PixlBit

Here's a game you've probably never heard of: Nadral, for the Atari 400/800/XL/XE 8-bit computer line. 

This game was written in the early 80s by a couple of German programmers, Julian Reischke and Andreas Wiethoff. It was sold to Atari Europe, but was never officially published. It did get leaked out to pirate groups, however. This game came in a bunch of games on floppy that my uncle sent to me. 

Nadral is definitely an unusual game. The title screen features a lot of psychedelic colors and text (all in German), and plays a bouncy tune, namely, Scott Joplin's ragtime classic "The Entertainer." Through trial and error (I only knew a little German from when we went to Germany), I pieced together the options for number of players, difficulty - Anfänger ("beginner"), mit Erfahrung ("with experience"), Fortgeschritten ("advanced"), and Experte (I could figure this one out on my own.) You also had an option to select your starting maze, which were named after the first eight letters of the Greek alphabet, but you couldn't select higher mazes until you'd unlocked them, and since the game didn't save progress, this was a useless option.

Then you hit the start button, and an ominous synthesized German voice welcomes you into a sort of bizarre German expressionist world.

Nadral is a maze game. You play as what has been described as a "helicopter bird", though it looks more like a typewriter with a propeller. Your basic object is to find your way through the maze to the "female" helicopter bird waiting at the end of each level, all without running out of energy. As you play through the game, you hear a constant menacing "hearbeat" tone that gets faster when your energy ("krafte") reaches critical levels. The sound, overall, reminds me a bit of Gene Deitch's Tom and Jerry cartoons that he made in Prague, with a lot of reverberation. The mazes are pretty sprawling, ranging from twelve rooms in Alpha to 99 rooms in Theta. Touching the walls means instant death.

The pattern of the gameplay is simple. In each maze, in order to progress, you must find colored keys to unlock their respective keyholes and open barriers to progress. A new colored key is added for each level, so by the time you get to the Theta maze, you need to find eight keys for eight keyholes.

The enemies only add to the bizarre nature of the game. They are all common household objects: TV sets, telephones, staplers, bouncing balls, joysticks, and even toilets. The TVs bounce diagonally until they hit a wall, while other enemies will try and home in on you. Their AI is simple, they will always move towards you even if there's a wall present. You can shoot horizontally only, and the way some walls and enemies are placed makes it difficult to reach important objects like keys.

When you do find your "girlfriend" at the end of the level, they kiss with a sound that was obviously lifted from another Atari 8-bit game, Synapse's Alley Cat. Then you get more bouncy music in celebration and a lot of German text as the game grants you bonuses for unused energy and keys, refills your energy, and sends you on to the next maze. Once you beat Theta, it simply keeps repeating Theta over and over again. 

And that's pretty much it. There's not much to this game, but it was a game I played a lot on my home computer when I was a kid. I didn't have documentation for a lot my games, but since this one was never officially published, it didn't matter in this case. In any event, I hope you enjoyed this little piece of weird video game history.