SQIJ!

“THEN THE FOOD RAN OUT.”

“Press ‘F1’ to experience the most terrific pleasure ever laid on your beady little pupils.” SQIJ! ZX Spectrum cover.

Another year, another April Fool’s Day, and another reaffirmation of my promise to leave the Bad Game Hall of Fame website appearing and operating as normal — a solemn vow I have kept for the past three firsts of April gone by. To explain my stance to potentially new readers: I’ve always thought that the classic webmaster tradition of “making your own website completely unusable” as an April Fool’s prank is a dumb one, and so I choose a different path: To instead to write regular articles about video games that can be considered as “jokes” in and of themselves. That being said, I reckon I’ve already covered most of the most historically notable gag games, and so I’ll probably have to start stretching the definition somewhat in order to keep this tradition going. Which brings us to the subject of today’s article: A game not intended by its creator as a prank on consumers per se, but rather one which they had never expected to be released in the first place. In that sense, I reckon the joke was ultimately played on them, as their contentious cassette somehow found its way to store shelves across the United Kingdom.

The story of SQIJ! (pronounced “Squidge,” according to its original creator) for the ZX Spectrum has been recounted many times and many ways in the years following its 1987 release, and become the stuff of British microcomputer legend. It’s well and truly one of the worst games of all time, and one which – I must reiterate – the creator of which didn’t presume their publisher would even put out on shelves! Luckily for us, the story of its development and unlikely release has been pretty well chronicled by this point, providing us a fascinating insight into the British budget games scene of the mid-to-late 80s in the process. It’s territory we’ve covered here before on the Bad Game Hall of Fame, but a subject matter I’m always happy to revisit nonetheless. It’s a dirty job, but someone on this side of the pond has gotta do it.

Now, one last thing before we get started: For a reason which will be revealed over the course of the article to follow, Spectrum SQIJ!’s defining feature is the complete inability for players to so much as move the titular character. And so – as an incredibly stupid self-imposed challenge for myself – I have determined to write this entire article in a single sitting, without getting up from my chair. Because, y’know: Not being able to move from where I am and all that, yeah? Also, I only decided to do an April Fool’s article this year with just a few days left before the 1st, so I’m basically having to knock this all out with little in the way of time to spare anyhow. Considering though that our standard articles take whole weeks of writing and research, and that I typically have a tendency to over-do it in the “word count” department, this should prove an incredibly difficult and potentially disastrous task. But hey, this whole damned website is nothing if not a testament to my own masochism, so on with the show I say!

“Sqij Was Once a Happy Bird in the Decadent Days Before the Population Holocaust.”

“I am not going to bore you with how long this game took to write or how much I hate
certain furry animals.”
SQIJ! Commodore 64 cassette tape.

When the British microcomputer boom hit big, it came as a boon to software publishers across the nation — across the whole of Europe, even. Not to dive too deep into the historical context here (let’s save that for an article I’m not trying to knock out over a single day); but the push being made to put PCs in the homes of nearly every Briton was an incredibly forward-thinking initiative, and one which encouraged a commendable standard for computer literacy in the country. Most pertinently though, for our purposes: It was a movement which emboldened a generation of enterprising bedroom coders, who realized a potential to profit off their hobby projects. Publishers, in turn, realized their own potential to profit off the labor of literal children, and quickly established divisions for contracting these code-writing wunderkinds as “game developers.”

One such label was ‘The Power House’ – formerly branded as ‘Omega Software’ – serving as the budget branch for London’s ‘CRL Group’ (Computer Rentals Limited). Where the larger company would eventually rise to some level of infamy for publishing horror-themed text adventure titles (the likes of Dracula, Frankenstein, and Jack the Ripper) – which ultimately saw the British Board of Film Censors stepping in to rate them as “unsuitable” for consumers aged 15 and under – they also had claim to developing one of the most impressive space-faring simulation games for its era, Tau Ceti. While CRL’s broader oeuvre is certainly interesting in its own rights and well worth looking into on your own time; we’re of course here to focus on Power House, and what constitutes a decidedly less “ambitious” output. Their earliest publishing efforts (during their Omega days) were comprised of price-cut re-releases for some of ‘Anirog Software’s back catalogue — simple shooter fare along the lines of Cosmic Commando, Starbase Defense, and the poorly-aged Indian Attack (changed up slightly by Omega as ‘Apache Raid’ for re-release). As that well quickly dried up though, and after further exhausting CRL’s own titles suitable for the value treatment, the move was made to open their mailbox to amateur developers seeking pay for their submissions.

To quickly explain the workings of the business model here [and why it might appeal to an aspiring young developer]: Let’s say you’re a hobbyist developer, who’s just finished work on a nifty little homebrewed game. For all your cleverness when it comes to coding though, you’re still limited as far as your ability to actually sell and distribute the thing — where you lack the means to produce cassette / disk copies by the thousands, or to establish the necessary relations with retailers. But have no fear: The value labels are here! By submitting your games to them (and with their often having little in the way of “standards” on their end), you can hope to receive back a contract entitling them to the rights to sell your game, in return for what usually amounted to a one-time paycheck — for as much as £1,000, or as little as £10. Assuming the label was reputable enough; your name would still remain attached to your game (for better or for worse), they’d handle aspects of the package design and manufacturing, and your game would likely hit store shelves priced somewhere in the £1.99 –  £2.99 range. If you were a particularly reliable hand, the publisher might even keep your name and number on record, and call you about doing further work for them. Such was the entry point for many a British youth into the games industry proper.

