New games for the Amstrad CPC?
Revenge of Trasmoz: a new game for the Amstrad CPC
One game for the machine I learned to program on as a kid, forty years ago. Two-player co-op, in 64K, with physical editions on cassette and disc.
Revenge of Trasmoz
[ Left: two-player co-op, in the secret catacombs. Right: single player, in the abandoned cemetery ]
A single-screen arcade platformer for one or two players. Kill enemies, chase the fire orbs they drop and use them to light the room's candles; all lit, room sanctified, next screen. Three zones: cemetery, catacombs and temple. And a time bar: when it hits zero, Mutamin, the skull monster, shows up and comes after you. With two players you work together to sanctify the room… but you can steal the other one's orbs.
🛒 Get it now
On itch.io you get the .dsk, .cdt and .wav files for an emulator or real hardware. On Steam it's a DLC for Trasmoz Legends, the saga's game for PC and consoles. The physical editions, on cassette and disc, are published by Polyplay.
🏆 Five awards at Amstrad Eterno 2023
What the press said
"This is great fun with excellent graphics and sound. The single-screen playfields wrap around at the edges, making for very tactical play. It is even better than its predecessor; a high-quality production for the Amstrad CPC."
"Revenge of Trasmoz stands out enormously thanks to its highly polished gameplay and the addiction it provokes, especially in two-player games. Graphically it is very beautiful, featuring a great selection of colors that allows Mode 0 to truly shine."
"A brilliant, fast-paced game with cute and colourful graphics, pleasant music and sound effects."
[ Retro Gamer UK: the issue's cover and the review, scored 86% ]
[ Retro Gamer Spain: the issue's cover and the review, scored 83% ]
You can hold it in your hand
The three physical editions are published by Polyplay, in Germany. Three formats, so it runs on a cassette-based 464, on a 6128, or on a modern 3.5 drive.
[ The Polyplay editions: cassette, 3'' disc and 3.5'' disc ]
Also available digitally
Revenge of Trasmoz is a standalone game: it launched on itch.io and it's still there, as .dsk, .cdt and .wav files, which work in an emulator, on a Gotek, or for transferring to tape or disc. Later it became part of Trasmoz Legends, on Steam, as DLC, thanks to Juan Carlos Amestoy and the RetroVirtualMachine team.
Under the hood
64K and not one byte more. No expanded memory: it runs on a plain CPC 464, the basic 1984 model. No big-machine tricks: compression, optimization and code that accounts for every byte.
A vertical screen, arcade style. The game fills the screen top to bottom, tate style, like a handful of CPC classics such as Arkanoid or Donkey Kong. That means touching the CRTC, splitting the raster and using vertical overscan, double-buffered so nothing flickers.
Two video modes at once. Mode 0 for the game, with its 16 colours and chunky pixels; Mode 1 for the scoreboard, with the resolution to keep the numbers crisp. Both living on the same screen.
Two players at once. Both on screen, each with a joystick or with keys comfortable enough that nobody loses because of the keyboard. You work together to light the room's candles… and you can steal each other's orbs. It is what changes the game.
Orbs that won't sit still. Every enemy drops a fire orb that jumps and bounces around the screen, and you have to chase it before it gets away. And time isn't a number: it's a bar, and when it runs out, Mutamin comes looking for you.
Where it all began
THE MACHINE I GREW UP WITH
My first dark object of desire, in my earliest childhood, was a Game & Watch. But the real crush came at my neighbour Rubén's house: he had a ZX Spectrum in his room, with its own TV. That's where I first played Skool Daze, Manic Miner, Knight Lore and Gunfright, and that was the spark. Games made by Europeans barely older than kids, true geniuses, building worlds from their bedroom. That's pure underground to me.
The Amstrad CPC was mine. It arrived as a gift when I'd already given up on ever having one, green phosphor monitor and all. I learned BASIC on it, fed it cassettes, swapped games in the schoolyard. If I have to point at where this starts, it starts there.
THE SCENE THAT BROUGHT ME BACK
Years later, around 2005, with the thread lost and the Amstrad shelved, I dusted it off again, properly this time. I was lucky enough to get my childhood machine back, tapes and all, because my uncle Alberto had kept the whole box all along. I loaded up the games I remembered from being a kid: some had aged beautifully, others were a disaster.
At first it was just nostalgia: collecting cassettes, loading the old favourites, getting in touch with people still active in the scene. It took me a while to find out there were people still making new games, and that's when the real shock hit: gems like El Tesoro Perdido de Cuauhtémoc, by 4MHz, or the demo Batman Forever, by Batman Group. They blew my mind. I couldn't believe you could do that on a machine pushing 40 years old. Years later, the same Batman Group left me speechless again: Pinball Dreams, a near-impossible pixel-for-pixel port of the Amiga classic, on a machine with a fraction of the muscle, and almost thirty years after the original.
