Wizball: The Colour-Restoring Oddity

The first minute of Wizball is one of the most confrontational openings on the Commodore 64, and it’s confrontational in a way that no modern game would survive a focus group with.

You are a ball. The ball bounces. You can nudge it left and you can nudge it right, and the bouncing continues regardless, in a lazy sine wave you have no say in. There are things trying to kill you. You have no gun worth the name. The game has handed you a physics object and a hostile environment and made no arrangements at all for you getting on with the second using the first.

This is the design. Chris Yates and Jon Hare shipped it that way through Ocean in 1987, and the whole game grows out of it.

Earning the verbs

Shoot the drifting enemies and some of them leave a green pearl behind. Collect pearls, and you can spend them.

What you spend them on is the game’s central joke and its central mechanic at once: you buy the things every other shooter gives away in the manual. Anti-gravity, so the ball stops bouncing and starts hovering where you put it. Thrust, so it moves with some authority. A smart bomb. Better shots. A shield. And, at a particular rung on the ladder, a cat.

The upgrades come in a fixed order, which means the opening of Wizball is a small survival test you have to pass while functionally disabled, and the reward for passing it is being allowed to play properly. Almost nothing else does this. The genre convention is that you begin competent and become overpowered; power-ups are icing. Wizball makes the base level of competence the first prize, and the effect on the player is peculiar and rather brilliant: the moment anti-gravity clicks in and the ball finally stops flopping about, you feel a relief that no amount of extra lasers could buy.

It’s a trick about baselines. Give someone a fifth weapon and they’ll note it. Give someone the ability to steer, twenty seconds after teaching them what it’s like to be unable to, and they’ll remember it for forty years.

The risk in the design is obvious enough — a player who can’t get past the first minute never sees the game. Wizball takes the hit. It’s a 1987 Ocean release and its answer to struggling players is that they should get better, which was the industry standard position and which here happens to be load-bearing rather than lazy.

The cat

Nifta the cat is the strangest good idea in a C64 game that’s already full of them.

Once bought, the cat — Catelite, in the game’s own vocabulary — becomes your partner. It follows you around, and its job is collection. Wiz shoots. Droplets of colour fall out of the wreckage. The cat catches the droplets and ferries them down to the cauldrons at the bottom of the screen. Player two can take the cat directly, which makes Wizball one of the earliest asymmetric co-op games worth the label: one player does the violence, the other does the logistics, and neither can finish the level alone.

The asymmetry is real, and it’s not the usual “player two gets a worse gun” arrangement that passed for co-op at the time. The cat has a different job with a different skill — reading where a droplet will fall, getting under it, running it home while Wiz keeps the sky clear. Two players who’ve got it working are doing genuinely different things in service of a shared objective, and they have to talk to each other to do it. Sensible Software would spend the next decade being very good at exactly this sort of thing; you can hear the same instinct for a clean, sociable system in Cannon Fodder’s tiny squads and, taken to its logical extreme, in Sensible World of Soccer’s entire model of football.

Playing solo, the cat is a computer-controlled follower and the whole thing is noticeably harder, because you’re now doing both jobs badly at once. The game is honest about wanting the second player.

Grey, and the point of it

The premise is that Wizworld has had its colour drained out of it, and Wiz is going to put it back.

Mechanically, that means the levels are rendered in grey. The droplets you’re collecting are red, green and blue, and there are three cauldrons at the bottom of the screen for them. Fill the right cauldrons in the right proportion and the level’s colour returns — mixing primaries to hit a target, which is a genuinely unusual thing for an action game to ask, and which turns each stage into a small resource-management problem running underneath the shooting.

What makes it more than a gimmick is the feedback. A C64 screen going from grey to full colour is a big, immediate, unambiguous reward that costs nothing to understand and doesn’t interrupt play. Nobody has to tell you that you’re winning. The world just gets better in front of you, and the machine’s slightly bilious palette — sixteen colours, several of them regrettable — has never been used to better effect, because the game has spent the previous few minutes making you appreciate literally any of them.

There’s a bit of craft hiding here worth naming. Wizball’s objective is legible at all times, at a glance, without a HUD, in a medium that hadn’t yet worked out that it needed one. That’s harder than it looks, and it’s the same problem Paradroid solved by printing the difficulty on the enemies. The good C64 designers were forced into diegetic clarity because they had no screen space to spare, and it made them better.

There’s a difficulty wrinkle in the colour system that I’ve come to admire. The droplets are a shared resource with the enemies’ patience — they fall, they drift, and if nobody catches them they’re gone. So the shooting and the collecting are competing for the same seconds. Wiz can clear the sky and watch every droplet hit the floor, or he can hang back to escort the cat and get shot. The level’s real question is how you split your attention, and the answer changes every few seconds. That’s a proper economy, running invisibly, in a game most people remember as the one with the bouncing.

The sound of it

Martin Galway did the music, and Wizball is one of the SID chip’s great showcases — the title tune in particular, which is doing tricks with the hardware that were part of the reason Galway was a name in the first place. The C64 music scene of the mid-eighties produced composers with genuine followings, which is not a sentence you could write about any other machine of the era, and the sound here isn’t decoration. The theme sets the whole tone of the thing as a bit whimsical and a bit off, which is exactly what a game about a bouncing wizard and a cat needs.

Delta went further and built the entire experience around Rob Hubbard’s soundtrack; Wizball is more balanced, and the balance is right for it.

Where it sits

The ancestor is Nemesis — Konami’s Gradius, which introduced the idea of a shop bar where kills buy upgrades in a chosen order. Wizball takes that structure and twists it until it means something different. Gradius’s bar is about optimisation: which build do you want? Wizball’s is about acquisition of the basics, which recasts the opening minutes as a story rather than a warm-up.

Alongside it on the C64, Uridium was making the case for a shooter built entirely on flight feel, which is the opposite argument: Braybrook gave you a ship that handled perfectly from the first frame and made the world hard. Yates and Hare gave you a world that’s manageable and made the ship hard, and then let you fix it. Both are excellent. Only one of them was brave enough to make its first thirty seconds feel broken on purpose.

Sensible followed it with Wizkid in 1992, which is a sequel in the way that a dream about a place is a sequel to the place — much stranger, much less coherent, occasionally wonderful. Wizball is the tighter machine.

Playing it now

The C64 version is the one, and it’s aged with dignity. The bouncing still reads as intentional the second time you meet it, which is the test any hostile opening has to pass. The Amiga and ST conversions are prettier and slightly softer. The 8-bit ports elsewhere lose the music, which costs them more than they can afford.

Get a second player if you can. The cat is the whole argument — a co-op design from 1987 where the two roles genuinely need each other, in a game with no dialogue, no tutorial and no explanation of anything. You will spend the first two minutes bouncing uselessly and swearing. Then it will click, and the grey will start coming off the world, and you’ll understand what the first two minutes were for.