This was perhaps the dream of a then-13 year old Jason Kendall, who had just wrapped development on his first-ever game: 1986’s SQIJ!, as intended for the Commodore 64. Having learned the basics of BASIC on his school’s Commodore PET, and further convinced his parents to invest in a VIC-20 for their home; he soon set about teaching himself the skills necessary for developing his own games, and spent a year producing the program that would ultimately become SQIJ! Admirable commitment for a teenager, to be sure. By his own admissions regarding the game’s simple concept and inspiration: “Yes it was a bit barmy – I just started writing a screen-flipping maze program and decided I wanted a gravity-pulled flying character. I was well into Jeff Minter’s stuff at the time and his psychedelic llamas, so it became a mutant bird.”^[1] And for what it’s worth, his original game is an entirely functional bit of game software! Truly commendable, considering his lack of experience and limited means. Now, is any of that to say it was a game worth a publisher picking up and selling?

I’m gonna go ahead and answer my own question with “Probably not!” At the risk of roasting the output of a literal 13 year old here,** I can really only describe SQIJ! as being “fundamentally flawed” at best. Putting aside for now the game’s audacious plot – which deals in no less than a “population holocaust” and mass starvation – your goal mechanically amounts to collecting the six pieces of an ‘Enertree’ scattered across a cave system, and assembling them on a designated pedestal located roughly in the map’s center. Certain sections of the cave require you to bypass laser walls, which requires trading acquirable fruits for ‘passes’ at several of available ‘Dispensa-Monsta’ locations. All the while, you’re having to contend with infinitely-respawning monsters at every turn — who rapidly drain your ‘Energy’ meter on contact with Sqij. Despite your weapon against them being a seemingly practical single-hit-killing beam – fired horizontally across the screen from Sqij’s mouth – you’ll soon realize how utterly ill-equipped our feathered friend is for the task at hand.

See, enemies are liable to enter from every open edge of the screen — the same openings you have to pass through in order to navigate. At the same time, the game attempts to maintain an on-screen count of four enemies attacking you simultaneously — spawning fresh enemies almost as quickly as you may take them out. In combination, this makes it so that trying to clear a path from one end of the screen to the other will only result in more enemies pouring out from whatever opening you’re trying to navigate through to, where no amount of stalling or maneuvering can save you from taking damage across the vast majority of SQIJ’s screens. When you factor in an inability to fire vertically at enemies – thereby making open ceilings and floors especially lethal – it becomes impossible past a certain point to maintain any minimum of your energy meter, and to not inevitably forfeit the single life you are given to complete the game within. And when the only way to replenish said meter is by picking up / dropping off pieces of the Enertree – which are as few as they are distanced from one another – the whole endeavor ultimately proves untenable.

It’s all a shame, too, because there’s at least a serviceable game buried beneath the layers of frustration. The graphics are appealing enough despite their disparate stylings; where the monster designs are all pretty adorable, and collectibles are easily distinguishable / discernible. The maze itself is relatively simple to chart, given some rudimentary landmarks and its measured scope. Control over your titular bird is intuitive and responsive enough, if not lacking some much-needed flexibility. The game even has a rockin’ soundtrack going for it, courtesy of one Jay Derrett — who receives their credit in one of the two simultaneously scrolling text tickers comprising the game’s endearingly impractical title screen. It all serves to demonstrate that Kendall had the potential to develop a tidy little adventure title for the C64: He just needed the time and guidance to further cultivate it. But of course, The Power House had neither to spare, and simply put the game that had been given to them to print; slapping a terrifying Tim White art piece on the cover, recording an entirely unrelated dub / rocksteady track to the B-side of the tape, and calling it a day.

Alright, so brief aside on that ‘FREE AUDIO TRACK’ as mentioned on the game’s cover: The title of the track in question is “Swimming Against the Tide,” as performed by the mysterious ‘H.E.X.’ (House Electronic Xperience). H.E.X. turns out to be the musical project of one Wayne Allen, who was buddies / bandmates with one of The Power House’s head honchos, Andy Wood.^[2] An arrangement was reached between the two where Andy would tack on Wayne’s tracks to the unallocated space on their game cassette releases, serving as a mutual bit of cross-promotion: Wayne would get his name out as an artist, and The Power House could boast a variety of eclectic musical accompaniments to a number of their various games. Never mind that the songs were never actually composed with the particular games in mind (largely consisting of studio leftovers / unreleased material by Wayne), or that the audio fidelity wasn’t particularly stellar. It was certainly a novel way to utilize the format, and to add some additional “value” to Power House’s value label offerings.

And so, SQIJ! made as fine an addition as any to The Power House’s Commodore 64 catalogue — slotting in nicely snug between the likes of Morphicle and Xenon Ranger or whatever else have you. But the standard practice of the time called for more than just a single platform release: To maximize profits, a publisher was expected to issue conversions across the whole range of then-popular computer formats; making appeals to Amiga adopters, BBC backers, and Spectrum supporters alike. At the very least, a Speccy conversion in particular was a must-have, as it was the most commonly-owned platform of its time. With this in mind, The Power House did reach out to Kendall to see if he wouldn’t mind helming the project himself. Best to keep the original creator involved in the production and all that. Only there was a slight hiccup to this plan: Jason didn’t own a model of ZX Spectrum, and he wasn’t about to spend the paltry £300 check they had issued him to go out and buy one. From his point of view: “I didn’t know Z80, and wasn’t really interested in learning it at the time; I was getting into the Commodore 64 and then the Amiga.”^[1b] But not to worry! Power House had other prospective programmers on call, who could take on the port work in Kendall’s stead.

