Krtek a autíčko

Krtek a autíčko (The Little Mole and the Car) is an action platformer created by the studio Kybersoft and released in 1990 by Proxima – Software v.o.s.; the music for the game was composed by Miroslav Hlavička. The game builds on the popularity of Zdeněk Miler's animated Little Mole, one of the most recognizable characters in Czechoslovak culture, and transplants it into a simple but inventive game framework understandable even to the youngest players, who were just starting out with computers.

The player's task, in the role of the Little Mole, is to load crates onto a truck, hindered along the way by a chaotic environment full of obstacles and quirky creatures called "springers." The Mole can actively interact with the surroundings – using a shovel to clear obstacles, or apples with which he can lure away or occupy the springers, which gives the game a mildly strategic dimension beyond simple item collecting and forces the player to think through the order of actions in each room. The game supports control via Kempston joystick as well as redefinable keys, which was standard at the time for more polished titles and made the game more accessible even to less experienced players.

Choosing such a familiar character from a series beloved by children was a smart move that won the game an audience even among younger players who otherwise never played text adventures or action shooters and approached the computer more as a toy. The graphical rendering of the characters and environment sticks to the source's charming style and, together with Miroslav Hlavička's music, creates an atmosphere noticeably lighter than that of the vast majority of action games of the time. Krtek a autíčko today ranks among the more charming chapters of domestic ZX Spectrum production – it shows that domestic studios could also work with locally rooted humor and characters that carried a completely different emotional resonance for the Czechoslovak audience than anything imported from abroad, and thanks to that the game still holds a special place among those who remember it.