


"The Killapede and a whole gang of creepy crawlies are out to get you. Dodge the fleas and the spiders from Mars to shoot at the multi-segmented beast. You must be quick though, as a fate of almost certain death awaits you."
Your objective is to clear the garden of pests which includes Ants, mushroom laying fleas, spiders, snails & the ever present Killapede. The player controls a small ship that can shoot knives, killing any pests in their path.
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.
