“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!