Repton (1983 computer game)

:"For the Superior Software computer game, see Repton."

"Repton" is a "Defender"-inspired game written by Dan Thomson and and published by Sirius Software in 1983. Repton was written for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore 64 computers.

The game involved many on-screen enemies and complex terrain. Gameplay could last for hours. The main objective was to prevent the enemy from building a base. In order to build a base, the enemy would steal the player's city, piece by piece. For every piece that was formed into the base, a missile would shoot from the base as the player flew overhead. The player's craft looked like an up-side-down key for a lock. The player's power grid could be tapped into by the enemy. The player had to pass their ship through an energy beam and drop off the collected energy at the energy-reserve tube.

Commodore 64 Programming Trivia

This game was made possible by fully utilizing raw machine code instead of BASIC (which was what the Commodore 64 used as a programing language). This allowed for faster running software. The way that Repton was able to accomplish such a feat was that it utilized the bitmap mode that could paint the entire screen at once. The Commodore 64 had 2 spots in memory to store bitmaps. Its mode was in 2 bit color which meant it could display four different colors at once (one being the background color). The entire game only had black, purple, green, and yellow as the colors.

External links

* [http://www.jeffbots.com/c64/repton.html Repton tribute site]