Space Panic

 
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Space Panic

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Game Description

Space Panic pits you as an astronaut against an entire space station full of creepy, crawly monsters. You can scurry up and down ladders and run back and forth across girdered floors to avoid the creatures, but there you have a limited oxygen supply and your job is to dig holes to trap the monsters. Once a monster is trapped, you must then cover up the hole before the monster can crawl out, effectively sending the creature plunging to its doom. Each screen is set up as a series of multi-leveled platforms with interconnecting ladders.

There are three types of creepy crawlies: Creatures, which must fall through one floor to be eliminated; Bosses, which must fall through two floors; and Dons, which must fall through three floors. Another way to kill a monster is to drop another one on top of it. If you are quick enough, you can dig several holes and trap several creatures at once. If the holes are vertically aligned, you can go up to the top hole, fill it in, and destroy several monsters in a chain reaction. ~ Brett Alan Weiss, All Game Guide

Roots & Influences

Space Panic was the first platform game. It was a big influence on Donkey Kong (1981), which was the first platform game featuring a character who could jump. ~ Brett Alan Weiss, All Game Guide

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Wikipedia: Space Panic
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Screenshot of the ColecoVision port
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Screenshot of the ColecoVision port

Space Panic is a 1980 arcade game designed by Universal. Chris Crawford calls it the first ever platform game;[1] as it pre-dates Nintendo's Donkey Kong (from 1981) which is often cited as the original platform game. It differs from most platform games (including Donkey Kong) in that the character cannot jump over obstacles. The main character digs holes in the platforms that he must lure the aliens into. He must then hit them to knock them out of the hole and off the screen. In later levels, two holes must be lined up vertically in order to dispose of the aliens. There is also a limited supply of oxygen.

While it may have indirectly influenced all subsequent platform games, it certainly directly influenced some very similar games at the time. These included some almost identical clones such as Acornsoft's Monsters (for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron) and the Apple II's Apple Panic as well as the popular Lode Runner, which looked very similar and used the basic premise of digging holes to trap enemies. Universal revisited the genre again in 1983 with the release of Mr. Do's Castle which incorporated and expanded upon many of the play styles explored in this seminal game.

Ports and Clones

First Published Name Company System(s)
1981 Apple Panic Brøderbund Apple II, Atari 8-bit, PC Booter, VIC-20
1982 Space Panic Universal ColecoVision
1982 Sheer Panic Visions Software Factory ZX Spectrum
1982 Monsters Acornsoft BBC Micro, Acorn Electron
1983 Bonka J. Morrison (Micros) Ltd. Dragon 32/64
1983 Cuthbert Goes Digging Microdeal TRS-80 Color Computer, Dragon 32
1983 Lode Runner Brøderbund Arcade, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MSX, Atari 400/800, MS-DOS (booter), Macintosh, NES, Game Boy, BBC Micro

References

  1. ^ Crawford, Chris (2003). Chris Crawford on Game Design. New Riders. ISBN 0-88134-117-7. 

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Games. Copyright © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Game Guide ® , a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Space Panic".  Read more

 

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