Those Were The Days.... Andy Remic Revisits His Spectrum Blasphemy

Wotcher all,

You may or may not remember, early last year, when Andy Remic went and made himself a ZX Spectrum game based on the second Combat-K novel, Biohell.

Feel free to head back and check out the press release; I had to brush up on it my own self.

Yes, that's right, one of the old "GO NORTH/KILL GOBLIN WITH ENCHANTED SWORD/GET KEY/OPEN DOOR WITH KEY/LOSE WILL TO LIVE" stylee command adventure games we all used to play as a kid* written for a system that came out nearly thirty years ago.

He wrote it on a Spectrum, as well. It's not like he got an emulator for this. Andy Remic has a ZX Spectrum. Don't take my word for it, look at this:


This kind of tells you what you need to know about Andy Remic. I fecking love Andy Remic. The dude suffers from terminal whimsy. He makes all these horrific short films on a shoestring budget. His books are these referential, precipitous, deranged, acid-fuelled rants that read like Aliens was recast with the guys from Red Dwarf. Sometimes I wonder if he dares himself to write the things he does. The other day he offered his Facebook and Twitter followers this quote from his work-in progress, Cloneworld:

“Infantry,” growled Mrs Strogger.
“Oh yeah?” snarled Franco, popping up from between her legs like some rabid, bruise-covered, blood- and saliva-smeared last-minute self-ejected caesarean.

See what I mean? You couldn't be more hardboiled than Andy Remic without replacing parts of yourself with steel. I come across people describing his stuff as silly or shallow and I wonder why they even picked up the books. It's like complaining about Spike Milligan's poor grasp of iambic pentameter. Not wrong, but talk about missing the point...

And then he creates a Spectrum adventure game based on his latest nutters-with-guns-vs-mutant-zombies mescaline trip, including commands (and responses) such as:

>COMMAND SIR?eat corpse
>Not on my watch, compadre.
>COMMAND SIR?_

Anyway, the inestimable Mr. Remic has been invited by Del Lakin-Smith at Wordpunk.co.uk to to write a nostalgic look back: at the decision to create something as genuinely insane as this, at re-learning how to program in BASIC, at running a competition for the first person to solve the game. The article, including links to download the game and a compatible emulator, can be found here:

Click to read Andy Remic's article

Kick ass.

See you soon,

David



* Those of us who didn't go out to get fresh air and excercise and meet girls, that is.