After Three Weeks in Paradise yesterday which came from a software house that had programmers at desks creating games, music composers for title music and art departments for posters and cassette inlays ,we turn to Number #75 in this Your Sinclair Top 100 which is called Wriggler – a game completely designed by a schoolboy.
It wasn’t just the game being designed by Allin Kempthorne – in 1985 – whilst he was at school, he decided he’d also generate the cassette inlay too. The game then went on to be released by Romantic Robot who were more known for releasing hardware like the Multiface 1 etc. which was excellent device for cracking into software and saving you place or inserting a POKE to cheat. Wriggler won both “Star Game” in Personal Computer News and “Game of the Month” in Crash Magazine
The story behind Wriggler is that you’re a maggot and your goal is to race through a vast maze which includes numerous perils like spiders and ants, within the maze you also come across different locations that include a Garden, Hell and also a Dungeon.
Though brownie points are given to Wriggler being created in a basic bedroom programmer setting, in truth I cannot grasp why it is sat within the Top 100, let alone higher than RoboCop or Green Beret! Yet here it sits and people still seem to love it, and here I stand wondering what I’m missing. In my non-rose tinted view Wriggler shouldn’t be within this chart at all – perhaps people are still thinking of this game when they were high on cans of Tizer and Wham bars.
Originally published June 14, 2016. Updated October 26, 2022.
