Uridium

01 · The game

A strafing run over a Dreadnought

The player flies a Manta fighter low over the hull of an enemy Super-Dreadnought, one per planet, fifteen in all.

Each level is one Dreadnought, a long ship of walls, plating and targets that scrolls past sideways. The Manta flies over it in either direction. Up and down move it across the screen, and left and right speed it up or slow it down. Slowed below a crawl, it loops over and comes back facing the other way. Walls are fatal; anything that stands out from the plating can be shot.

Fighters come in waves. When the level's last wave has been launched, Land now! flashes at the top of the screen. The Manta lands on the runway at the Dreadnought's right-hand end, a bonus game decides how much the ship's destruction is worth, and the Manta takes off over the hull as it vaporises.

02 · The release

Andrew Braybrook's next game after Paradroid

Hewson Consultants published Uridium for the Commodore 64 in February 1986, a year after Braybrook's Paradroid.

Andrew Braybrook designed and programmed Uridium, and Steve Turner wrote the title tune. The two worked together at Graftgold, Turner's company, and Hewson published the games of both. In an interview printed in ZZAP! 64 the month the game came out, Braybrook said that Paradroid updated its screen 17 times a second at its slowest and Uridium 50, every frame of the television picture. He also said he had taken the friction out of the controls: left and right only accelerate the Manta, so it keeps moving until the player turns it round.

The game went on sale on 28 February 1986, at £8.95 on cassette and £12.95 on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128. Dominic Robinson of Graftgold wrote the ZX Spectrum version, which Hewson released on 28 October 1986, also at £8.95. In 1987 Hewson put Uridium and Paradroid together on one Commodore 64 release, the Uridium/Paradroid Double Value Pack, whose manual is linked under About.

The game was copied and re-released after Hewson. Mindscape's The Last Starfighter for the Nintendo Entertainment System, from 1990, is a conversion of Uridium with new graphics and a new story. The Commodore 64 original came to the Wii's Virtual Console in Europe on 28 March 2008, for 500 Wii Points. Braybrook wrote a sequel, Uridium 2, for the Amiga, published by Renegade in 1993.

Sources: ZZAP! 64 issue 11, March 1986, pages 100-101 and the Braybrook interview; Crash issue 35, the Spectrum advertisement; Spectrum Computing; Wikipedia for the release date, The Last Starfighter and the Virtual Console; Nintendo World Report; Uridium 2.

03 · The reception

Number one in the charts and the Golden Joysticks' arcade game of 1986

The reviews singled out the graphics, the charts put the game at the top, and the readers of Computer and Video Games voted it the best arcade game of the year.

ZZAP! 64 reviewed Uridium in March 1986 and gave it 94 % overall. One of its three reviewers called it "surely the best arcade game yet to hit the 64". Their only complaints were that each screen's playing area is a little small and that fifteen Dreadnoughts with little variation might grow monotonous.

Popular Computing Weekly of 20 March 1986 printed the Gallup Top Twenty for all formats with Uridium at number one, three weeks after its release.

The Spectrum version did as well with the critics. It was a Crash Smash at 90 %, a Sinclair User Classic and a Your Sinclair Megagame, and Crash's readers voted it the best shoot 'em up of 1986.

At the Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, voted by the readers of Computer and Video Games and reported in its April 1987 issue, Uridium was Arcade-style Game of the Year, ahead of Gauntlet, the runner-up. Andrew Braybrook was Programmer of the Year.

Sources: ZZAP! 64 issue 11; Popular Computing Weekly, 20 March 1986; Spectrum Computing for the Spectrum reviews and the Crash Readers Awards; Computer and Video Games issue 66, April 1987.