Before we get to the ZX Spectrum conversion this article is ostensibly centered around, there is the matter of another conversion that had been commissioned — one which seems to escape the purview of most pieces written to cover SQIJ! This would be a version slated for models of Commodore 16 and Plus/4: Cross-compatible machines released after the C64, but with lower specs targeting more productivity-minded consumers. That is to say that SQIJ! would have to be further simplified in order to run effectively on these newly-intended platforms. Unfortunately, Jason wasn’t quite equipped to handle this project either, again lacking the home hardware to conceptualize it. And so, the man called upon to helm this conversion would be one Mark J.M. McCubbin; who had simultaneously been put to work in developing a further C16 P/4 conversion for another Power House release, The Equalizer. And judging from what he was able to do for SQIJ!… well, perhaps it’s for the best that The Equalizer wound up remaining a C64 exclusive after all.

The downgraded graphics can at least be forgiven; simplifying the heads-up display, reducing poor Sqij to an amorphous green lump, and consolidating the different monster varieties into a singular sprite. You might even excuse Mark reducing the number of collectible Enertree components down from six to four, thereby rendering larger sections of the game world completely barren and not worth exploring. What cannot be given a pass though are the changes made to the enemies’ attack patterns: Where the original game’s system of constantly-respawning baddies approaching you from all angles certainly wasn’t ideal, it’s certainly a better implementation than not being able to kill them at all. Here in the C16 version of SQIJ!, each new screen sees a swarm of enemies immediately fill the space and begin to circle you, rendering it impossible to avoid damage in an entirely new and exciting way! The complete inability to kill them either – where your laser seems to ineffectively pass right through them – renders the chances of your survival that much slimmer. Their being too numerous and speedy to outmaneuver is the icing on the cake, ensuring that your time spent in C16 SQIJ! will be as brief as it is frustrating.

So, that’s the lesser Commodore conversion written off completely! Which finally brings us to the main event: Jason Creighton’s conversion for the ZX Spectrum. This other Jason – two years Kendall’s senior (at age 15) – had submitted his previous attempts at developing Spectrum games to CRL over the course of some prior months, none of which the publisher evidently deemed fit enough for production. That being said, The Power House had kept his name and number on record, for just an occasion such as this. As Creighton recounts the fateful day he was contacted for the project: “[The Power House] just called and said they had a Commodore 64 game that needed converting.”^[1c] Simple as that, I reckon. But the contract in place here would be surprisingly iron-clad, by the sound of it — given how the publisher would soon proceed to ride on Creighton to complete his assignment. And as we proceed, I feel compelled to reiterate a key detail again here: Jason Creighton was still a 15 year old, who was not working as a salaried employee for CRL.

First things first: Creighton was gonna need a copy of the game he was intended to replicate. A simple ask, one might imagine. Unfortunately, CRL / The Power House had initially neglected to provide a reference copy to him as such, wasting precious time within their imposed deadline — originally issued December ’85, and come due February ’86.^[3]  For his part, Creighton tried to get the ball rolling by getting the publisher to cough up the C64 sample; visiting the CRL offices in person, and speaking to a company representative. This meeting apparently did not go so well, as Jason goes on to recall: “Some short guy starts moaning at me for no reason, saying it was all my fault for not having this or that.”^[1d] It’s at this point that Jason rightfully tells the company to “stick the contract,” and returns home believing himself freed of his commitment. But to his surprise – come the end of January – he would finally receive his copy of the original C64 SQIJ! (presumably by mail)! But the comedy of errors here was far from over, as the version provided to him came in the form of a floppy diskette — a format which he did not have the necessary means to actually load. Knowing full well the teeth that had to be pulled in order to get CRL to provide even that much to him, Creighton likely figured it wasn’t worth the trouble of trying to get them to provide a copy on cassette, and re-committed to breaching (or otherwise ignoring) his contract.

“I didnt even compile it.
Then they accepted it, oddly.”
SQIJ! ZX Spectrum inlay.

But The Power House proved relentless. With a month left before due date, the company finally sees fit to send Creighton a copy of the game’s world map, for him to reproduce within his conversion. At this point, Jason isn’t trying to give CRL so much as the time of day — focusing instead on his upcoming exams for school, and whatever other pursuits seemed more worthwhile than dealing with the highly unprofessional publishers. And so, the deadline came and went: February gave way to May, and time passed at its usual pace through to June. And all the while, CRL apparently held stubborn in their steadfastness — refusing to let Creighton off the hook, or to delegate the conversion to any other available programmer. By this point, Jason simply wanted to get the publisher off of his back, and to continue his life undisturbed by their further pestering. With this frustrated mindset in place, he set to his work, taking full advantage of whatever shortcuts he could take in producing his obligated conversion. Where he had initially planned way back in December to “write the software in machine code and make a decent effort of it”;^[1e] he was now mentally exhausted, rightfully pissed off, and looking to wrap the project in record time. And to this end, he sought help from one of CRL’s rivals in the microcomputer market.

