The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.Find sources: "Earth Shaker" video game – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
Earth Shaker
Developer(s)Michael Batty
Publisher(s)Your Sinclair
Designer(s)Michael Batty
Platform(s)ZX Spectrum 48k
Release1990
Genre(s)Puzzle
Mode(s)Single-player

Earth Shaker is a Boulder Dash-inspired game published as a cover tape in 1990 in Your Sinclair (for the ZX Spectrum 48k). Notable in being the first covertape to subjectively set a high standard,[1] having been initially rejected by publishers Zeppelin because of First Star's suing of companies publishing Boulder Dash clones.[2]

Development

The game was originally conceived as a Boulder Dash clone by Michael Batty, but its scope grew through a long development process:

I started Earth Shaker about 4 years before it appeared in Your Sinclair. A Boulder Dash clone seemed like a reasonably easy thing to program. I thought Boulder Dash was great and played it for ages. I'm still fascinated by the way you can get such complicated behaviour and realistic avalanches by using a few simple rules. Earth Shaker just grew—I kept leaving it and going back to it. But it was the first machine code game I managed to actually finish.[2]

References

  1. ^ Michael Fraser. "Earth Shaker". ntlworld.com. Archived from the original on 2015-04-16. Retrieved 2015-04-08.
  2. ^ a b "Home Action Replay Page - ZX Spectrum - Michael Batty Interview". homeactionreplay.org. Archived from the original on 2015-04-14. Retrieved 2015-04-08.

External links


Categories