Paradroid

Imagine a spaceship infested with enemy robots, where you have not a single decent weapon of your own — and yet you are able to capture the toughest steel beast on board. That is the ingenious paradox on which Paradroid stands, one of the cleverest games ever created for the Commodore 64.

Your avatar is a tiny influence droid numbered 001, whose only real ability is to take control of another robot. This happens through the famous hacking minigame: on a split screen you compete with the target robot for control of logic circuits, trying to occupy more fields than your opponent in real time. If you win, you take over its body, its armament and its resilience — and suddenly the defenceless nobody becomes a walking fortress. The higher the robot's number, the harder the fight, so the game naturally turns into an escalating game of chess over resources.

Behind Paradroid stands Andrew Braybrook, one of the most respected British programmers of the eight-bit era, who released the game in 1985 under the banner of Hewson Consultants. During development Braybrook kept a detailed diary (later published in Zzap!64 magazine), which turned Paradroid into a textbook example of thoughtful game design. The combination of top-down action, tactical takeover of enemies and a minimalist yet legible graphic style was exceptionally fresh for its time.

Critics received the game with enthusiasm and to this day many retro publications rank it among the absolute cream of the C64 library. The concept proved so timeless that it earned remakes and spiritual successors — from the enhanced Paradroid '90 on the Amiga to later independent clones that adopted precisely that hacking mechanic.

What fascinates about Paradroid is how elegantly it merges action and strategy into a single fluid whole, without needing complicated menus or lengthy explanations. It is a game that forces you to think about every fight as an investment: is it worth risking a harder takeover, or sticking with a tried-and-tested body?

Why play: For the timeless design, where a defenceless droid becomes master of the ship thanks to one of the cleverest minigames of the eight-bit era.