Sub-Terrania

About Sub-Terrania

Sub-Terrania (1994) is Zyrinx's gravity-bound Genesis shooter in which a lone pilot rescues miners from an alien invasion, fighting gravity, inertia and dwindling fuel in underground caverns.

Sub-Terrania in Depth

On an off-world asteroid, aliens invade a vital subterranean mining colony, destroying its headquarters and leaving workers trapped in crevices as radioactive dust swirls toward them. The only weapon able to repel them is an experimental attack fighter, and a lone pilot must defeat the aliens and rescue the miners. Seen from the side underground, the ship is always pulled down by gravity, which can be used to save fuel. As in Gravitar and Thrust, the directional pad rotates the ship and a button thrusts in the direction it faces, but Sub-Terrania adds back thrusters for reversing away from enemy fire.

Each of the nine levels is an enclosed map that can be explored in any direction, with objectives set out beforehand except in the last three: rescuing miners, carrying and using special equipment, collecting sub modules that let the ship go underwater, and defeating alien bosses. Finding efficient routes is central. The ship's force field gives way after too much damage, and limited fuel must be topped up from strategically placed canisters, so refuelling has to be planned, while mining rails let the ship slide along and fire. Critics praised its "excellent" graphics, smooth parallax, physics and "superb" pseudo-industrial soundtrack, which Mean Machines Sega likened to Depeche Mode crossed with Martin Galway's C64 music.

Making Sub-Terrania

It was the first game from Zyrinx, a small Danish studio of demoscene veterans, David Guldbrandsen, Karsten Hvidberg, Jens Bo Albretsen, Michael Balle, Jesper Jørgensen and Jesper Kyd, who chose the Mega Drive partly because of how many sprites it could handle. Sega published it in 1994. It gained a reputation for being overly difficult and sold poorly, but critics were positive, describing it as an evolution of gravity shooters like Gravitar and Thrust and praising its originality, graphics and music, while noting its controls and physics took time to master. Zyrinx followed it with Red Zone.