90. Back To Skool

(Spectrum, David Reidy, 1985)
As of this writing, Activision's Call of Duty series has a stranglehold on the videogame charts, an unprecedented marketing campaign and previous (deserved) success have ensured a prosperous future for Bobby Kotik and friends.
Meanwhile, there have been no parties at many studios who didn't have the advertising, marketing, franchises or, at the very least, the money to blindly ram a game down the throats of consumers until they choked on it. Since 2008, developers have been closing their doors and turfing out a lot of talented people who had the goods, but didn't put enough "mainstream potential" into their games.
Now, maybe more than ever, the dollar is the single most important thing to videogame companies and, for the biggest ones at least, originality and integrity can stick it, brother.

Now lets harken back to a time where great games literally came out of "some guy's bedroom" where individuals would put the own ideas to the test, produce a product that captured what they believed a game should be, then, if given a break, would see a publisher pick up their program and market it to the public, without a Pepsi tie-in, or crappy-ass night vision goggles.

Skool Daze is one of the most punk rock games ever made, not Paramore "punk rock", Skool Daze is straight up Black Flag. The brainchild of David Reidy, it was a videogame based on the exploits of a cheeky kid called Eric who had to undergo a series of tasks in order to steal his bad school report, waiting in the headmasters safe. Whilst doing this, Eric had to continue to attend lessons and avoid trouble, receiving 10,000 lines would result in Eric's expulsion and the end of the game. It can be seen as an early example of today's popular "sandbox" games, Eric is free to go and do whatever he wants, at any time, but still has be present at certain events and activities (very similar in structure to Rockstar's awesome "Bully") the game features a cast of characters, mostly school stereotypes, who interact both with Eric and with each other. It was novel and unlike anything before it.

Back to Skool was essentially more of the same, however, it added much to the gameplay by including extra activities, a playing field, a girl's school, a bicycle, small animals and Hayley, a girlfriend for our catapult wielding hero.
It was by no means an easy task, managing time to perform tasks whilst not being late for lessons or being caught in private areas was difficult and some lateral thinking had to be done to obtain various clues and code numbers.
The game was basically a whole lot of fun to play, being at school myself at the time, it was a great tension buster (especially seeing as the game allowed you to rename all the characters, so kids up and down the country could localise the game to their own friends and teachers) Eric's Beano-esque antics were classic comic book trouble-making.

Your Sinclair rated Back to Skool 19th in its final "Top 100 Spectrum games of all time" issue. An original, fun and very playable game, made pretty much by one guy. No-one queued up at their local supermarket at 6a.m for it, you didn't get any steelbook edition, it didn't have motion sensor controls or even a soundtrack by the popular beat combos of 1985.

It was simply videogame making at its very best.