''Zombie Zombie'' is a

ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer that was developed by Sinclair Research. It was released in the United Kingdom on 23 April 1982, and became Britain's best-selling microcomputer. Referred to during development as t ...

computer game developed by Spaceman Ltd (Sandy White and Angela Sutherland), published in

1984 Events January * January 1 – The Bornean Sultanate of Brunei gains full independence from the United Kingdom, having become a British protectorate in 1888. * January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast A ...

Quicksilva Quicksilva was a British games software publisher active during the early 1980s. Quicksilva was founded by Nick Lambert in 1979. The name Quicksilva was inspired by a particular guitar solo in a track on the album Happy Trails by Quicksilver Mess ...

. It is a development of Spaceman's previous ''

Ant Attack ''Ant Attack'' is a ZX Spectrum computer game by Sandy White, published by Quicksilva in 1983. It was converted to the Commodore 64 in 1984. While ''Zaxxon'' and ''Q*bert'' previously used isometric projection, ''Ant Attack'' added an extra degre ...

'', and uses an updated "Softsolid 3D" isometric graphics engine.

Gameplay

The player is alone in an ancient walled city infested with zombies. The player must lure the zombies into following the player and then trick them into falling off the edge of tall structures more than three blocks high. The player must get close enough to the zombies to attract their attention into following them, but not so close as to be overwhelmed and become a zombie themselves. ''Zombie Zombie'' includes a

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

, which can be piloted and used to alter the terrain by lifting and dropping bricks.

City

The city is made of blocks which can be rearranged by the player to make the zombie cull easier. As the city walls are incomplete in places,

Your Spectrum ''Your Sinclair'', or ''YS'' as it was commonly abbreviated, was a commercially published and printed British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, mainly the ZX Spectrum. It was in circulation between 1984 and 1993. History The ...

recommended that the player's first action was to rebuild the wall, preventing zombies from wandering off in to the outer desert and making the game impossible to complete. Your Spectrum revealed in another tips article that there was a second hidden city accessed by entering a codephrase. City #1 contains the phrase "© AS" (Angela Sutherland) and City #2 the phrase "SPACEMAN WAS HERE!" made out of cityblocks.

Development

''Zombie Zombie'' uses two-channel sound, a then unheard-of feat of a computer equipped with only single-channel 1-bit sound from a tiny speaker. Through the use of the Sinclair Interface 1, the game's two-channel melodies could be played back on a MIDI-equipped synthesizer. Although a wiring diagram was supplied with the game, the interfacing code had been tested on a

Yamaha DX7 The Yamaha DX7 is a synthesizer manufactured by the Yamaha Corporation from 1983 to 1989. It was the first successful digital synthesizer and is one of the best-selling synthesizers in history, selling more than 200,000 units. In the early 1980 ...

with a ROM containing bugs - so the circuit would only work on that particular synthesizer. This came to light when Sandy White attempted to demo the game while connected to an unfamiliar synthesizer.

References

External links

* {{WoS game, id=0005866 1984 video games Action video games Europe-exclusive video games Quicksilva games Video games developed in the United Kingdom Video games about zombies ZX Spectrum games ZX Spectrum-only games Single-player video games