Earlier in 1986, computer games development behemoth Ocean Software had established an ‘Ocean IQ’ sub-division, for publishing a line of software tools intended for game-authoring. The intent was to make the prospect of development that much more approachable / accessible to hobbyists, and to hopefully foster a new generation of programmers. To this end, they released Laser BASIC into the world — providing extended commands and program calls that a developer could potentially utilize in coding a game, as well as some additional (apparently rudimentary) graphic design tools. By most accounts, the Laser BASIC toolkit was a dud, and the whole initiative on Ocean’s part was something of a failure. As a review written for CRASH magazine detailed — in comparing Ocean’s offering to several of their competitors’:

“The commands are all four letters long and start with a full stop. From .ADJM to .WRBV, they are almost all totally unmemorable and unpronouncable. […] The code needed is hard to read and hard to debug. At present you can’t use Laser BASIC in commercial games without infringing Ocean’s copyright, but a run time system, misleadingly called the Laser BASIC Compiler should be available for £9.95 by the time you read this. I don’t expect that there will be many takers.”^[4]

Undeterred by (or perhaps uninformed of) its negative reviews, Creighton had gone ahead with purchasing a personal copy of Laser BASIC and its accompanying compiler. Despite the valid misgivings he had with CRL by this point, he still had the courtesy to provide a progress report to another liaison for the company – ‘Software Manager’ Ashley Hildebrandt – and informed them that he would be utilizing Ocean’s toolkit in developing his overdue SQIJ! conversion. In interviewing Ashley roughly thirty years after the fact, the former CRL employee would admit to “[not knowing] Laser BASIC if it bit me on the behind,” before further claiming that Creighton’s account contained some error — denying his part as Jason’s contact within the company, and shifting the blame to “someone [else] at CRL.”^[1f] Regardless of who may have signed off on whatever or whenever, Creighton soldiered ahead in putting Laser BASIC through the paces, and churning out his conversion as quickly and dirtily as possible. He knew full well that if he had taken the originally planned trouble of writing the game in machine code, the resulting game would’ve operated faster and more efficiently. But completing this project was no longer a matter of pride or showcasing his coding talents: It was to free himself of this pestering publisher, plain and simple.

At this point, all Creighton had to go off of in developing his conversion were hazy memories of having seen the original game in action at CRL’s offices nearly half a year ago, plus the map that had been provided to him as a reference guide. For an indignant Jason, this would be more than enough to work with. What stood as more present in his memory was a clause in his contract, which effectively stated that “the company could reject the game if it was well basically crap.”^[3b] A fair enough clause – to be sure – and one which Creighton banked on The Power House electing for. He committed to providing them the crappiest game possible, and proceeded with what seems to be phrased as a 40 hour marathon coding session.*** All said and done, what he figured he was left with was a game that met the minimum-most standards of functionality: Something that could theoretically be played, if one had the patience for it. The graphics were intentionally hideous, the gameplay was deliberately tedious, and the program didn’t even bother to support joysticks (as was a well-established industry standard by this point). As a final demonstration of his utter contempt for CRL, he didn’t so much as bother to compile the damned thing — the process by which written code is compressed and optimized for the machine itself to read and execute.

By all accounts, staff at The Power House should’ve taken just one look at what Creighton had handed them, and quickly determined to throw it away. If there was a single iota of professional pride left between the whole lot of them; they’d have realized how unreasonable they had been through this whole fiasco, let the unfortunate teenager off the hook, and simply given up on making a Spectrum conversion of SQIJ! available to consumers. Better to do that than subject them to the mess Jason had sent their way, and risk losing valuable trust with their audience. But of course, we all know by now what it was they wound up doing: They only went and recorded the program to cassette as it was, furnished it with the same musical accompaniment and packaging as they had before, and included their set of Speccy-specific load and control instructions in the inlay; alongside a “Programmer Profile” template card the label had filled out for Creighton, showcasing his name and headshot.

Evidently, the company had felt compelled to get this conversion of SQIJ! out as quickly as possible, and stupidly took Creighton’s program in entirely undeserved “good faith.” This is to say that nobody seemed bothered so much as to test the game on its receival, before authorizing it to be printed and mass manufactured. Perhaps if someone had taken this basic-most step, they’d have noticed something like a glaring issue with the game. Granted, I could be referring to any one of several facts of its design here — between the whole game effectively being a prank at CRL’s expense, the program code still having not been compiled, and the tendency of the software to crash at seemingly every turn. But all those issues should be considered as overshadowed by one more obvious, impossible to miss, and single-handedly fatal flaw: The game was unplayable. Not in the sense of performatively exaggerating its lack of quality – mind you – but to say that you literally could not control your “playable” character in any capacity. Let’s get to figuring out why.

** If I should have to defend myself here: Mr. Kendall ’s obviously a grown adult now, and seems to have a sense of humor about his whole experience as a budget games developer.

*** Funnily enough, I found myself writing that sentence at roughly the 5 hour mark of my own marathon writing session! Kindred spirits, Creighton and I.

“Screen Shots May Vary From Your Version.”

“Of course, recovering the pieces are not
Sqij’s only problem…”
SQIJ! ZX Spectrum back of box.

Picture our post-apocalyptic future… or perhaps our ancient past? Hell, who’s to say if this story is even meant to take place on planet Earth? In any case, our titular Sqij is made to inhabit an ecosystem on the verge of collapse; having previously lived their days as a “happy bird,” before a mass extinction event gives further way to seemingly global food shortage. Somehow, Sqij has managed to survive past this scheduled doomsday, and undergone some unspecified mutations along the way. The cold world has left them as an insatiable, ferocious, and violent beast — motivated by unrelenting hunger, and in search of a promised perpetual food source. This so-called ‘Ener Tree’ (punctuation varying between in-game and print instructions) is the supposed key to eternal life itself, but carries a complicated catch: Its pieces have been broken and scattered within the treacherous ‘Lotz-Too-Weet’ cavern system — where a pedestal made to support it was originally built. And so, the task falls upon the determined Sqij: To re-collect the pieces to the Enertree, and to rebuild it on its dedicated foundation. Only then can Sqij hope to save themselves from “certain death by starvation,” and to provide a “constant supply of food [to] all his family and friends.”