[ Operation Alexandra, by 4MHz, and Batman Forever, the demo by Batman Group ]
I'm lucky enough to still have a physical copy of that Pinball Dreams, signed and dedicated by the Batman Group crew themselves: I won it at a championship of the game organised by the AUA, the Amstrad Users' Association. They never had permission to sell those copies, so they gave them away as prizes instead, and it's still one of the most treasured pieces in my collection. The AUA is another of the great pillars of this scene: at every fair they go to, they repair anyone's machine for free, show off the latest CPC releases, and organise or take part in meetups like Retro Parla or Amstrad Eterno. Not long ago they shared a stand at Retro Alacant with none other than Roland Perry, the father of the Amstrad CPC, alongside other familiar faces from this small universe. Because that's what it is: the Amstrad only really caught on in Spain, France, Germany and the UK, and yet, all these years later, it still has a small but incredibly alive community behind it.
That was my introduction to the homebrew scene, which I now have the honor of being part of. And as I pulled the thread I found out it had been going for years, long before I noticed: I owe a lot to those pioneers. To ESP Soft, fully committed to the CPC since the early 2000s, with games like Galactic Tomb or Cero Absoluto. To RetroWorks, who make games for several systems but have CPC gems like Teodoro Can't Fly or The Sword of Ianna. To CNGSoft, César Nicolás González, a solo legend who codes machine-code ports that shouldn't be possible, like my beloved Bubble Bobble for the CPC. And to The Mojon Twins, born on the Spectrum with their La Churrera engine, but who also filled the CPC with games for years. Above all, to my dear 4MHz, who I'm lucky enough to call friends, and who are, for me, the absolute reference for how to make new games, good ones above all, for old machines.
[ Galactic Tomb, by ESP Soft, and Bubble Bobble for the CPC, by CNGSoft ]
And some people just go straight for the impossible. Jon Cortázar and his studio Relevo Videogames brought another gem to the CPC, Invasion of the Zombie Monsters, a smooth-scrolling platformer with incredible graphics that have nothing to envy from 16-bit machines. Syx and TotO went as far as emulating, building on Simon Owen's work, the original Pac-Man arcade ROM inside a CPC, running exactly as it did in the cabinet. The group Easter Egg made a 128K remake of R-Type that's a genuinely mad achievement: watching that shooter run like that on this machine makes no sense at all. And the most recent of all, Renegade Reloaded, by Geco (with new graphics from TotO), takes the classic Ocean beat ‘em up and gives it real scrolling; for me, without exaggerating, it's the best 8-bit version of that game that exists, and my favourite way to play it today, even ahead of the original arcade. Over in France, the studio GGP does much the same with remakes as flashy as their CPC take on Toki.
[ Easter Egg's 128K remake of R-Type, facing off against the Dobkeratops boss, and real gameplay from Geco's Renegade Reloaded, with graphics by TotO ]
CPCtelera itself, the tool Carlos Perezgrin used to code Revenge of Trasmoz, is the work of Fran Gallego, a professor at the University of Alicante who still brings real Amstrad CPCs into his classes and ran CPCRetroDev for years, the international coding competition that has launched a good chunk of the machine's new games.
And the scene doesn't keep itself alive on its own. There's essential archive work: amstrad.es catalogues manuals, magazines and over two thousand games in Spanish; CPCWiki is the reference encyclopedia and forum in English; and CPCRulez does the same for the French scene, one of the most active in Europe. And there are people telling the story every week: Cepeceros (“a Mode 0 podcast for lovers of the brick-shaped pixel,” as they put it, which fits this game rather well), Vida Extra Retro, Juanje Juega and Javi Ortiz, El Espectrumero, who bring every new release and its authors onto their streams; in print, the revived MicroHobby, now covering CPC, C64 and MSX too; and outside Spain, Xyphoe, with years of English-language CPC longplays and streams. Between all of them, this stays a living conversation, not a graveyard of machines.
[ Shovel Adventure, by Pat Morita Team, and Baba's Palace, by Azicuetano ]
With The Curse of Trasmoz I had already scratched an itch: the ZX Spectrum, the rubber-keyed one I never had as a kid. Now it was the Amstrad's turn. By then, with VolcanoBytes I'd already shipped complete games for other platforms, and had even ported my beloved Galactic Wars EX with JanduSoft; I felt I finally had the bare minimum experience to attempt a good retro game, something simple but genuinely beautiful and fun. And I had none other than Carlos Perezgrin at my side, ready to roll up his sleeves and dive with me into the guts of this particular machine, to build something completely new that would do justice to this world of ours. Any old game would not do: it had to be one worthy of it.
