Skool Daze

Forget about saving the world - in Skool Daze your task is to sneak into the headmaster's office, crack the safe and grab your own report card before your parents see it. This cheeky British classic from 1984 turned an ordinary school into a playground for mischief.

The studio Microsphere came up with an idea that was remarkably open for its time: instead of linear levels, you are given the whole school as a kind of sandbox. You move through the corridors, classrooms and yard, attend the lessons dictated by the timetable, and scheme all the while. The report card is locked in the safe, whose code you have to piece together from letters that you knock out of your classmates and teachers with a catapult or gradually reveal through clever moves.

The school lives a life of its own. The teachers have names, personalities and timetables; they move around the building, teach, scold and chase you when they catch you outside class or up to mischief. Classmates jostle, fights break out in the yard, the bell drives you from lesson to lesson. This illusion of a functioning environment, where every character has a role, was unusually alive in the mid-eighties.

Humor is an inseparable part of the design here. Firing pellets from a catapult, hiding from the stern headmaster, dodging punishment for truancy - all of it reflects schoolboy rebellion with typically British irony. The game takes neither itself nor authority seriously, and that is exactly what won the hearts of players who could rebel with impunity against what they knew every day from their own desks.

Skool Daze received a sequel, Back to Skool, which added a girls' school and further mischief into the mix, and together the two games form a firm part of the ZX Spectrum's golden canon. It is still cited as one of the first titles to demonstrate the taste of freedom and an open game world back in the eight-bit era.

Why play it: For an infectiously playful school sandbox full of British humor, where rebellion against the teachers turned into a surprisingly free-form game.