A TRIBUTE TO

AFTER RELEASING BEDROOM CODERS’ GAMES AS THOR, A REBRAND SAW ODIN IMPRESSING WITH IN-HOUSE HITS LIKE NODES OF YESOD, ROBIN OF THE WOOD AND HEARTLAND. FORMER ODIN CREATIVES STUART FOTHERINGHAM AND KEITH TINMAN REVIEW THE CELEBRATED STUDIO

WORDS BY RORY MILNE

STUART FOTHERINGHAM

■ Former artist/designer Stuart Fotheringham worked for Software Projects, Odin and finally Denton Designs. He’s now CEO of a financial advisory firm he cofounded.

T h e company that became Odin was set up in 1984 as Thor Computer Software, with its remit being to publish games created by bedroom coders. Thor’s early successes included Chris Kerry’s platformer trilogy: Jack And The Beanstalk, Giant’s Revenge and The House Jack Built. Its final release was the equally impressive collect-’em-up Stairways, which was the work of developers who became founding members of Thor’s second incarnation.

Founded to tap into an industry shift from freelance developers to in-house studio teams, Odin immediately became a force to reckon with thanks to its 1985 debut, the sci-fi arcade adventure Nodes Of Yesod. Hot on its heels came Robin Of The Wood, a vast adventure with character interaction and a beat-’em-up element, and The Arc Of Yesod, a Nodes sequel released on a revived Thor label.

The following year saw Odin enter an ambitious deal with Telecomsoft, the fruits of which included the well-received shooter Mission AD and the epic romp Heartland.

The studio’s 1987 highlights were the run-and-gun On The Tiles and the sidescrolling blaster Sidewize, which was followed by Crosswize in 1988. Sadly, by the time this and Odin’s 1988 Guy Fawkes platformer The Plot came out, the pressure of its Telecomsoft contract had led to it losing its creatives and closing its doors.

Many years later, in 2010, a reincarnated Odin released enhanced iOS and Flash versions of Nodes Of Yesod. Now only time can tell if the respected firm will revisit more of its hits in the future.

GREMLINS

ZX SPECTRUM • 1984

■ An early effort by Thor stalwart Chris Kerry,Gremlinsis aGalaxianstribute with a novel twist. Every stage features a different type of alien to shoot down, and there are three phases to each stage. To begin with, your opponents attack your ship against a pitch-black night sky, which makes their brightly coloured forms easy to pick out. However the next phase introduces coloured bands across the sky that the cunning aliens use as cover for their assaults. Finally, there’s a third phase where the rainbow-like sky flashes different hues, leading to Jeff Minter levels of visual overload. If you manage to survive these three phases then it’s onto a fresh level of faster opponents.

JACK AND THE BEANSTALK

ZX SPECTRUM, VARIOUS • 1984

■ The huge colourful environmental features inJack And The Beanstalksit in sharp contrast to the meagre background visuals typically found in early Spectrum platformers. The Thor platformer also stands out for its demanding gameplay, which is defined by pixel-perfect navigation. Each level requires you to collect an item and then head to an exit while avoiding deadly creatures, which sounds straightforward. The catch is that any climbing you do has to follow a precise path. If you deviate from this by even a few pixels then you fall to your death and have to start the level from scratch. So it’s a strict memory test, but one that you get great satisfaction from mastering.

GIANT’S REVENGE

ZX SPECTRUM, C64 • 1984

■ Very much a continuation ofJack And The Beanstalk, althoughGiant’s Revengeboasts seven levels to its predecessor’s four. The brightly coloured sequel also manages to up the ante in terms of its difficulty. With some of its stages, dogged opponents are all that stand in the way of you progressing horizontally, whereas vertical movement requires you to follow a specific route perfectly. In other levels, however, moving left or right across the screen takes every bit as much care as ascending upwards, since this is only possible to do without dying if you stick to a pre-defined but unclear path. This certainly makes things challenging to begin with, but once you work out where you can and can’t go on each level then you can make short work of them.