In 2019, ZeroPaige created a version of Super Mario Bros. for the Commodore 64. They weren’t entirely the first to do so. In 1987, The Great Giana Sisters, with its lead characters Giana and Maria, not only took its gameplay from Nintendo’s game but replicated its first level layout in its entirety. A rip-off of a popular game for cheapskate owners with other systems? Yes, but there is an intriguing footnote there. Amazingly for such an important part of games history, no one is able to pin down exactly when Super Mario Bros. was released anywhere outside of its 1985 Japanese release. In Europe, it appears to have been around June 1987, which would place it a month after the release of The Great Giana Sisters. So rather than just being a rip-off alternative, that game came with an element of tiding over those anticipating the big release, as well. Similarly, four and a bit years later, Zool was released a month before Sonic 2.
Zool’s take on the platform game with its emphasis on speed makes no secret of its debt to Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s not a note-for-note cover like The Great Giana Sisters or Frank Bruno’s Boxing, but it’s hard to imagine what it would look like without its main inspiration. Pretty much every positive idea it has comes from Sonic. I picture a whiteboard in a brainstorming session on Sonic’s key qualities and someone excitedly drawing circles round the words ‘zoom’ and ‘cool’ and saying they’ve had an amazing idea for the name.
Zool’s non-Sonic ideas include resurrecting the cartoon ninja to get some of that late TMHT money (Zool’s title character appears to be a kind of ninja ant, or nant), and some of the most blatant product placement in an era of blatant product placement. Is Zool’s first level themed around sweets because it’s the coolest idea Gremlin Graphics came up with? No, it’s because Chupa Chups lollipops stumped up the cash. And the cash and the hype worked! Zool helped sell some upgraded new Amigas and not only reached #1 but got its own novelisations(?!), one of which spent half of its blurb trying to make it clear that Zool is not an ant, people, god.
The game has its positives. It’s attractively colourful and Zool moves with impressive and joyful pace. His aggressive slide move is satisfying, and when he collects a power up and starts leaving a flickering trail of ghostly Zools behind him it does an impressive job of conveying speed-based supernatural powers. The Amiga doesn’t offer the right kind of computing power to completely match up to Sonic, but Zool’s movement is a sound enough alternative. The problem is that creating a main character, or even a main character and some licorice allsorts bees, is a long way from creating a game.
Zool’s level design could have done with ripping off Sonic the Hedgehog more too. That made Sonic work by giving him the space and freedom to use his speed in, if in increasingly carefully rationed ways. Zool doesn’t offer any of the same opportunity for flow. Instead of branching paths and whizzy set pieces, Zool is all trap pits and walls which must be ascended with great care, and offers no leaps of imagination at all. Zool’s movement might be joyful, but the design saps away the joy it ought to be revelling in, in the name of misguided challenge. If you placed Sonic in there instead of Zool, he wouldn’t ever get the chance to be Sonic. It’s difficult to tell on Gremlin Graphics’s part if this was a spectacular missing of the point of Sonic, or just playing it too safe and sticking with what they knew, but the end result is the same. Zool’s level design prevents it from even making it to the level of successful Sonic rip-off.
Microbyte Amiga chart, The One, November 1992
