Smash T.V.

Smash T.V. for Commodore 64 is Ocean Software's 1991 conversion of Williams Electronics' dystopian arcade shooter. Developed for the C64 by Probe Software, it places a contestant inside a murderous television spectacle set in the then-future year of 1999. The premise is deliberately excessive: survival is entertainment, a manic host treats slaughter as prime-time programming, and cash, household goods, and luxury prizes are scattered among the danger. Rather than being a conventional scrolling adventure, this is a compact, screen-by-screen action game built around clearing hostile arenas as quickly as the player can.

Each room is an enclosed combat zone viewed from above. Enemies pour in from openings around its edges, so success depends on moving through the available space, turning to face threats, and keeping a route clear before the arena becomes crowded. The Commodore 64 release uses a joystick in port 2, adapting the arcade original's separate movement-and-firing controls to the computer's available input. It preserves the essential pressure of having to steer a contestant around the room while aiming shots toward robots, mutants, armed attackers, and other hazards.

A cleared arena opens the way onward through the show's interconnected stages. Picking exits determines the next room, creating a choice between paths while the overall goal remains reaching a level's boss encounter. Money, wrapped prizes, extra lives, bombs, shields, and weapon improvements give each run another consideration: collecting them can improve a player's chances, but moving toward them can also mean crossing directly into an enemy wave. That balance between aggressive shooting, evasive movement, and quick prize collection is the core of the game.

The C64 version follows the arcade game's satirical game-show setting and its succession of themed danger zones, but it is a home-computer conversion rather than the original Williams cabinet. Ocean published the Commodore release in 1991, with C64 programming credited to Nick Jones, graphics by Lee Ames, and music by Jeroen Tel. The version's single-joystick format necessarily gives the action a different feel from an arcade twin-stick control panel, while retaining the fixed-screen rooms, wave-based attacks, routes, pickups, and bosses that define Smash T.V.

Smash T.V. sits in the lineage of frantic arena shooters associated with the Williams arcade original, designed by Eugene Jarvis and Mark Turmell after the earlier Robotron: 2084. On Commodore 64, Probe's conversion brought that fast, prize-chasing contest to an eight-bit home computer during the system's later commercial years. Its combination of futuristic television parody, short intense arenas, branching progression, and constant pressure to grab one more reward gives the C64 game a distinctive arcade character without turning it into a direct copy of the cabinet experience.