Wizball
1987 · Horizontal Shooter · Commodore 64
Overview
Wizball (1987) is Sensible Software's colour-restoring shooter: a bouncing wizard and his cat collect red, green and blue paint to bring grey Wizworld back to life.
Deep Dive
The evil Zark has drained the colour from Wizworld, and the wizard Wiz, travelling as a bouncing green ball, sets out with his cat Nifta to restore it. Each of the eight levels starts in three shades of grey. Wiz cannot collect paint himself; that job falls to Catellite, the cat, who gathers falling droplets of red, green and blue that are mixed to recolour the scenery. Pearls dropped by enemies buy upgrades and can summon Catellite. Only the first three levels are open at the start, and finishing them unlocks the rest. Two players can play together.
Developer Story
Jon Hare and Chris Yates, who founded Sensible Software, began it as a Nemesis-inspired shooter; the bouncing ball and its controls came first and the wizard story was added later. It was released for the C64 in May 1987, with Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga and Atari ST versions following. A sequel, Wizkid, appeared in 1992.
Did You Know?
- Zzap!64 gave it 96%, later rated it 98% as the best C64 shoot 'em up, and in December 1988 named it the best game it had ever reviewed.
- Martin Galway composed the music for the Commodore 64 version.
Sources & further reading
- Wizball — Wikipedia
