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Lightfarce / Zarjas

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A game written in an afternoon at Binary Design while we were supposed to be finishing off Zub. The title and big clunky graphics were a piss take of Lightforce, a Spectrum shoot-em-up recently released.

The game originally went out hidden as an 'easter egg' in the 128k version of Zub on the Spectrum, but was later retitled Zarjas, given a loading screen and scrolling message and given away on a cover mount tape with Sinclair User magazine.

The title Lightfarce was meant as a mickey-take of the Spectrum shoot-em-up getting all the hype at the time called Lightforce.

The second title, Zarjas, is a misspelling of the word 'zarjaz', spoken by The Mighty Tharg, Betelgeusian editor of 2000ad magazine and used in his native language to denote something fantastic.

I love the way I was trying to make one of the baddie graphics look like it was made from polygons, years before I'd ever seen a 3D modelling package.

 

† Sales Estimates
Almost all sales estimates given are educated guesses. Being lowly developers we rarely had access to the publisher's sales infomation, and in many cases hadno contact with the publisher whatsoever after each game was completed. Even in cases where we were the owners of the development studio and on royalty deals, for various reasonsit was very rare that we received accurate sales figures from the publishers involved. We'd be delighted to correct any errors, or hear more accurate sales figures for any of the titles here.Please email the webmaster if you know something we don't!

‡ Downloads
We don't condone video game piracy. We would prefer that all our games were still available for purchase by those who wanted them,but unfortunately most of our games are not commercially available in any form, with the IP or code in the hands of defunct commercialentities with neither the will nor the ability to commercially exploit these products, if not forgotten about completely. In such cases we're happy for the game to be madeavailable free for enthusiasts to download, rather than being consigned to the dustbin of history. If you would like us to remove a link,please email the webmaster to explain why.

Credits
The credits listed are accurate to the best of our recollection, but if we've made any errors or ommissions (quite likely!) please email the webmaster to let us know and we'll try to make a correction as soon as possible.

We are The Pickford Bros, veteran independent video game designers based in the UK.

Episode #137 Interrupt Request

Thu, 01 Sep 2022

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