A travelogue of remaking the 1983 ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64 classic as a living
browser world. This is the voyage of recreating the game in a modern browser.
It began when I was reminded of the old game when I saw the re-issue of the C64.
Like many others - I had always wanted to finish the game, but due to long and unreliable loading times, plus the game being quite challenging and slow, I simply moved on to other things.
I recall spending half an hour waiting for the game to load looking at the character art.
So, I downloaded the old game, found a map and attempted to write a script to convert the map into a JSON text, to create a walk through.
Pretty soon I had the idea to re-create the game to run in a browser, as a labour of love.
Prologue
From a PNG of a world map to a PWA game on the home screen. About five weeks in real time, split between many short sessions.
There were many false paths and dead ends, ideas which seemed great at the time but turned out to be abysmal!
It began with an old picture of the world map and a question: can this become structured geography in a JSON? Named rooms, eight-way exits, gated routes — then the real ambition landed: not a map viewer, a remake.
React, Vite, a simulation worker, procedural halls — and stick figures that looked suspiciously like Terrance and Phillip until the Spectrum crops arrived.
Hand-drawn approximations weren’t enough. The sprites lived as Movisoft bitmaps inside a .z80 snapshot — time to do some archaeology.
The Legend team made some good choices to speed up development of the game. While the game was written in Basic; Movisoft itself was 4Kb of machine code which explains why the animations ran in realtime whereas the scenery took notorioulsy long to render each time you changed location.
Movisoft was a system designed by Legend to handle the graphics and animations for the game:
Combat, hunger, Wagnerian ponderings, the Ring soundtrack, speech bubbles — and a victory horn when all six quest items finally reach Valhalla.
Automate portrait extraction from the PDF, then carve faces for what would become the bait of the trollsticks era. Eyebrows were collateral damage once.
Intermediate era
Before AI scenery, every room was drawn live in Pixi — castles, caves,
yellow beams, black arches. Those plates were never saved as files;
they only existed at runtime. For this documentary we re-baked them
from the original drawScenery code so you can see the
middle step between Spectrum cells and the refined paintings.
Glorious disaster
The plan: CC0 stick walk cycles plus oval “trollfaces” glued on like refrigerator magnets. On paper: elegant reuse. On screen: a cursed puppet show moonwalking through Asgard.
A homemade Hel.mp4 on white changed everything. Extract frames, keep the boots black, wage war on white puddles, and chase equitemporal sampling until the gait matched the film.
Hel was rendered frame by frame from a video created by FLUX from the portrait and a character bio I made up - based on a similar character from a different mythology from Neil Gaiman's Dreaming.
From here, it was clear that rendering all the characters would be a huge task which I didn't have the time or expertise to do.
So - I created a "rendering pipeline" in Python which took each character portrait, searched the web for that character's mythology, created a character bio then render walking videos using FLUX Kontext, and finally extract walk frames from those videos.
The pipeline worked but did require a lot of manual tweaking to get the videos into a format that could be used.
The main issue was cleaning up the videos to remove the background and any other noise.
I took a leaf out of the old book of movie making and rendered each video with a precise industry 'green screen' background of
#00B140
which can then be easily procedurally converted into transparent in a Python script.
Next was to set up the combat animation pipeline. This required changing aspect ratio of the generated videos and a few goes round to ensure they fit on the screen.
Novita, Seedream, FLUX Kontext — and a firm stop when the first batch looked like a three-year-old’s people. Dragons must not be cute. Cloaks must not become green-screen holes.
At this stage the game was almost ready, but the player's character was still a stick figure. To render the player, I used the same pipeline as the players, and picked an appearance for the male/female player which were inspired by ... well you work it out!
Diet the install: drop videos, keep half-size WebP. Caddy, quiet music, mobile chrome that doesn’t open the keyboard in landscape, and a PWA portal to the live site.
Re-creating and finally finishing the game was a real joy. I'm quite pleased with the final result - it's not perfect but it's a fun game.
It's my ultimate wish that the original authors, John Peel, Mike Dailly and team will see the game and enjoy a play through.
Please drop me a line below if you have any comments, suggestions or improvements you'd like to see.
The Making Of ends where the game begins. The horn is optional. The wine is not.
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