Such is the plot as told in the original Commodore 64 release of the game, and ostensibly carried over to this Speccy conversion. Of course, Creighton couldn’t be bothered to include any of those aspects of the narrative within the game itself — where Kendall had previously included a story summary within the ‘Instructions’ section of his game’s main menu. All Creighton deems worth to include on the Spectrum version’s title screen is a prompt to press the ‘1’ key on your keyboard, enabling you to ‘PLAY GAME.’ As alluded to earlier though, this will serve as your only functional input across the entire program — your singular option for interacting with the application in any tangible capacity. For once you load into the game proper, and see our particularly portly visage of Sqij sat in the center of the screen, you’ll have no further means of actually controlling him. You can consult the manual’s controls as frequently as you like – presuming that ‘Z’ and ‘X’ will move him left and right, or that ‘K’ and ‘M’ should move him up and down – but to no avail.

Was this perhaps Creighton’s devious intention all along? According to the man himself, this is apparently not the case: At one point in time, he would claim that the inability for players to move in the game comes down to an modern emulation error — where “the original game” had worked fine when he shipped it off to CRL, and where he had guessed that the more recent recurring issue players were facing “has more to do with Laser basic and emulators.”^[3c] However, it has since been confirmed by multiple sources (including Stuart Ashens) that the problem is present on original Spectrum hardware — with genuine copies of the game to boot. So, what gives then? What’s to blame for the complete lack of game functionality? Luckily, there is in fact an answer to this question, as well as something like a solution for it!

See, your standard ZX Spectrum integrated keyboard comes with a full letter set, ranged A through Zed. And in keeping with expectation, each key is meant to type in lowercase by default — where two separate ‘Shift’ keys exist for accessing either uppercase letters or your range of symbol characters (commas and quotation marks and so forth). This being said, Spectrum games which utilized a keyboard would typically recognize your key presses regardless of capitalization, since it was an easy enough contingency to account for. In the case of SQIJ! though, there is an odd exception to this rule — a seemingly deliberate, single line of code made to serve the contrary. By the power of a pre-scripted ‘POKE’ command that sets the RAM value at the address ‘23658’ to a value of ‘8’ (Thanks to @Chentzilla for correcting some of my verbiage on this!); the program effectively enforces Caps Lock and renders all your letter key inputs unreadable by the game, which is curiously designed to exclusively recognize lowercase values. At the same time, toggling your keyboard’s own physical Caps Shift key does nothing to fix the input issue, where the game will still refuse to acknowledge any of your attempted key presses.

The solution, then, is to counter SQIJ! with a POKE command of your own: To ‘Break’ into the game’s code, set address 23658 to ‘0,’ and restart the program. In other words, you can stop the game in its tracks in order to change a line of code at will, and ultimately fix the game-breaking issue for yourself! That’s the beauty of the Speccy right there, I tell you what. This still doesn’t answer the question, however, of how the self-sabotaging bit of script made its way into the game in the first place? In being informed of this bit of culprit code years later, Creighton continued to deny allegations of deliberately disrupting his own game: “I most certainly did not place the poke there – that’s seriously weird. I suspected that maybe it was because of Laser BASIC running on an emulator.”^[1g] Taking Jason at his word, this would leave us with one of two likely culprits then: Either a concerted effort by The Power House to sabotage their own release – possibly attempting to hide the shoddy work past the game’s first screen / to cast further dispersion on Creighton’s coding abilities – or some unintended insert by a Power House staffer potentially made in the process of double-checking the code. Which sounds more likely to you?

Before you answer, bear the following fact in mind: Looking at the code at all would’ve probably clued a programmer into the fact that Creighton hadn’t compiled it, and that significant portions of the Laser BASIC library were still present in the “final” program. As you might recall from earlier, using uncompiled code in this case would have constituted no less than copyright infringement — where “use of Laser BASIC in commercial games” prior to the Laser BASIC Compiler releasing would’ve carried likely legal ramifications, had anyone been foolish enough to try. Needless to say, Speccy SQIJ! stands in full violation of Ocean’s terms of use, as the excess code it contains could effectively (and quite easily) be reverse-engineered, in order for a crafty consumer to get their hands on the £14.95 program extender for just the £1.99 asking price of the game cassette! Granted: It wasn’t the most useful set of tools, and thieving sorts would still have to somehow get hands on the compiler in order to get away with using it, but the legal standpoint here is still clear. All that being said, SQIJ! probably wound up serving as a pretty strong deterrent in itself for those potentially interested in Laser BASIC — demonstrating that script extension alone certainly wasn’t enough to save you from fundamentally bad game design.

Which finally brings us to the actual game! Assuming you somehow could’ve figured out the root of the input issue for yourself at the time (highly unlikely, sadly), and entered in the saving POKE, what would that even leave you with? Still one of the least functional, decidedly unplayable games ever released for the sorry system. You could probably figure out that much before even moving poor Sqij across the screen: The lad is absolutely massive in terms of screen real estate, and unfortunately hideous as he has ever been. And the enemies which occupy both sides of the screen clearly lack anything in the way of intelligence — content to simply shuffle up and down the screen in their designated columns. What this leaves you with is another entirely inelegant solution to the original SQIJ!’s combat problem; where the impotent ‘Thingys’ (the C64’s name for its monster roster) are of no threat to you unless you deliberately run headfirst into them. As a matter of fact, you can miss colliding with them physically and still take damage from them, as whatever vertical space their path encompasses counts as a constant hurtbox. The solution, then, is to fire Sqij’s ‘Splurger’ at them to remove them from the screen — sometimes requiring multiple consecutive shots, since the collision detection is decidedly busted. And even then, you might still see the lingering visage of your foe on-screen, as the game is plagued by visual artifacting issues.**

