Previous Next

By the time I received my first Acorn Electron, it had been on general sale for about three years. Commercially it hadn't been seen as particularly successful and most children wanted a 48K Spectrum because of the huge library of games available for that machine. Electron games were, by comparison, quite hard to find and I became friendly with the only other kid in my class who had an Electron, partly so I could improve my games collection. Not that he had that many games, actually. But he did have a compilation called Five Star Games which featured a number of best-selling games from 1985, and amongst those games was one game that we couldn't stop playing. And that game was Repton, the original diamonds-and-boulders maze game that went on to spawn seven sequels and countless fan-made level sets later in time.

The first Repton on the Electron features twelve screens and is an oddity in the collection because it has much smaller sprites than the vast majority of the other games in the series. It has a few unexpected playing differences too. Put together with a loading screen, a high score table and an attractive screen layout, the game proper splits the screen real estate into three columns. Status information is shown to the left, the playing area in the middle (which is the largest area) and, on the right, well, a big Superior Software logo and four miniature Reptons to indicate how many lives are remaining.

Your mission is to clear each of the screens of diamonds without losing any of your precious lives. Lives can be lost by colliding with "reptiles", being bonked on the head by a falling boulder, committing suicide or running out of time. Each screen needs to be approached logically, with certain patterns of boulders needing a detailed appreciation of how the game engine works - i.e. if I remove this diamond, will the rock above it fall to the left or the right, and where will it ultimately land. Other problems come in the form of diamonds hidden in safes (you can only collect these after you find the key on each screen). Be aware, if you've played subsequent Repton titles that there are no transporters in this original Repton, but the safes look exactly like transporters.

If you manage to complete a screen, and the first two are relatively easy, then you are given a password. The "big mission" on the game's first release, was to complete every screen in turn without losing any lives, and without using any of the passwords. Do this successfully and you would be shown a Competition Code, allowing you to enter Repton's prize competition. Alas, by the time I got my hands on Repton, the competition had closed a long time previously. Yet it's testament to just how addictive I found it that I tried to reach this hidden screen anyway. I never managed it because one of the very final screens starts you off in an arena with three marauding reptiles from the very beginning, and one of them always managed to get me no matter how fast I was on the game controls. The password is Giant Clam if you want to try it!

One of the more curious inclusions of the first Repton game is that the map is only available to you after you have found and collected it. Another is just how much of the playing area you can see. Later games introduced a map that was permanently available, bigger sprites but a smaller viewing area and turned the Repton sprite into everything from John Wayne to David Bowie. This game may therefore seem a bit simplistic in comparison, but both individual screen missions and the overall prize competition one can both still be considered very challenging even now.

Repton runs at a fair speed and the graphics are good if not amazing. I still like the little animation of Repton that occurs if you stop controlling him for a few seconds. Clearly, when Tim Tyler programmed the game back in the early Eighties, he had no idea what a phenomenon it was going to become, and originally he "themed" the game, choosing passwords for each screen that suited the lizards and reptiles within it. This had the unfortunate, and not subsequently repeated, side-effect of allowing its players to guess the passwords. I vividly recall searching through nature books, tapping away at the password screen and discovering some of the easier ones - i.e. Gecko and Salamander.

Of course, it's not perfect in a few ways. One of the strategies for dealing with the reptiles is to drop a boulder on them. However, I have witnessed occasions where the boulder goes right through the reptile without taking it out. And, as in all Repton games, there's always this sort of fear at the back of my mind that one false move can render the screen uncompletable. This initially inhibits experimentation and then inevitably leads to frustration if you do get it wrong and end up getting smashed in the face by a boulder.

Generally though, I'd say Repton has aged pretty well, and certainly a lot better than the disappointing "ultimate" Repton Infinity that arrived some time later. Looking at the reaction the original game received on release, it was unashamedly adored. If looking for it now, there are two standalone releases and it also appeared on Superior Collection Volume 3 and 10 Computer Hits 4 in addition to Five Star Games. As all five cassettes tend to sell for between £2-£5, you may well opt for a compilation release of Repton over the (very popular and easy-to-find) original Superior tape... that way you'll pick up the rest of the games on it for free!