Cheery Chimp

Splat Chimp is a love letter to "Splat!", a 1983 ZX Spectrum game by Ian Andrew and Ian Morgan, published by Incentive Software of Reading, England. In Splat! you guided Zippy, an X-shaped sprite, through a top-down maze whose viewport scrolled in a random direction every few moments — the player had no control over the scroll, only over Zippy. Touch a wall, fall in water, or hit a spike and you lost a life. Survive long enough collecting plums and clumps of grass (some invisible) and you advanced to the next level, where the scroll came faster and the time was shorter. Seven levels. A digitized "Yippee!" on level clear. It placed fourth in the 1983 Golden Joystick Awards for Best Original Game and shipped with a £500 prize for the highest score — reportedly the first home computer game to offer one.

The mechanic — "you don't control the world, only yourself within it" — is genuinely unusual. It survived forty years without ever quite getting a modern descendant. This is one attempt at that. The chimp replaces Zippy, coconuts replace plums, spiders replace spikes, but the core idea is the same as Splat!'s: a viewport scrolling out from under you while you scramble for fruit. What's new is the frame around it — a Wordle-style daily challenge with one shared seed for the whole world, a share grid you can post, a stats screen, a seven-level Adventure mode that nods directly to the original, and a Practice mode for learning the rhythm without losing a life that counted.

Thanks to Ian Andrew, Ian Morgan, and everyone at Incentive Software for a game that was clever enough to still feel fresh four decades later.