The graphical issues are further compounded by Sqij’s own tendency to break into chunks and occupy multiple spaces on the screen. By my guesstimation, the code that Creighton wrote for scrolling enemies vertically is one of the major culprits at play here — where that designated screen space will try to scroll any graphic currently occupying it, and thereby hold onto residual data for Sqij’s massive sprite. As such, you can expect to leave bits and pieces of the poor bird across the screen, as you slowwwlyyy attempt to move them across it. You get the sense that the game itself is rapidly falling apart on you as you attempt to play it, which – come to think of it – is actually a pretty fair description for what’s happening. The fact that the game further has to stop any other motion from occurring on screen as Sqij is in flight speaks to how poorly held-together the whole of the program is — how its inability to keep up with more than a single process at a time makes the ZX Spectrum itself seem somehow ill-equipped for the task at hand. But I can assure you: The machine was capable of so much more than what’s on display here, and could’ve made it happen if SQIJ!’s spaghetti code had given it the chance to.

I briefly mentioned how slowly Sqij moves across the screen, so let’s get into that a bit more. I did a bit of calculation before sitting down for this ill-advised writing session (I’m really hating this, by the way!), and here were my findings: Sqij moves horizontally at a rate of one step per second, for a distance of 5 pixels. With a screen space measuring roughly 256 pixels in width (give or take some difficult to discern boundary boxes) – and Sqij himself occupying 65 of those pixels – it winds up taking close to 30 seconds to travel from one side of the screen to the other [without obstruction]. While this is an obviously excruciating process to sit through in real time, it’s remedied slightly by the fact that on transitioning from one screen to another, Sqij will re-appear immediately in the center of the screen; as the game lacks the ability to keep in register which side of the screen Sqij exits from, and saves itself the trouble of determining where he should enter from on the next. In effect, this shaves a rough 15 seconds off of your per-screen commute, so long as you don’t second-guess which direction you want to travel in.

Of course, this all assumes that you’re actually able to pass from one screen to the next, without inadvertently navigating out of bounds and sending the game down crashing and burning. There is a very specific angle of approach / vertical row you’ll have to approach every horizontal opening from – where Sqij’s belly should just barely clip through the floor of the entrance – lest the game fail to recognize you as colliding with the screen-transition trigger. Aim any higher or lower, and Sqij will simply soar on past the edge of the screen — into the great unknown, for as long as you’re content to hold down the Z or X key. Actually, that’s not entirely true: If you go out of bounds trying to travel through to the right side of the screen, the game will just straight-up crash, as it’s evidently not fit to continue tracking coordinate data once it exceeds a certain limit. At least when you attempt to move a screen up or down [and you’re not perfectly aligned with what the game expects], you’ll hit the ceiling / floor and get set bouncing backward; taking damage in the process, but giving you the opportunity to re-align rather than falling out of bounds.

You may well be asking by now, “But to what end?” What’s the point of even committing to all this torturous traveling with the constant chance of crash? Well, don’t you wanna see the ending? Aren’t you curious to know what endgame celebration Creighton put together for those with the will to endure? And so, you do your best to play by the rules: Silently inching your way from screen to screen (as there’s no music / sound effects to speak of), firing your laser as occasionally necessary, and generally doing your best to abide by SQIJ!’s set of arbitrary rules. You remember your objective to collect ‘Doodlefruits’ along the way, and to trade them in for passes at the Dispensa-Monstas and so forth. And so, as you stumble upon your first piece of produce, you press the intended ‘L’ key to collect it… again and again, to absolutely no avail. At a point, you might fool yourself into thinking you’ve managed to pick it up — where if Sqij eclipses its designated tiles, it can temporarily remove the fruit sprite from the screen. But if you further press the ‘N’ key to bring up your inventory, you’ll find that you can never turn those values from 0’s to 1’s.

Believe me when I say I tried every possible configuration of positioning and button pressing to try and pick up various different pieces of fruit / the Enertree. I even tried re-enabling the uppercase POKE mid-game to see if that somehow might allow me to pick up items! But it’s a fool’s errand: The function simply doesn’t work. The laser walls across the map still do a fine job of impeding your progress, though; and with no way to pick up the necessary passes for unlocking them, there’s only so much of the map you’re able to explore. At a certain point, the reality sets in: Even after “fixing” SQIJ!, the game is still impossible to complete. Unlocking the abilities to move and shoot may delude you into thinking there’s a full game waiting to be explored and interacted with here, but it’s all an illusion: For all intents and purposes, you may as well have never left the starting block. At least then, you’d be saved the precious time and patience spent trying to navigate the nightmarish caves.

And so, I issue a new challenge to more clever Spectrum users than I: Figure out some way to actually make the item collection functional. If any of you are up to the task of troubleshooting where Creighton’s code goes wrong again, and can provide some sort of POKE or patch to remedy it, I will return to this damned game again at some point and see it through to its proper completion. Honestly, my curiosity at this point is killing me. I’ve already sunk so much time into this stupid game – never mind this ever-lengthier article – that I’m fully invested in it all now. Even knowing full well what the ending is, thanks to its being readable in the game’s code, I still need that closure — to know for absolutely certain. That ending, by the way, would seem to consist of a revealing block of text written by Creighton, made to contain the following:

“WELL DONE OLD BEAN!! YOU’VE DONE IT. BUT FOR ME IT MEANS ANOTHER 2 MONTHS IN A DARK DANK BEDROOM (WHICH BADLY NEEDS DECORATING) WRITEING A FOLLOW UP. OH WELL. NEVER MIND. BYE FOR NOW.”

