Spindizzy: The Definitive Review

Spindizzy is one of very few games that’s notable by virtue of what it summates as much as its qualities as a 1980s videogame. While definitely a credit to its genre and its era, Spindizzy contains more cultural weight than it initially presents. It encodes videogame histories and speculative futures in singular fashion, asserting a kind of peculiar individuality, in part due to its unapologetic celebration of purist artificiality. And yet it also slavishly follows the zeitgeist it seems to be observing and reporting on. It’s this cultural depth that makes it unforgettable for me. Spindizzy is one of the 8-bit greats as seen in a hundred best games of the 80s lists, but it’s elevated beyond that mere populism. Its auteurship places it firmly in the pantheon of Matthew Smith, Jeff Minter, Paul Woakes, Braybrook, Singleton et al, as extremely singular games made by a single person. Spindizzy works as a celebration of that idea, that in artistic terms, there’s a clarity of vision when the entire thing is the work on one mind.

Spindizzy arrives in 1986, the year of dominating maturity for the 8-bit micros in the UK. It’s a year of feverish explosion, of dizzying possibilities flooding the shelves on a weekly basis and of an industry rolling at optimum velocity. As such, it serves as a real emblem of the times: a steadfastly mature expression of particular 8-bit tropes and a bravura display of technical and design prowess. Its author, Paul Shirley, gains notability off the back of it, becoming one of the major names you’d see repeated in the videogame press of the day. If you’ve never heard of it, the premise is simple: explore and collect. You are an object in an environment. An environment you must navigate to collect items called jewels. Fully explore the environment and collect all the jewels and you’ve completed the game. However, working against you is a timed countdown, and any errors you make - falling off the environment, or falling from too great a height - will incur deductions from that time. At zero, it’s obviously going to be Game Over. Entering new rooms and picking up jewels add time to the countdown. It’s simple enough, but the magic is in the presentation and the kinetics, for it’s here that Paul lays out a style that’s both confident and familiar, yet worked with the right kind of precision to feel extremely correct.

Spindizzy is an isometric adventure, meaning it arranges its graphics with a projection view that can represent three dimensions on the two-dimensional surface of a TV screen. As is the common practice, it uses tiles of various shapes to build up environments screen-by-screen, connecting each single-screen layout together to form an expansive world. Stemming directly from the roots of all UK 8-bit isometry, Sandy White’s Ant Attack and the Stamper’s Knight Lore, Spindizzy takes this most beguilingly artificial of presentation modes to create a deliberately synthetic universe. Abstract in its geometry and visual style, it most obviously recalls Mark Cerny’s 1984 game, Marble Madness (yes, that Mark Cerny). Apparently, Paul Shirley denies ever seeing Marble Madness but I find that utterly preposterous given how close the aesthetics, geography and mechanics are.1 Marble Madness is a deliberately infuriating coin-guzzler that pits you as a marble navigating downwardly through pre-rendered racecourses. These come in a strikingly distinct abstract geometric aesthetic of square edges and hard-angled geography with stripes, grids and ellipses as surface textures. However the game has a cartoonish quality that softens its stark edges. The most obvious example being green meanies that flip-flop around with comedic menace and punitive outcomes should your marble fall foul their comically expandable mouths. Marble Madness is full of such touches, including marbles shattering if falling from too high, only for the resultant dust to be swept away by a conveniently-appearing dustpan and brush. The game is emphatically jovial. Spindizzy has none of that whimsy and instead pursues an austere sense of the minimal. As mentioned earlier, it has a focused purity and with the emphasis being on exploration and solving switch-based logic puzzles, the entire vibe of the piece is therefore much more cerebral and contemplative.

It’s in that vibe that Spindizzy is most magical. Somehow, Paul Shirley has created a starkly beautiful geometric universe where the aesthetic chimes in harmony with the mood of play, as if the realm of Marble Madness is some Disneyland theme park far off in the distance. Spindizzy has a textural richness that emerges from the game in action, of the component parts synthesising the synthetic, almost as if that’s the entire point of the exercise. As such, it carries a rare sense of the manufactured 80s as it lived and breathed in primary-coloured plastics and pastel artificial fibres. Spindizzy matches and evokes its era with its hard geometry and performative wireframing. The graphics are all bitmaps, but much like Marble Madness, it deliberately signals the grammar of the advanced computer imagery memeset: it demarks its occupiable space with grids and outlines, leaving monochromatic blankness for the void its structures exist within. That void changes colour arbitrarily as you switch from screen to screen, seemingly to allow shifting palettes to avoid visual monotony, but it only enhances this sense of the synthetic. The experience of exploring a deliberately abstract artifice feels extremely ‘80s, but also means the game can never fall short. Amidst a melee of compromised arcade conversions and vestigial attempts at reasonable animations, 1986 is a year of some virtuosity in the 8-bit bitmap art arena, but that sense of eternal inadequacy is ever present. The animation never quite matches the professional animated cartoon, the attempts at painterly representation only ever being vague gestures towards the photoreal. With Spindizzy’s deliberate artificiality we find something else - an aesthetic that perfectly fulfils. Even the invaders and the mobile cannon of Space Invaders are shorthands for things that are supposed to look professionally-drawn or even actually real, as showcased by repeated bits of supporting artwork and whatnot, and this applies to the vast majority of videogame graphics over the proceeding decade, but Spindizzy is not an approximation - it is absolutely being itself. Much like the holiest of sacred Affectionate Discourse texts, Mercenary, Spindizzy’s supporting artwork is an airbrushed representation of the game.2

When I played Spindizzy in period, I always felt immersed in its space first and foremost. The urge to explore was utterly instinctual, making it feel like the actual point of the game. It has an uncanny atmosphere of isolation in a perfected realm, which promotes an oddly calming sense of the zen. The idea of exploration without enemies, where the peril came from environmental navigation, feels just as fresh today as it did back in 1987, when I probably first played it. Interestingly, the game is mostly silent and this just adds to calmness. It feels oddly mature, a grown-up pursuit that violence-hungry children would bore of immediately, and which only the cultured and sophisticated would recognise as incredibly valuable. It’s fascinating that Paul Shirley felt that simply navigating the environment he constructed was sufficient challenge. Other ‘marble’ games - Bobby Bearing, Gyroscope etc - pitted the player against enemies. Ant Attack has its ants, even if its style of environment defines that vibe of the synthetic which Spindizzy excels at. To play it today would be to pick up a finely-wrought pocket universe of the past, and perhaps to prod at some of its easier areas to see what the fuss is about. Make no mistake - Spindizzy presents a formidable challenge to skill, bravery and patience, even by 1980s standards. It’s unforgiving, demanding hard sprints with certain death if you don’t brake at the right spot and plenty of seemingly insane blind leaps off the screen, with only your faith and wisdom to guide you to a safe landing on the next. The key benefit of isometric projection in videogames is the allowance of three dimensions of movement on a two-dimensional screen and despite arraying its world on a single level, there are plenty of screens that take full advantage of that extra dimension, with some arrangements bordering on artistic expression within its minimalist palette. Spindizzy exists almost as an example piece, a way of showing what the isometric projection brought to videogames beyond the shooting thrills of Zaxxon or the hopping antics of Q-Bert. Spindizzy doesn’t try to distract you from its space and its style of presenting it. Instead it draws your attention towards it, and focuses the mind on being in this unique place. Thinking now, Spindizzy feels more like an object than a game. A virtual sculpture, working as a celebration of its form. And in doing that so effortlessly, it absolutely earns its signature credential of being truly timeless.

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