THE EVOLUTION OF URIDIUM

“Uridium’s walls were definitely Zaxxon-influenced. I wanted them to teach people not to go zooming all over the place at top speed all the time”
Andrew Braybrook

Although Paradroid wasn’t the first game Andrew Braybrook developed for the C64, it was his first big hit for the system, but since much of the strategic shooter’s appeal lay in its original gameplay, the option of producing a similar but improved sequel wasn’t one that its author was keen to pursue. Instead, he connected his follow-up – Uridium – to its predecessor by basing its design around the destruction of Paradroid freighters, although as he explains, he ultimately changed this narrative. “The two games were quite different genres, but they had similar DNA, and making a connection wouldn’t have done any harm,” Andrew reflects. “But I noted that the scale was different; we wanted the Uridium enemy to be giant-sized ships, where as the Paradroid freighters were not that big – you could walk from one end to the other in a few seconds, and the Uridium Dreadnoughts took longer than that to fly across.”

Much of Uridium’s look and basic gameplay had come about thanks to Andrew visiting the arcades, where the visual style of Tehkan’s vertical shoot-‘em-up Star Force caught his eye, along with some of the core mechanics in Defender and Zaxxon. “I had been playing Star Force a