In any case, that’s all that can currently be said for SQIJ! on the Speccy. Jason Creighton phoned it in to spite an irksome publisher, and he can hardly be blamed for it. And where any other publisher would’ve immediately rejected this drek; The Power House had only money on their minds, and sold it likely knowing full-well it was a lemon. The blame, in this case, is entirely on them: For effectively forcing the poor circumstances a teenage Creighton was made to work within, for not doing their due diligence in enforcing any measure of quality control, and for seeing fit to stamp a price tag on an entirely non-functional product. But believe it or not, it doesn’t end here. No, Power House still had at least one more SQIJ!-related crime to perpetrate, which we’ll get to soon enough.

** “Visual artifacts” in a game development sense are corrupted bits of graphical display, which can appear due to whatever manner of program issues. The most common example you may be familiar with are sprites in NES games which can potentially appear as misaligned or otherwise anomalous — where errors in reading the cartridge result in the wrong values being read from the graphics bank, and show up as mixed-up characters and scenery.

“INSATIABLE, FEROCIOUS, VIOLENT HUNGER.”

The ZX Spectrum conversion of SQIJ! hit store shelves as had been planned for it, priced at an unassuming £1.99. For all the importance CRL and company seemed to have placed on getting the game done and distributed, you might be surprised to hear they didn’t do much in the way of advertising for it when all was finally said and done! In any case, The Power House had plenty of other games on their publishing plate, and as such had an abundance of other products more deserving of their attention / promotion. Past a certain point, you’d forgive the label for trying to pretend the troublesome game didn’t even exist — to want to wash their hands clean of the matter completely. Leave it to Creighton to remind them some time later, though: As something of a lark, he’d call CRL in order to inquire about his due payment, where they’d still owe him some percentage of the total copies sold.

It was at this point that someone at the company had to pull up the numbers on SQIJ!, and to calculate his compensation. When they got back to him, they informed him of the good news: “Sqij! had sold a massive 250 copies, and [he] was due £25.”^[1h] Naturally – in keeping with their practice of timely transactions – they never actually got around to sending him the check, either. “No surprise there then! But to be honest I never expected it to get published.” From here, Creighton would finally cut his tenuous ties with The Power House, go on to serve a brief stint at the renowned Melbourne House (where he helped work on a game that ultimately went unreleased), finish his studies, and seemingly drop out of the games-making business some time thereafter. As such, SQIJ! remains his sole contribution to the industry — the process of its development clearly having left him disillusioned with it all.

The Power House, for their part, kept soldiering on as well as they could. Between their continued publishing of further submissions to their company, they were also gearing up in ‘87 to release their first compilation cassette — the fittingly titled Power Plays. With their focuses primarily being the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum by this point, they’d release distinct versions of the compilation for each platform — compiling eight of the different available games for each machine respectively. Naturally, the original C64 version of SQIJ! was a shoe-in for its system’s collection of games. And it’s fortunate that common sense prevailed when it came time to compile the assortment of games for the Spectrum, where its version of SQIJ! was clearly too embarrassing to include among the hahaha nah I’m just messing with y’all: Of course they went and included Creighton’s version of SQIJ! in their compilation. With nothing in the way of tweaking to even try and fix the game, it still would’ve rated as an entirely non-functional title — what shouldn’t even count as an eighth game among the lot. Never mind how incompetent it made them look to include a completely broken entry in their premier collection: It leads one to consider how desperate they must’ve been as a company to have tried to sell it in the first place?

Things behind the scenes for The Power House were not going so swimmingly. Reportedly, they were incurring debt at a fairly debilitating pace, and failing to effectively compete in the budget games business. Blame it on their catalogue not being up to par, on their mismanagement, or some combination of the two. In either case, their futures seemed far from secure come mid-1987. This didn’t stop one Ashley Hildebrandt (the former Software Manager as mentioned earlier) from attempting to buy out the company though, in his attempt to try and salvage something of them.. After having apparently been at odds with CRL founder Clem Chambers for some time during his employ, Ashley evidently believed that he could do a better job steering the ship for the company’s previously affiliated value division. Having finalized the deal in 1988, The Power House became a distinct entity, where it would remain as such for the rest of its storied history. In other words: They went out of business before the end of that very same year — when the company was ultimately shuttered in light of its continuing debt. Hildebrandt, for his part, would also exit the games industry soon after.

Original SQIJ! creator Jason Kendall had stuck with The Power House for one more release prior to their shutting down: 1987’s I-Xera, also released for the Commodore 64. Shockingly, the publisher didn’t bother commissioning a Spectrum commission that go-around. After parting ways, Kendall would pen another couple C64 games on behalf of some other labels (Wizard’s Pet and Star Slayer) – sometimes operating under the alias of ‘The Master’ – before appearing to establish / affiliate with a one-time publisher in ‘The Big Apple Entertainment Company’ to release 1988’s Oops! — returning to his classic form with a single-word title as appended by an exclamation mark. Despite his latest game seeming to review decently, and a more competently-handled conversion to Sinclair systems (as programmed by one Shakeela Rizvi); this would mark the sole industry contribution by the company, before both it and Kendall himself seemed to call it quits. It’s a shame the young creator could never quite find a stable publishing arm for his releases, and that his time in the business was so short-lived: There was a genuine potential to be developed here, which seemed to be held back by poor circumstances outside his control and decisions likely beyond his comprehension level at that time.

“Obitus brings adventure role-playing to your computer like you’ve never seen it before!”
Obitus magazine advert.

