THE EVOLUTION OF Gribbly's Day Out

“SEON seems to have been my most evil creation. His clacking pincers and relentless pursuit of Gribbly [wound up] a lot of people!”
ANDREW BRAYBROOK

Platforming is a well-defined genre, but this hasn’t always been the case. When Andrew Braybrook started work on Gribbly’s Day Out in the mid-Eighties, coin-ops like Joust and Bomb Jack involved flying from platform to platform instead of jumping between them. Andrew’s design followed their lead, but his player character, Gribbly Grobbly, was inspired by the opponents in an obscure arcade title and had made his debut in a Dragon 32 conversion. “The little hopper graphic fitted neatly into an 8x8 character,” Andrew says of Gribbly’s debut, “and it provided the Dragon 3D Seiddab Attack with a bit of on-screen movement. It was based on the hopper creatures in Tazz-Mania, a coin-op we had in one of our local watering holes. Gribbly’s Day Out had not been thought about at that time, but sometimes an idea really screamed out to be in the next game.”

But as Andrew soon found out, adapting the low-res Gribbly into a larger, more expressive form had an impact on the character’s abilities. “The design of the Gribbly sprite had a lot of knock-on effects,” Andrew points out.

“I wanted to link Gribbly’s mouth graphic to whether he was gaining or losing points, his antennae kept waving about, and his eyes blinked. All of that took up about half