A year since its release I still hold Super Hexagon to be the finest game released ever. You can keep your Half Lifes and your Zeldas, Super Hexagon is a perfect game. The perfect game. It never wastes your time, it’s pure game with no fluff, within seconds of booting the game you’re playing and hours later you’re still playing having not noticed the day and night pass you by.
Now usually we keep our interests PC-based, being a PC gaming site, but someone’s gone and ported Super Hexagon to the Commodore 64 and they’ve done a cracking job.
It would be silly not to share.
Micro Hexagon was created by Paul Koller for RGCD’s Cartridge Development Competition. His demake of Terry Cavanagh’s superb pattern racer does a great job of capturing the frenetic speed and throbbing music of Super Hexagon but all in much reduced quality:
I love Koller’s idea of taking a game which is already iconic for its stripped down, efficient minimalism and then further trimming the game until it’s barely 16kb in size.
Other entries in this year’s contest are listed below:
Bellringer III (Geir Straume & Sean Connolly)
Candle Burner 1.1 (Dirk Schmitt)
Cosmic Ark (Max Hall)
Devil Ronin (Georg Rottensteiner)
Invert (Richard Bayliss)
Kobo64 (Kajtár Zsolt)
Linus Vs Simon (Simon Quernhorst)
Magic Duel (Jörn Ruchmann)
Micro Hexagon (Paul Koller & Mikkel Hastrup)
Monster Buster (p1x3l.net)
Powerglove (Matthias Bock)
Revenge Of The Tomato (Richard Bayliss)
Rocket Smash (John Christian Lønningdal & Saul Cross)
S-Blox (Payton Byrd)
Vallation (Jason Kelk & Sean Connolly)
You can grab the whole bunch in a tiny 300kb file from RGCD and with an emulator like Micro64.de you can play them all relatively easily.
The contest itself presents coders with the challenge of creating a game in just 16kb. That file has to include all the game’s code, art, and music. Efficiency is paramount, any waste code could push your game over the limit and disqualify it from the competition.