The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - TRAZ: Transformable Arcade Zone
Don't miss this one - it's as good a successor to Breakout that you’ll find outside the Arkanoid series, complete with a constructor set.
RELEASE DATE: 1988
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Cascade Games
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Commodore 64
Breakout was first released by Atari in 1976 and represented a major evolution in the Pong-style gameplay of hitting a bouncing ball with a paddle by translating the core mechanics into a single-player game about breaking a wall of bricks to clear a board. Within its first few years, it inspired dozens of clones, knockoffs and variants, and by the late 1980s, Breakout was still going surprisingly strong at inspiring more. The popularity of Taito’s brilliant 1986 hit Arkanoid kept the genre alive, and it was only natural that sooner or later, a developer would create an offshoot with the visual flair of Arkanoid and the capabilities of a construction set. Cascade Games provided that with TRAZ, and while it is anything but original, it’s a nicely-made and well-rounded brick breaker with 64 levels and plenty of intriguing possibilities for user-generated content.
TRAZ differs a bit from other brick-breaking games in the sheer variety it’s able to offer. Whereas Breakout and its successors tend to assign the wall beneath the paddle as being the drain for the ball, TRAZ instead makes all of the walls bounceable and utilizes an electronic beam that can be placed anywhere on the level as the screen’s main hazard. TRAZ also allows the player to utilize multiple paddles at once. This allows for some inventive level design where the drain can have some bouncy areas at strategic intervals or where the hazard beam can be set up in the middle of the level with paddles on either side. There are also levels where you may have both horizontal and vertical paddles to manage. Levels can even be set up Pong-style where the player controls paddles on both sides and has to bounce the balls across the level to break bricks.
But not every brick needs to be broken – there are unbreakable bricks that can be used for reflection and there are also windows that can obscure the playfield but be passed through. TRAZ also allows players to install monster generators which cause floating creatures to pop out and infest the playfield until they’re hit by the ball and destroyed. There are also options to release power-ups that can have effects on the ball such as splitting it into pieces or making it loop around, and my personal favorite is one lifted from Arkanoid that powers up your paddle to start shooting bricks down until you run out of shots or lose your ball.
The game’s editor has a little bit of a learning curve, but after about five minutes of fiddling, I was testing out my own level and having a blast. The game’s pre-programmed levels are quite creative and can provide some awesome inspiration. One of my favorites involved destroying a giant toadstool in the middle of the field while controlling two vertical paddles and a horizontal one; the hazard zones were limited, and with those paddles, I was able to line up combo shots to hit some of the harder-to-reach bricks. At the end of each level, you get to advance in a direction of your choice to another level, and it took me a bit of time to realize the editor allows you to set where these levels are like rooms in a flick-screen platform game, allowing for some interesting opportunities for storytelling or theming.
Perhaps the neatest option beyond building your own courses is the ability to play cooperatively and simultaneously as two players, and it works really well in TRAZ because the game can get so frantic. Considering that many games of this era utilized hotseat competitive play, it’s a nice way to share the game with a friend.
Though I’d never heard of TRAZ before conducting my research for this series, it became a fast favorite once I got into it. The Commodore 64 version was by far the best in terms of graphics, sound and control, and I’d recommend it over the ugly CGA MS-DOS version or the garish ZX Spectrum port. I will also note that the version I played (an obviously pirated copy I accessed from an online archive) included a trainer mode with unlimited lives, and I’d recommend finding that one or inputting a cheat code to anyone playing today, as TRAZ is otherwise exceedingly difficult on some stages and is much more fun when you don’t have a limited number of lives to manage.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about gameroom games, puzzle games, unusual games and begin delving into the arcade and console games you missed from the 1980s.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
If you’ve missed the earlier entries in the series, which cover ASCII games, adventure games, wargames, strategy games and role-playing games, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!