But this would not be the last the world saw of Sqij! That is to say, artist Tim White – who had originally drawn the rendering of Sqij seen the game’s packaging – saw fit to recycle his work for another entirely separate title’s cover art years later: 1991’s Obitus, as released by Psygnosis. As a perspective-shifting active combat RPG, with little in the way of any prominent bird-esque creatures within (as far as I could gather from a glean); the choice to dust off ol’ Sqij seems a curious one? But I suppose that at the time, SQIJ! was still a pretty obscure little game, and that few (if any) folk were bound to notice the re-use of that particular art asset. As a matter of fact, the Sqij seen on the titular game’s cover wasn’t even the first time Tim had recycled the creature concept: The origins of this piece of art date back to 1975, where he had originally painted it as the cover for a 1975 sci-fi novel Under a Calculating Star, written by a John Morressy! Reportedly, White re-used the same image across several other books as well, before bringing it back twice again in his time spent contributing to the games industry. The dots might’ve only been connected for the first time years later, as SQIJ! began to develop its initial notoriety online.

The original ‘World of Spectrum’ website was first established in November of ‘95, made to detail the history and contain a wealth of knowledge in regards to the famous computer line. While the current website has since been “revamped” as of 2020 – in order to make it way less comprehensive / harder to navigate / functionally useless – a ‘World of Spectrum Classic’ domain has since appeared in its stead, to preserve its original contents and carry on the legacy. Putting that bit of division aside from now: One of the classic features on WoS was the ability to browse the ‘Visitor Voted’ highest scoring and lowest rated games, with pages dedicated to listing the top / bottom 100 respectively. Naturally, SQIJ! sank to the bottom of the board pretty quickly – thanks to the handful of Speccy enthusiasts already familiar with it – and thereby prompted further users to discover it and re-confirm its rating accordingly. As word spread, it eventually became a staple of YouTube channels with a penchant for covering microcomputer content (see the lovely Kim Justice, for one), as well as featuring in Stuart Ashen’s compendium of ‘Terrible Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.’ In said book, Ashens sees fit to open his description of SQIJ! as follows:

“This is it. This is the worst game in this book. If anyone ever tells you that the worst commercially released game ever is E.T. for the Atari 2600 or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing for PC, show them this. In fact, I’m not even sure this is technically a game.” ~ Stuart Ashens^[5] 

With its legacy as “the worst game ever released for the Spectrum” secured – putting even the likes of Don’t Buy This! to shame in the eyes of the community – SQIJ! ascended to the ranks of of legend. It’s very name became a running joke within the scene, where the annual Comp.Sys.Sinclair’s legendary annual ‘Crap Games Competition’ has paid homage and alluded to it numerous times across its 25 year history. It’s certainly the sort of game you can’t forget after having learned about it / “played” it for yourself. But perhaps no tribute to it has been quite so flattering as its full-fledged redux in 2018: Psytronik’s release of the aptly-named SQIJ 2018 – as envisioned by studio ‘Tardis.dk Remakes’ / developed by Søren “Sokura” Borgquist – is nothing short of the Spectrum conversion SQIJ! had originally deserved. As a more faithful and loving remake of the original C64 game (with additional improvements made to playability), it does a justice to it that has been long overdue for the past 21 years. In execution, it’s an entirely playable bit of interactive software — likely the best version of the game that exists. It can be downloaded (and purchased on cassette tape) here for those curious, and played on any range of ZX Spectrum emulator / original hardware.

All that leaves us with is to put a tidy little bow on this article, by checking back in with the Spectrum version’s creator one last time. When asked by Eurogamer’s Graeme Mason how he felt as “the man responsible for one of the ZX Spectrum’s worst commercial releases,” Creighton had the following to reflect with: “Well at first I was horrified, but now I laugh at it. I mean, at least I’ve achieved something…I just can’t believe people are still talking about it 30 years later…”^[1i] Such is the power of exceptionally bad games; to merit curiosity and discussion decades after the facts of their original releases, in the same way as some of our industry’s most revered classics. While I hope this article serves for a long while as one of the most comprehensive written on the subject of SQIJ!, I have no doubt that further research and long-held insights revealed will continue to flesh out the story of this most peculiar program. Perhaps one day, someone might even manage to fix up the code well enough to make it playable as had originally been intended, so that sickos like me can finally see it through to a true completion. Perhaps that day is best left until I’m too old to remember the promises I’ve made here to actually play it, though.

Aaand that’s a damned wrap for me on this 11-hour marathon writing session! Was the challenge worth the toll it has clearly taken on my stamina and my mental health? I guess that’s up to you to decide, dear reader. The only thing I know for sure is, I am never doing anything remotely similar to this sort of stupid bullshit endurance gimmick again. All y’all can go ahead and wait six months between articles again, if I damn well please to take so long. Next April Fool’s Day, I am just gonna straight-up phone that year’s article in, and do my best to try and forget about this one entirely. Maybe I’ll do a challenge where I get drunk as a skunk — knock back a shot every time I catch myself using an em dash, and black out before a day’s work can even get done. If there’s one lesson that should truly be taken away from this article, it should be this: Never wait until the last minute to try and write a 10,000 word article, kids. I’m literally going to fall asleep on my keyboard now, so okay bye y’all!

[1] b c d e f g h i Mason, Graeme. “The story behind the worst game ever made.” Eurogamer. January 22, 2017. Web.
[2] Fearon, Rob. “HEX” Take This Machine. May 5, 2015. Web.
[3] b c Kendall, Philip. “The Story behind SQIJ!” ShadowMagic.org.uk. June 4, 2012. Web.
[4] “Tech Tips: Battle of the BASICs.” CRASH, Issue 25. Newsfield Publications. February, 1986. Print. (Transcript available)
[5] Ashens, Stuart. ‘Terrible Old Games You’ve Probably Never Heard Of.’ Unbound. December 3, 2015. Print.