SHACK ATTACK: THE SHOPPERS ARE COMING
We have a new game, and you can play it right now. It's called Shack Attack, it's free, and it runs in your web browser.
Black Friday, 1985
You remember the store. It was at the edge of the mall parking lot and it sold everything with a wire in it: batteries by the door, boomboxes in the window, and a home computer that everybody came in to poke at.
In Shack Attack you work there. It's five in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, the whole town is in the parking lot, and the manager has left you one velvet rope and one rule. Five shoppers get past you, and you're fired.
There is no security guard. There is the stock.
Hold the doors
The shoppers come down five lanes, a wave at a time, and you put gear on the street to send them home. A boombox turned all the way up does it. So does a spelling test from a talking toy, or an answering machine with the right message on it. Nobody gets hurt. They just decide the mall sounds better.
Batteries are what you spend, so the first thing you learn is to put down a Battery Rack. The second is that a boombox only covers its own lane.
If you've ever defended a lawn with a row of plants, you know the idea. This is that, at the mall, with a CB radio.
Ten days to Christmas Eve
It doesn't stop on Friday. Every weekend to Christmas they come back, and they bring the weather: snow that slows everybody down, rain that shorts out any gear that isn't under the awning, ice that sends shoppers sliding past your displays, and fog so thick you can't see who's coming.
They bring friends, too. A mom behind a stroller. The lady with the coupons, who gets a lot faster when she loses them. Mall walkers doing their laps straight through your defences. A dad filming the whole thing. And then the dolls come in, the ones every kid in America wants that year, and the town loses its mind in one lane.
Every day you win, the manager adds something to the catalogue: twelve pieces of gear by the end, from a pocket stereo to a robot arm.
On Christmas Eve, five minutes before closing, there is one last customer. He's wearing a red suit and he doesn't take no.
It sounds like a 64
The music is Christmas carols arranged for the SID chip by people who really knew it, played by the same SID player as our jukebox. The sound effects are built the way a 64 game builds them: three voices, pulse, sawtooth, triangle and noise.
Coming soon for the Commodore 64
Shack Attack was an idea for the 64 first. We built it for the PC to find out what the game is, and now we know. The Commodore 64 version is next. That's its title page.
Until then: play it free in your browser. You need a mouse, so not on a phone. Get through Christmas Eve and your name goes on the Employee of the Month plaque.