Where Trasmoz comes from
Trasmoz is a real village of fewer than a hundred people in Zaragoza, with a medieval castle above it. It is, officially, the only excommunicated village in Spain: a curse dating back to 1255, when the Bishop of Tarazona excommunicated it over a land dispute with the nearby Veruela monastery. Legend says a sorcerer built it in one night; history points to counterfeiters and witches. Today the castle houses the Museum of Witchcraft.
[ The full Curse of Trasmoz cover art, and Dani Díez's sketch map ]
Because almost everything told about Trasmoz is about witches. There's talk of covens in the woods by the ruined castle. There's talk of Dorotea, the first one, a local priest's niece who, legend says, swapped the holy water for something else. And above all there's talk of Tía Casca, the most feared of them all: said to have pulled children from their cradles to whip them, cast the evil eye on them, and poison the pastures. In the 19th century the villagers threw her from a cliff, and they say her spirit still wanders near the cemetery.
All of this made it into print thanks to Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, who spent a season at Veruela monastery in 1863 and took those stories into his Cartas desde mi celda. Today Trasmoz has made peace with its reputation: every year it names its own Witch of the Year, a resident the village honours with a plaque on their front door.
All of that legend ended up becoming the first game in the saga: The Curse of Trasmoz, for the ZX Spectrum. It was a dream come true: the machine I'd envied at Rubén's house long before I had my first Amstrad. I didn't want to make just any game, I wanted a story with real Spanish roots, and the legends of Trasmoz were the spark I needed. I owe a lot of it to Dani Díez, who wrapped the pixels in a cloak of fantasy with his cover art, and to Beyker, who pushed the AY chip to its limits with an unsettling soundtrack.
It's a single-screen arcade platformer with 23 levels: you steal fire from skeletons and zombies with your sword to light each level's candles, mastering the trick of the infinite screen wrap to work your way around the edges. It was coded by Javy Fernández, of Defecto Digital, and Sergio ThePope, using AGD. Ready and Play, Indie Retro News and Planeta Sinclair all reviewed it, agreeing on how it pulls you back for another go once you've finished it.
[ Two real scenes from The Curse of Trasmoz: dodging skeletons and jumping between platforms ]
Just like Revenge of Trasmoz would later, it also got a deluxe physical edition, this time through Polyplay: a big box with Dani Díez's cover art, cassette or 3-inch disc, an illustrated 12-page manual, an A3 poster, stickers and postcards, and an SD card packed with extras.
That's where Mutamin comes from: the skull-monster in the game, born of that same darkness.
A sequel, not a port
When The Curse of Trasmoz was done, Carlos Perezgrin dove headfirst into porting it straight to the Amstrad. We got as far as some real tests, with the game running on the CPC.
[ On the left, The Curse of Trasmoz for the ZX Spectrum; on the right, Carlos Perezgrin's first tests porting it to the Amstrad ]
But the project stalled: we lost the motivation to push it through as a straight port. Until a better idea came along: instead of porting the first game, make the second one.
Everything left out of the Spectrum game went in here. None of it came free, and all of it was solved by Carlos Perezgrin's code on CPCtelera, Fran Gallego's tool.
Carlos doesn't only code Trasmoz. His team, Sugar Free, took third place at CPCRetroDev 2020 with Anima, and the music and sound effects of Revenge of Trasmoz are the work of Antonio GreenWeb, of the Pat Morita Team, whose Shovel Adventure swept five categories at CPCRetroDev 2021. Working with both of them is one of the things I'm proudest of in this whole project: they are two of the best in the scene, and it shows in every note and every routine of this game.
[ The early Mode 1 tests: 4-colour mockups, mixing and dithering to fake extra palette ]
The first mockups for this new Trasmoz on Amstrad were done in Mode 1, trying to squeeze out of the machine the feel of more than four colours through mixing and dithering. We showed them to the scene to see how they landed, and the result went down really well: there's a very particular look in there that I'd love to explore properly for CPC one day. But for this Trasmoz we decided to be more classic, and lean into what truly makes this machine unique: its Mode 0, with its 16 colours and its tricky, brick-shaped pixel, so much its own and so hard to tame. So the game stayed in Mode 0 for the gameplay, with the HUD in Mode 1 (see “Under the hood” above). The result is a much more arcade retro look and feel.
[ The title screen, with Mutamin front and center, and real gameplay across three of the game's settings ]
Revenge of Trasmoz started as a port that never went anywhere and ended up being the love letter we made to the Amstrad and to our childhood.