Dropzone

When you’ve got a twenty-year itch to scratch, it’s time to get around to dealing with it. Such is the case with Archer Maclean’s Dropzone on the Commodore 64. As the C64 is my home, my computer since 1984 – and Dropzone just happens to be my favourite game for the machine – cracking it took on a personal significance for me.

The Atari 800 version is much better, y’know…

Until recently, the highest score I’d managed was a rather remarkable 950K-odd, just 50,000 points shy of the magical one million mark and the rating of Megastar. It’s also the point when the game gives you no more lives and lets you see just how long you can last. That high was recorded as part of the Llamasoft Lleague, and frankly since then I hadn’t even been close to such a score.

But opportunity falls into your lap in the strangest ways. Remember are a well-known C64 cracking group; a couple of leading members are good contacts of mine, and they know my love for Dropzone, so they thought I’d be ideal to test out their latest proposed release to make sure there weren’t any bugs left.

Drop Zone? Wesley Snipes? Curse Google!

A potential mass Dropzone playing session awaited me... In the end, though, it only turned into one game – but what a game that was! Making 100K was just a warm-up, something that could be done in my sleep. At 300K things started getting nasty and those damned planters were dropping their androids at a rate where you can’t possibly keep up and protect all your men. Cue the occasional frantic wrenching of the joystick to avoid the incoming nemesites and taking one hand off the stick to prod at the cloaking key so I don’t get splattered by anything else on screen during the judicious use of one-handed manoeuvring.

Hitting 500K, the zone is in full effect, there’s no thinking, just doing. Flying around and taking everything down in one glorious sweep of the stick and button, pods have their contents obliterated less than a second after explosion, and I begin to think I’m unstoppable… And that’s the problem. My brain starts to think.

Write a successful game and you, too, could meet Jeff Minter.

Two things kick in at around 750K to drag me out of the zone. Firstly, the undeniable realisation that maybe, just maybe, I could actually reach one million for the first time in this game. The second just happens to be the awareness that my right hand is so cramped, I can barely prize it off the joystick, let alone wiggle my fingers. But when was achieving anything worthwhile easy?

The last push of 250K has to be made in full control of my senses. I make strategic use of smart bombs to keep the score ticking over, inching it higher and higher. At 900K the pain is becoming almost unbearable and it would be prudent to stop, but you know you just can’t when you’re that close to the mark. Then 950K arrives and the previous high score is bested and things are almost there. Several little slips have reduced my lives but the display still shows at least three remaining. My heart really is pounding at this point and frantic attempts to remain composed are met with resistance: “can’t fuck up now” is the main thought in my head.

The evidence of twenty long and painful years, m’lud…

And then, in a glorious explosion of a pod and trailers, the one million mark is passed. Tension turns to relaxation, the joy is overwhelming. I go to exclaim and throw my hands up in celebration, and suddenly realise that with my right hand still clamped firmly to the stick, doing so would likely tug the whole Commodore assembly off the desk! So I continue playing; but it gets so hard to move that the last life lost is almost a relief. The goal is met. Almost twenty years of playing has finally resulted in the ultimate target.

Next stop: getting that one million mark in Robotron…

MAYHEM, September 2004.

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