A new game for the Commodore 64. Black Friday, 1985. You work at the Shack, the electronics store that sells everything with a wire in it. The shoppers are coming. Hold the doors.
Coming soon from Comm-Adore. Can't wait? The PC version is free to play in your browser today.
The story
Out at the edge of the mall parking lot there's a store that sells everything with a wire in it. Batteries by the door, free with your battery club card. Boomboxes in the window. A home computer nobody in town can afford, and everybody comes in to poke at. Everyone just calls it the Shack.
You started Monday. Stock room, minimum wage, a red vest one size too big.
You have met the manager once. He lives in the back office and talks to the staff in memos, on pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips. He has one rule: nobody comes through those doors until he says so. So he strung a velvet rope across the front of the store, pointed at it, pointed at you, and went back to his office. The other part of the rule was on the next slip. Five of them get past you, and you're fired.
Then it's five in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, and the whole town is in the parking lot. There is no security guard. There is you, the rope, and whatever is on the shelves.
It turns out the stock is all you need. A boombox turned all the way up will send a grown man back to his car. So will a spelling test from a talking toy. Nobody gets hurt. They just decide the mall sounds better, and go home.
The game
Shoppers walk in from the right, down five lanes, a wave at a time. You put gear from the shelf out on the lot to send them home before they reach the store.
- Batteries are what you spend. They drop from the sky, and Battery Racks make more.
- Gear only works on its own lane. A boombox blasts a sound wave down it. A stereo stack makes shoppers stop and gawk. An answering machine sends one home with a single message.
- The velvet rope runs across the front of the store. Shoppers who reach it push at their lane's stretch until it gives, then walk in through the door. Now and then a gift drops with a rope kit in it, to put a stretch back up.
- Five shoppers in the store and you're fired.
There are ten days, from Black Friday's 5 AM doorbusters to Christmas Eve. Each day you win puts something new on the shelf: twelve pieces of gear in all, from the pocket stereo to a robot arm.
How to play on the 64
One joystick, in port 2. That's all you need.
- Move: the yellow frame goes a square at a time. Hold the stick and it keeps going.
- Up to the shelf: push up from the top lane. The frame goes onto the gear cards along the top, each with its price in batteries.
- Take a card: fire on it. Then move to a square on the lot and fire again to set the gear down. If you can't afford it yet, wait for more batteries.
- Pick up batteries and gifts: move the frame onto their square. Your batteries are counted at the top left.
- Mend the rope: push left past the first square, onto a lane's stretch of rope, and fire. It takes a rope kit, and those come in gifts.
- Pull the plug: the last place on the shelf says OUT. Fire on it, then fire on a piece of gear to take it off the lot and free its square.
- Pick your eight: from the seventh day the store has more gear than the shelf holds. Before the doors open, the spare gear stands out on the lot. Fire on a piece to take it, fire on a card to put it back, and fire on GO! when you're ready.
The bottom of the screen shows how many shoppers have got into the store, which wave you're on, the day and the time.
A few things worth knowing on your first day:
- Start with Battery Racks on the squares nearest the store, one in every lane. They pay for everything else.
- Then a Boombox in each lane. It only shoots at shoppers in front of it, in its own lane.
- A shopper who reaches a piece of gear stops to wear it down. That buys the gear behind it time.
- Don't spend everything. The last wave of a day is the big one.
The shoppers
Every weekend to Christmas they come back, and they bring friends:
- The cart pusher, whose cart takes the hits first.
- The mom with a stroller: slow, and the stroller soaks up a lot.
- The coupon lady, who wears your gear down three times as fast. Take her coupons and she comes on at twice the speed.
- Kids on a sugar rush, three at a time.
- Mall walkers, who never stop: straight past your gear to the rope.
- The dad with the camcorder, who films everything. The gear in front of him stops working.
- The returns guy, who walks in backwards. Nothing can hit him until he turns round.
- The big-screen guy, behind a boxed TV that takes thirty hits.
- The doll-craze mob: the dolls are in, and seven people want the same one.
- And on Christmas Eve, one last customer in a red suit.
The weather
The time of day and the weather change the rules, and you can see it coming down.
- Night: your gear can't reach as far, and fewer batteries turn up.
- Snow floats down and lies along the lanes. Everyone walks slower.
- Rain shorts out gear that isn't under the awning. It goes blue and does nothing for a few seconds.
- Ice: sleet blows across the lot, and shoppers slide right past your displays.
- Fog hides the far end of the lot.
Built for the 64
Shack Attack started as an idea for the 64, and this is the version it was always meant to be. It runs on any Commodore 64, PAL or NTSC, with no expansion, from one disk image. Up to forty shoppers are on the lot at once, eight to a lane, and it's built and played on a real 64 as it goes.
Where it is
It's being built now. All ten days can be played, with all the weather, all twelve pieces of gear, the story, the catalogue, a save to the disk and the Employee of the Month plaque. Still to come: the sound and the music. The blog has more on how it's built, and this page will say when it's ready and how to get it.
On the PC, too
Shack Attack is on the PC as well, in your web browser, and it's free: all ten days, with Christmas carols on the SID chip. See the PC version >
Keep it coming
If you like what we're doing and want to see more of it, your support helps us keep making new things for our Commodores: games like this one, Asteroid Base Defense and Hazelwood, demos, tunes and more.
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