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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I released Ad Lunam, a "proof of concept" aiming to bring an adaptation of Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space to the Spectrum (you can find the details in the last Annual).

The game, having to run on the 48K, was very limited in its presentation, like the strategy/management titles of the early 1980s. So I promised myself to create an expanded version for the 128K Spectrums, in which I would insert graphics, animations and AY music to give it a more attractive look, without sacrificing any of the original idea and gameplay. Naturally, this posed the problem of dividing the game into distinct portions to be stored across the memory banks and retrieved from there when needed, making sure to reserve a fixed area for the variables, so as not to alter their values while passing from a section to another. Fortunately, the managerial nature of the game, characterized by well-defined sectors - research and development, mission planning, facilities building etc. - made this task easier.

In Ad Lunam Plus I worked mainly on graphics, trying to reproduce the appearance of the various spacecraft as faithfully as possible: rockets, in particular, are represented to scale, and this required a greater effort in designing them. Even more difficult to create were the numerous portraits of the protagonists of the space race, starting with those who open the game with the choice between the USA and the USSR, that is Werner von Braun and Sergei Korolev, to continue with the pilots - now properly differentiated between "astronauts" and "cosmonauts" - and the final screens. Thanks to a patient work of digitization and finish, they came out looking enough like the originals, and constitute the graphic part I am most satisfied with.

The most notable addition, however, is the mission control room, with its associated animations. Inspired by that of Accolade's Apollo 18, it is the most imaginative part of the game, as in the early years of space exploration they were much smaller and simpler structures, without the large monitoring screens that would enter in use only towards the end of the 1960s.

Due to memory limitations, I created something hybrid: the tower-shaped launch pad is typically American, but during manned missions you can see the digitization of a famous photo of Gagarin aboard the Vostok 1, with a Sokol type helmet on his head. For the same reason, the suits of the astronauts/cosmonauts seen on spacewalks and when the flag is planted on the Moon were designed in a "neutral" way, i.e. without making them look like anything real in particular, even though their appearance is pretty much credible for the time. Likewise, the buildings - some of them inspired by graphic elements seen in Raid Over Moscow- are the same for both sides.

I wished to use historical images for the end-of-game screens. For this reason, I ran into quite a few difficulties for that of the US player, as I wanted to employ some photo taken from one of the Apollo 11 ticker tape parades. Unfortunately, the resolution of the majority of the pictures I was able to find by searching on the Web was too low. Others looked better, but the astronauts, being photographed from a distance, appeared too small and did not look good when the images were converted to the Spectrum's graphic format. In the end, I decided to use a photo from the front page of the 14 August 1969 issue of the New York Times: I cropped the main image and set it upright. After some tweaking, I obtained a good enough result to fit into the game. For the USSR final picture, on the other hand, the choice was quite easy: the lovely photo of a triumphant Khrushchev with Titov, Gagarin, Tereshkova and Bykovsky on the top of Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow lent itself magnificently as the crowning glory of such a colossal undertaking.

As for music, in addition to the national anthems played at the time of choosing the player's country and after a milestone has been achieved, I chose two marches for the end-of-game scenes: The Washington Post March by John Philip Sousa for the USA and of Semyon Aleksandrovich Chernetsky's Slava Rodine for the USSR.

Then, Ad Lunam Plus was released in the summer of 2020 and after some partial revisions it took on its final form. It is the game I am most proud of: it is the most complex I have created to this day, and one of the largest projects made so far for the Spectrum with ZX Basic. As I did with Ad Lunam, I distributed it with the source code, so that the more curious can know how I made it, and why not, get inspired to do something similar. There is a tremendous lack of this kind of games in the Spectrum's homebrew scene, and I hope others will see Ad Lunam and Ad Lunam Plus as an incentive to try to fill this void themselves.