Back to the Moon: I Spent 100 Revisions Rebuilding Zarch, and Now It’s on Io

Or ‘Virus’ for Amiga fans.

If you know, you know.

1987. David Braben, fresh off co-writing Elite, puts out Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes. It was a tech demo that happened to be a game, and it showed off what that new ARM chip could do. A solid-shaded 3D landscape rolling past in real time, on a home computer. A year later it came to the Amiga and Atari ST as Virus, and a lot more of us got to lose whole evenings to it.

And then there was the control. Nothing before or since has flown like Zarch.

You didn’t steer with the mouse. The mouse was the ship. Push it away and the nose tipped forward. Pull it back and it reared up. Thrust always fires out of the bottom of the craft, so wherever you tilt is where you go, and gravity never lets up. Hovering took real skill. Landing on the pad felt like threading a needle. Most people crashed in the first ten seconds and never came back. The ones who stuck with it built up a muscle memory that, it turns out, lasts nearly forty years.

Mine did, anyway.

So I built one

BLIGHT IO is my take on it. It’s an original game, not a port, and it doesn’t use a line of Braben’s code. But it’s built on the same feeling: a lander on a tilting mouse, flying low over a patchwork landscape while something alien poisons the ground under you.

Alien seeders drift across the moon, dropping blight that creeps from tile to tile. Shoot them down. Fire homing missiles. Land on the pad to restock. And this is the changes to the plot: you can plant seed pods of your own and take the ground back. Green spreads out from each pod and pushes the blight back.

That part is thanks to the missus. Her first review was brutal: she hated it. So I listened. She wanted more land, a way to fight back rather than just defend, and a sky worth looking at. Id already assimilited a pretty decent html version of Virus but it was missing these changes. All three went in, and the game is miles better for it.

The sky is the other half of the game

My day job is VFX: particles, fluids, making things look right. So the aesthetic tweaks never stopped. After about a hundred tweaks and revisions, every one of them an improvement, this is where we’ve landed:

Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon. Lava fields glowing orange through the dark. Pine forests. Rock spires. And overhead, Jupiter fills half the sky, with the Sun and the other planets wheeling past on a day/night cycle that lasts about three minutes. You’ll be mid-dogfight at dawn and lining up for a landing by starlight. The whole screen changes colour as you fly: lava runs glow orange right out to the edges of the window, and the night side goes deep blue.

Every model, texture and sound is generated live in the browser. No samples, no engine, no downloads. It’s one HTML file, and it plays in a browser tab.

A confession about the controls

The mouse control is faithful. Brutally so. My other half lasts a few seconds with the mouse and wont play it.

Give her a gamepad, though, and she flies. The trick is the left stick: it springs back to centre, so letting go levels the ship out. On the mouse, that catch is something you learn over years. On a pad you get it for free. (If you fly FPV quads like I do, this will feel very familiar.)

So play it on a gamepad if you’ve got one. And if you’re an old Archimedes or Amiga hand who still has the muscle memory, go for the mouse and see if it comes back to you.

Play it

BLIGHT.IO is out now, free, on itch.io: 👉 https://tekanobob.itch.io/blight-io

If you ever played Zarch or Virus, I strongly recommend it. I made it for you. If you didn’t, give it five minutes on a gamepad and see whether it clicks. Most people won’t get it, and that’s fine. The ones who do won’t put it down.

The moon you leave is the moon you inherit.

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BLIGHT.IO is an original work, not affiliated with Zarch, Virus or their creators. I built it by prompting Claude, one revision at a time, but the design, the fussing and the hundred rounds of “no, the sky needs to be bluer” were all mine