Killapede
An Amstrad CPC arcade shooter from the Twins' early Players catalogue, developed before their partnership with Codemasters.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Players — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1986
- Platforms
- Amstrad CPC
- Genres
- Shoot 'em up
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins (original development)
- Publisher
- Players
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins (original development). Publication: Players.
The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.
Making the game
Having produced 2 games to prove simple games could be written in BASIC using Panda Sprites it was time to now write an arcade action game using it. We picked on one of our favourite arcade games Centipede and thought we’d attempt to produce a version of this for the Amstrad CPC.
We developed it first in BASIC and then converted the code section by section into Z80 assembler until the whole game was ‘machine code’. It took about 8 weeks to write at a time we were supposed to be doing revision for our A’level mocks and they really suffered, thankfully the game didn’t and we were very pleased with it.
We took this to Richard Paul Jones at Interceptor and sadly he would only offer us £250 and we thought it deserved more than this. We reluctantly accepted, but decided to look for other publishers for our next games.
Not only did they not pay much for it, they then had the cheek to produce Killapede for the C16, BBC Micro and Electron – obviously not talking to us or paying us anything, which we weren’t very happy about.
Bizarrely a year later Players and Interceptor went out of business. We figured we could sell the game again to another publisher since it was no longer available from Players. We succeeded in getting it published again through budget publisher Powerhouse.