Splat!1983

The player guides Zippy, an X-shaped sprite, around a maze, viewed top-down, with solid walls, hazards and collectable rewards. The view of the maze scrolls randomly right, left, up or down. The object is for the player to survive for a period of time without making contact with either an edge of the playing area, represented as a brick walls, or hazards including water and spikes, all of which lose a life. If the player survives they receive a score bonus for completing the level and they proceed to the next level, which is a continuation of the maze, with less interval between scrolling steps and a shorter level duration. The first level lasts about two minutes, and by the seventh and final level this is down to about forty seconds. Points are awarded for collecting plums and clumps of grass, some of which are invisible.

Completing a level of the game triggers a voice saying “Yippee!”. On the ZX Spectrum release this was remarkable due to it overcoming the Spectrum’s rudimentary sound capabilities. It was a very early use of digitized speech sound effects in home computer games.