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Aticatac

Apple II port · Ultimate Play the Game, 1983

The Aticatac loading screen on the Apple II: the chained ATICATAC lettering, a magenta wizard standing in blue water, a treasure chest, the Apple //e mark, and the Ultimate Play the Game logo
The loading screen

Ultimate’s 1983 Spectrum classic, running on a machine it never reached in its day. The rooms, the artwork, the doorways and the decorations are converted straight from the original Z80 source rather than redrawn by hand, and the engine driving them is fresh 6502 assembly. The disk image is free to download, below.

Where it came from

Ultimate Play the Game was really Ashby Computers and Graphics, set up in Ashby-de-la-Zouch by the brothers Tim and Chris Stamper. They kept famously quiet in public and sold an awful lot of games.

Aticatac entered the charts at number five in November 1983 and was number one a fortnight later. Crash gave it 92%. It made it to the BBC Micro in 1985 and the Xbox in 2015, on Rare Replay — but never to the Apple II. Until now.

The game

You’re locked inside a five-floor castle, and the front door only opens for the Golden Key of ACG. The key comes in three pieces, hidden somewhere different every game, across roughly a hundred and fifty rooms.

Coloured doors need keys of their own, and you can only carry three things at a time. Your energy is a roast chicken on the panel beside the room, and it’s slowly eaten away as you move about. Ghouls burst when you throw a weapon at them; Frankenstein, Dracula, the Hunchback, the Mummy and the Devil don’t.

Play as the knight, the wizard or the serf. Each one can slip past a particular piece of furniture the other two can’t, and there’s nothing on screen to tell you which.

The Apple II character selection screen: ATIC ATAC GAME SELECTION, with sprites for 1 Knight, 2 Wizard and 3 Serf, 0 to start, and the 1983 A.C.G. copyright line
Three characters to choose from, with the knight highlighted.
A white-walled room in the Apple II port: a skull, a ghoul and a spider, wall shields and a portrait, a magenta arch, and the panel showing a full roast chicken
A full chicken, near the start of a run.
A tall orange-walled room in the Apple II port with two tables, a ghost and a spider, and the serf standing at the bottom
Tables you can’t walk through.
A green staircase room in the Apple II port, with doorways at the top and bottom and the player part way up the steps
Stairs between one floor and the next.
A green cavern in the Apple II port with the Devil standing in the middle and a magenta mushroom beside him; the panel shows the roast chicken nearly eaten away
The Devil down in the caverns, with the chicken nearly gone.

The keys

Q W E A D Z X C walk, eight ways
S pick up, and put down
Space throw the weapon
P pause
Escape back to the selection screen
Joystick steers, and button one throws

Eight keys rather than four: the Apple’s keyboard only reports one key at a time, so you can’t make a diagonal by holding two — instead each of the eight keys is a direction of its own. S sits in the middle of that ring.

The disk

apple-aa.dsk

Bootable — put it in drive one and turn the machine on. Needs a 128K Apple //e.

No Apple to hand? Open the browser //e and load the disk into drive one.

Aticatac © 1983 Ultimate Play the Game. The design, the artwork, the castle and the name are theirs; the rights sit with Rare. This port is a personal conversion, not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed from the rights holders, and nothing here is sold.

The original is preserved at World of Spectrum, and the licensed way to play it today is Rare Replay. If you have never played it, play that first.