Chiller

01 · The journey

To the haunted house and home again

The title screen sets the task: rescue your girlfriend from the haunted house and return to your car. To reach her, the boy crosses a forest, a cinema, a ghetto, and a graveyard, and he must collect five magic crosses on each screen before he can move on.¹

On the way home the girl comes too, and the two of them collect blue and red crosses through the same places in reverse. Mushrooms eaten and ledges broken on the way out are still gone. There is no car at the end: after the last cross, the game starts again in the forest with the score kept.

Play ChillerSee what you must doExplore the ten screens

02 · The release

A £1.99 game, and a tune that had to change

Mastertronic published Chiller in 1984 as a £1.99 cassette. The title screen credits David and Richard Darling with the programming: Richard wrote the code and David drew the graphics, while David Dunn wrote the music.²⁸ The brothers went on to found Codemasters in 1986.³

The first release played David Dunn's arrangement of Michael Jackson's Thriller during play. After a dispute over the music in November 1984, Mastertronic issued a version with a different tune.²⁷ The copy studied here is the first release, and the Music tab plays both tunes.

03 · Reception

A budget game reviewers noticed

Price was part of the story from the start. In Personal Computer News, Bryan Skinner called the £1.99 game "a winner", and argued that if Mastertronic kept making games of this standard, publishers charging £6 to £10 would feel the pressure.⁴

Fraser Marshall was more measured in Personal Computer Games. He compared the cross collecting with Manic Miner, but judged Chiller "different enough from that classic to provide many hours of enjoyment". He also found the graphics occasionally indistinct, and admitted he never got past the cinema.⁵

The Commodore 64 release sold 121,874 copies, the fourth highest among Mastertronic's original games, a figure that counts both releases together.⁶

04 · Other Chillers

A namesake and an unofficial sequel

Exidy's Chiller, a 1986 arcade light-gun game later released for the NES, shares only the name.⁹

aNdy's Chiller 2 is an unofficial Commodore 64 sequel with twelve single-screen levels, which aNdy says he made with permission from one of the Darling brothers. Its download includes the sequel's 6502 source code.¹⁰ On the same page, aNdy says he is working on a third game, CHILL3R. On 30 September 2026 it was not listed for download there.¹⁰

05 · Inside the game

Explore how Chiller works

Each tab takes one part of the game apart, from the game's own code.

• Play: the whole game, ported from its own code, starting on any of the ten screens.
• Gameplay: the ten screens and their cards, the crosses only one of the two can take ($7F50), the energy bar, and the five enemies on every screen.
• Controls: the joystick and keys, and how the boy jumps ($5418).
• Maps: all ten screens rebuilt from their settings ($7000), how the way home is stored, and every enemy's path.
• Graphics: the boy's and the girl's frames, and all seventeen enemy animations.
• Music: both releases' in-play tunes, played through a port of the game's own driver ($60A0).
• Discoveries: unused code for lives and for killing enemies, SILVER CROSSES, a prompt that never appears, and an enemy that wears every sprite in the game.
• Source code: the whole game disassembled and annotated.