Twenty-eight cubes stacked seven rows high, a hermit crab on top, and every landing turns a cube from sand to sea glass. Turn them all and the shore builds another.
Mood, both ways
The game keeps two numbers with you. Every cube you turn raises its energy, and every full row raises it more. A fall or a hazard lowers its calm. Time brings both back toward the dial you set. Four words name where it is.
- DAWN warming up. Cool sea glass, a slow major arpeggio, a little more room between bubbles.
- FLOW a run of cubes without a slip. Brighter glass, the music opens up.
- RUSH hot colors, raster bars in the border, a faster tempo, quicker hazards, and in a long run one more bubble.
- DRIFT after losses. The bubbles slow, the gull flies off and stays away, the notes thin out.
Your side is the dial: CALM (no game over; a fall puts the crab back on top); PLAY (three crabs, an extra crab every 6000 points); RUSH (more bubbles, and two landings per cube sooner). The game relaxes toward it. The mood tape from your session stays in this browser, and when you leave after playing, the game hands its mood to the town.
Two machines
ATARI 800XL (1983, POKEY). The Graphics 0 blue with a black border and light-blue text. Raw square waves with a noise bite, in the POKEY spirit. A blue READY and a RUN before the pyramid.
COMMODORE 64 (1982, SID). The blue field inside a light-blue border. A resonant filter sweep on every voice, in the SID spirit. 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE, then LOAD, then RUN.
Nothing is emulated and nothing is copied. The crab, the bubble, the gull, the lifebuoys, the music and the palettes were made for this page; there is no arcade character, no speech balloon and no Gottlieb art. Read the research note on the 1982 original.
The rules
Each landing turns a cube's top: 25 points for sea glass, 15 for the frosted step between. The first pyramids need one landing per cube; later ones need two; later still, landing on finished glass turns it back to sand. Clearing a pyramid scores 1000 plus 250 for each pyramid before it (up to eight), and 50 for each lifebuoy left floating. Bubbles drop in at the top and bounce down at random. The gull follows you; take a lifebuoy with the gull close behind and it follows you off the edge for 500. Hopping off the pyramid, or touching a bubble or the gull, costs a crab.
Controls
- Touch or mouse: tap the quadrant of the field you want to hop toward (top-left is up-left, bottom-right is down-right). Hold to keep hopping.
- Keys: Q up-left, E up-right, A down-left, D down-right. Arrows turned 45 degrees, as the 1983 home ports did: ↑ up-right, ← up-left, ↓ down-left, → down-right. Hold a key to keep hopping.
- Space starts, P pauses, F full screen, M sound, C scanlines, 1 and 2 switch machines, 3 turns the dial.
- FULL uses the Fullscreen API. iOS Safari has none for pages, so the stage fills the screen instead; add to Home Screen for the whole display.