Space Taxi
Developer/Distributor: Muse Software
Year: 1984
Genre: Arcade - Platformer (single screen)
Coder(s): John F. Kutcher
Music/FX: Silas S. Warner
You are a 23rd-century driver of a jet cab and fly your passengers through the various crazy districts of the city. Each screen is comprised of numbered platforms where passengers appear who you have to carefully pick up by landing next to them and bring to their desired destination which can be either another pad or the next level/district. The quicker you are, the more money you make that you need for buying gas, paying fines for accidentally landing on a passenger (shit happens, eh) or failing to reach a destination in time.
Your cab is equipped with jet engines on the front, bottom and rear which can be controlled with the stick. To go downwards you just let go of the stick and let gravitation do the rest. To land on a platform, you have to carefully hover over it, press the button to extend the landing gear and slowly descent until your cab touches down. When the landing gear is extended, you can only use the bottom engine to go up and down while the front and rear ones are locked. A green, yellow or red light display in the lower part of the screen will give you visual feedback of your efforts, green means a flawless landing, yellow or flashing yellow points to a slightly rough to you-barely-made-it one and red means unsuccessful landing.
There are three levels of difficulty to select, Morning Shift - Beginner (levels 1 - 8), Day Shift - Intermediate (levels 9 - 16) and Night Shift - Expert (level 17 - 24). A level or screen represents the corresponding hour of the day (1-24) and things get increasingly difficult as the day goes on and slowly turns into night.
Passengers calls come in via cb radio and also get displayed in a message box in the middle of the lower screen area. The familiar call "Hey, Taxi!" will soon get ingrained into your mind as you struggle to despatch your passengers as fast as humanly possible to pay for those silly gas bills... that stuff gets more expensive every damn day, eh.
There are additional hazards in many levels like asteroids, table tennis balls (they're after you! It happens!!), black holes that try to pull you in, platforms separated by automatic doors, cannons shooting fireballs (must be a particularly nasty district), caves with very hard to reach pads, deadly snowflakes (no special ones, just deadly), fuel-robbing baseballs (a special nastiness of the 23rd century, just you wait!) and much, much more that stands in your way of making a decent dough. Saving fuel is essential so you have to master the controls of your flying cab to make the most of your supply. Needless to say that contact with any of the level installations or edges of platforms will result in your certain death, as will running out of fuel.
What can I say, Space Taxi is one of the best, most famous and successful early C64 games. Graphics look a bit blocky but ooze creativity and a good sense of humour. The cab is a small but nicely drawn sprite with convincing exhaust fumes and precise movement. Controls are self-explanatory and allow pixel-perfect manoeuvering. Swiftly flying from pad to pad and performing a smooth landing feels rewarding and will make you come back to the game time and time again, at least it does in my case, the fun is only limited by your skills and no jerky scrolling or other technicalities stand between you and your success or failure in the game. However, some of the obstacles scattered across the screens can be very tricky to circumvent, specially in tight situations when fuel is low and time is running out.
A major attraction of the game is the digitized speech. Passengers call you to a pad with a snappy "Hey, Taxi!", then request getting flown to a certain destination with "Pad 9, please!" or "Pad 3, please!", etc., or "Up, please!" to go to the next level. If you fly them to a wrong pad, they'll repeat the original request (just without the "please"), hitting them with the landing gear or squashing them on landing makes them yell "Hey!!" and they also are polite enough to throw a "Thanks!" your way after you've successfully transported them to the right pad. Even though the samples are very lo-fi and scratchy, they were a big thing back in the day when digitzed sounds weren't as common as they are today, certainly not in an 8bit home computer game from 1984.
Space Taxi was one of the earliest games that I've played when I got my C64 in 1984 and I loved it from day one. It's easy to get into, big fun to play and the difficulty level rises quite slowly, even though some of the Night Shift levels will make you tear your hair out. As it is essential to go from pad to pad as quickly as possible, getting the inertia and gravity controls down is important if you want to see the later levels. Fuel management brings in a slight strategic element as not every level contains a gas station. If you want to go for a high score, determining the right time to refuel can make or break it. One of my friends was an expert at the game and we always tried hard to beat his scores but weren't successful at first, then he let us in to the secret of fuel management which helped to improve our scores a lot.
The game has a cult following and it's easy to see why, an almost Matthew-Smith-esque (of Jet Set Willy fame) humorous approach, great gameplay, jolly tunes, digitized speech and nice little visual tidbits here and there made it an instant success and it has retained its playability to this day. Highly recommended.
Incidentally, developer Muse Software (Muse is an acronym for Micro Users Software Exchange) founded by Silas S. Warner in 1978 was behind the game Castle Wolfenstein that came out in 1981 for the Apple II computer, one of the earliest stealth games that also got ported to C64, MS-DOS and various Atari 8bit computers. When Muse Software went bust in 1987, id Software obtained the rights to the Castle Wolfenstein name and game style and finally released the well-known Wolfenstein 3D in 1992.