New games for the ZX Spectrum?

The Curse of Trasmoz

What the press said

You can hold it in your hand

Both physical editions are published by Polyplay, in Germany: cassette for the classic 48/128K, and a 3-inch disc for anyone who prefers a faster load.

Also available digitally

The Curse of Trasmoz is a standalone game: it launched on itch.io and it's still there. Later it also became part of Trasmoz Legends, on Steam.

The Spectrum I never had

MY NEIGHBOUR'S SPECTRUM

For me, all of this (making new games for old machines) starts on the Spectrum too, even though my own would take much longer to arrive than I would have liked. I already told this part on the Amstrad CPC page: my neighbour Rubén had a brand-new ZX Spectrum in his room, the rubber-keyed one, with its own TV. We'd go down to his place after school to play Skool Daze and Manic Miner, and to me that was pure magic. You didn't need to know anything about programming to feel there was something special going on in there.

I have one story from that time that sums up what the Spectrum meant to a Spanish kid back then. I won a school drawing contest, and word got around that the prize was a Spectrum, the real rubber-keyed thing. I remember being over the moon for days. When they finally took me to collect it, it turned out you only got the computer if you also bought a whole encyclopedia set. My mother said no, quite rightly, and I went home without my Spectrum. It's still, to this day, one of those small childhood disappointments you never quite get over.

BACK, MUCH LATER

The Spectrum came back into my life much later, as an adult, thanks to my friend Mollitronix, who restored one of these machines for me, literally rescued from the trash. That Spectrum works today and sits in my collection, and it's one of the things I'm proudest to own.

So when the time came to make my own first game, there was no doubt in my mind: it had to be for the Spectrum. With The Curse of Trasmoz I gave back, in my own way, the magic I felt at Rubén's place as a kid. The Amstrad, and its own game, would come later; I tell that story, with the origin of the Trasmoz legend, at a slower pace on the Amstrad CPC page.

How the game came to be

The legend of Trasmoz, the only excommunicated village in Spain, is what gives all of this its shape: I tell it in full on the Amstrad CPC page. Here it's enough to say it was the spark I needed to make a game with real Spanish roots, instead of just another game.

[ Dani Díez's cover art and his sketch map of Trasmoz ]

The Curse of Trasmoz is 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 without ever leaving the screen.

[ Four real scenes from The Curse of Trasmoz, stealing fire and working the infinite screen wrap ]

It was coded by Javy Fernández, of Defecto Digital, and Sergio ThePope, using AGD. I owe Sergio a special mention too: he helped us with dedicated tools, like his own tool, "la perilla" ("the knob"), for importing Tiled maps into AGD, and with a few small assembly routines that AGD alone couldn't handle.

The rest of the team: soundtrack by Beyker (Sergio Vaquer Montes), who pushed the AY chip to its limits with an unsettling score made in Musicizer II; cover art by Dani Díez, who wrapped the pixels in a cloak of fantasy; and game design and pixel art by me.

Just like Revenge of Trasmoz would later, it also got a deluxe physical edition, through Polyplay: cassette or 3-inch disc, in a big box, with Dani Díez's cover art and all the care of a proper collector's edition.

Ready and Play, Indie Retro News and Planeta Sinclair all reviewed it, agreeing on one thing: it hooks you, and once you're done, you want to go back for another go.

Beyond the Spectrum

The Spectrum scene today is still very much alive, and to me bigger and more active than the Amstrad one. The Mojon Twins are still there, born on the Spectrum with their La Churrera engine before they went on to fill the CPC with games too; RetroSouls, with games of their own like Ringo, Plyuk or Zak McDrucken Saves the Chickens; and Pat Morita Team, led by Antonio GreenWeb, who besides the Amstrad has a whole Spectrum catalogue: Shovel Adventure, Penguin Attack, Vampire Slayer, Bat Boy, even exclusive games for the ZX Spectrum Next.

And then there's El Mundo del Spectrum, documenting all of this since 1996: it started as a tribute to the MicroHobby magazine, has run its own podcast since 2012 with hundreds of episodes, and even published two books that reached the top 10 bestsellers on Amazon. If anyone doubts the Spectrum is still alive, that's the proof.

The Curse of Trasmoz also had a life I didn't see coming: in 2022, Pere Serrat converted it, on his own, for the Dragon 32 and Dragon 64, the Spectrum's British cousins built around the Motorola 6809. The port is available as an optional download on the game's own itch.io page, with its own devlog telling the story.

The Curse of Trasmoz is, for me, where it all really began: my first own game, made for the machine I could only admire at someone else's house as a kid. If you've got a Spectrum nearby, or just an emulator handy, you know what to do.

🎮 Play The Curse of Trasmoz

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