Atic Atac

Picture a medieval castle as a maze full of secret passages, drifting ghosts and doors that slam shut just when you need them least. That is Atic Atac, one of the most playful and charming action adventures ever created on the ZX Spectrum.

The game casts you as one of three adventurers — a knight, a wizard or a serf — and each has their own shortcuts and tricks for getting out of the cursed castle. The goal is to find the scattered parts of the golden ACG key and escape before the monsters get you. Atic Atac was famous for its ingenious idea for displaying health: instead of a dull gauge, you see a roast chicken in the corner of the screen that you gradually nibble down to the bare bone. Rich object puzzles, dozens of colour-coded rooms and a top-down slanted perspective gave the game an unmistakable flair.

Behind the game stands the studio Ultimate Play the Game, the legendary label of the Stamper brothers, who later founded Rare. At the time it was Ultimate that set the bar for graphics and smoothness on the Spectrum so high that the competition could only stare. Atic Atac from 1983 ranks among their early gems and to this day serves as a showcase of how to squeeze the maximum out of eight-bit hardware.

The atmosphere was equally distinctive — a combination of a horror premise and a cute, almost cartoon-like visual. The game was never needlessly cruel, more of an invitation to repeated exploration and to finding a better route. Each of the heroes experiences the castle differently, which enormously increased replayability at a time when games fit into a few dozen kilobytes.

Atic Atac is today regarded as one of the defining games of the Spectrum's golden era and regularly appears in rankings of the platform's best titles. Its influence on Rare's later work and on whole generations of British developers is undeniable.

Why play it: For the timeless, witty and cleverly designed arcade exploration of a castle that shows Ultimate at its very best.