Chiller (Commodore 64)

Here's a game that I played before I even owned a Commodore 64, courtesy of one of my mates. It was one of Mastertronic's earlier C64 games, and it was programmed by the Darling Brothers, who went on to become Codemasters...


Coz this is Chiller... Chiller night... what?

Apparently they weren't code masters when they programmed this... the emulator version spends a lot of time slagging them off for releasing a broken game that was impossible to complete, and goes into detail about how the cracker had to rewrite the game to make it doable!

It's typical early-years Commodore 64 fare... a simple platformer split into a few screens, where you have to collect everything on one screen in order to progress to the next. You can actually tell it's pretty much a bridge from the Vic 20 or C-16 to the C64. And if you haven't guessed, it's loosely (cough!) based on Michael Jackson's Thriller video...


This film must be rubbish, there's nobody here!

Chiller a very colourful game... almost too colourful... but it's not exactly thrilling, being a fairly slow-moving effort where you just wait for things to pass before collecting the crosses you need. You do have an energy limit which forces some urgency, but completing the task at hand is not really much fun. Still, in those early days I'm sure it kept a fair few people happy for their £1.99.