Spindizzy

Spindizzy is an action and puzzle game played from an isometric perspective. The player can view the playing field from four angles and rotate between them. The screen displays a compass arrow to aid orientation. The game takes place in a fictional landscape of interconnected stages suspended in a dimensional space.

The player controls a probe called a Gyroscopic Environmental Reconnaissance And Land-Mapping Device (GERALD) via keyboard commands or a joystick. The craft is able to transform between three configurations—a ball, an inverted square pyramid, and a gyroscope—that manoeuvre and respond to the terrain with subtle differences. In addition to moving in eight directions, the player can give the probe a burst of speed.

Spindizzy was developed by Paul Shirley for Electric Dreams Software, which Rod Cousens founded in 1985 as a British affiliate publisher of American video game company Activision. Shirley was primarily inspired by Ultimate Play the Game games that feature an isometric projection. While he has noted the similarities to the 1984 arcade game Marble Madness from Atari, Shirley has stated that he had Spindizzy's isometric engine operational before he had ever seen Atari's game; although he acknowledges others' scepticism. He derived the title from the Cities in Flight series of science fiction stories, which include antigravity devices called "spindizzies".

Development lasted around eight months. Shirley programmed the game on an Amstrad CPC 6128 microcomputer. Rather than create an action game where the player rolls around a ball, Shirley approached the design as an "adventure/puzzle" game because he felt the "rollaround concept" affords a great deal of freedom when creating puzzles for the player. He developed an interpreted script to generate the game's levels. The script allowed him to design more than 380 stages using 11KB of storage, a feat he considered personally satisfying.

Shirley described the game's marketing life as short and attributed that to Activision's business practices. James Hague of Dadgum Games commented that Spindizzy could have been an "all-time classic" had it received a proper marketing campaign. Despite this, the game sold well in the United Kingdom, reaching the number one position in the Amstrad charts in March 1986. The Commodore and Spectrum versions also appeared on their respective platforms' Top 10 charts on their release several weeks later, taking the game to the number 2 position in the all formats chart.

The game was well received by video game journalists upon its release. 64, and Crash magazines awarded Spindizzy their respective top recommended distinctions: "Master Game, "Gold Medal", and "Crash Smash". Tony Hetherington of Computer Gamer listed it as one of the essential Spectrum titles of 1986. Reviewers drew comparisons to Marble Madness, which was ported to home platforms the same year.

Other developers have referenced Spindizzy's isometric design when creating their games. Before developing Bactron, a 1986 isometric adventure game, Vincent Baillet researched popular isometric games at the time, including Spindizzy. Similarly, Spindizzy partially inspired Glenn Corpes during the development of the 1989 Amiga game Populous. Fascinated by the isometric graphics popular on 8-bit machines in the mid-1980s, Corpes considered Spindizzy his favorite game with this visual style. Drawing inspiration from the game's ramps and sloping hills that connected remote plains, he created an isometric level builder that he could manipulate.

Activision released a sequel titled Spindizzy Worlds for Amiga and Atari ST computers in 1990. The game features similar gameplay with improved graphics and larger playing fields. It was later ported to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by ASCII, which Shirley disapproved of and considered a "disaster". He took legal action over the span of several years to obtain royalty information and payments.