Codetapper's C64 Site

Blagger

Blagger titleThings were much simpler back in 1983. C64 programmer Tony Crowther was knocking out a game in 2 weeks, then taking a 2 week break to think up his next title. His early games could get away without having to resort to any technical tricks, and Zzap magazine was more than a year away from being created!

Blagger, published by Alligata software, is an incredibly simple game:

  • Maximum of 8 sprites per screen (therefore no sprite multiplexer required)
  • 30 levels stored in memory (uncompressed)
  • 128 tiles for the entire game (static palette)
  • 48 sprites in total
  • 2 frames of animation for the baddies
  • No scrolling
  • Music consisted of a 5 second piece of music that loops at regular intervals

C64 programmers in the late 80s and early 90s could only dream that they could knock up such a simple game and have it published. By that stage, games were expected to have loading screens with music playing, sprite multiplexing, often multi-load, and various technical tricks were employed to increase the amount of graphics and sound in each game.

Of the 48 sprites in Blagger, 16 are used for the main character (2 sets of 8 frames for each direction) and even then, 5 of them are blank and unused:

Blagger sprites

The enemy sprites vary in colour on each screen by simply setting the sprite colour. The safe was also made up with a single sprite so that it can sit over the scenery. Here's one of the later levels with the sprites highlighted:

Blagger highlighted sprites

The tiles are equally simple, several are unused, and if you load the tileset into Maptapper and load a C64 savestate, you can extract all the levels very easily. All maps are stored in the most logical format, left to right, top to bottom:

Blagger tiles

The blue tiles in the bottom row are the frames of animation for the collapsing floors. The game uses the red tile in some of the later levels, but for the collapsing floors it simply increments the tile index and the colour remains blue due to the way the C64 stores colour ram.

There was so much unused memory in the game that even the level names were stored completely uncompressed as a 31x30 map:

Blagger level names

Levels

Each level is 31 tiles wide by 19 high, and there's a $fe byte between each that you have to skip. Here are all the levels in case somebody wants to create a remake:

blagger_level_01.png blagger_level_02.png blagger_level_03.png blagger_level_04.png blagger_level_05.png blagger_level_06.png blagger_level_07.png blagger_level_08.png blagger_level_09.png blagger_level_10.png blagger_level_11.png blagger_level_12.png blagger_level_13.png blagger_level_14.png blagger_level_15.png blagger_level_16.png blagger_level_17.png blagger_level_18.png blagger_level_19.png blagger_level_20.png blagger_level_21.png blagger_level_22.png blagger_level_23.png blagger_level_24.png blagger_level_25.png blagger_level_26.png blagger_level_27.png blagger_level_28.png blagger_level_29.png blagger_level_30.png

Any suggestions?

If you have any idea what should go in this box, please let me know! :)