Atari ST A to Z: Quartz

An unusual and very pretty shoot ’em up today, from the mind of the man who gave us Spindizzy.

Quartz is a game that combines free-roaming, vaguely Asteroids-esque sequences with more traditional forced scrolling stages in a variety of different directions. It’s simple but effective… and damned addictive.

It’s also a great example of a popular graphical style at the time — raytracing, or at the very least, a pixel art approximation of raytracing. Today, graphics cards are just starting to get into real-time raytracing for the latest “new thing” in graphical fidelity, but back in the ST era, prerendered raytraced graphical assets were quite commonly used as a means of making sprites look “3D” without going full-on polygonal.

Whether it’s “real” raytracing or not doesn’t really matter at the end of the day… what does matter is that this is a gorgeous game that’s a ton of fun to play!

Follow Atari A to Z on its own dedicated site here!

One thought on “Atari ST A to Z: Quartz”

  1. Graphically, Quartz sure looks great for its time. Shame there isn’t much more to the enemy design. They remind me a bit of the characters from a terrible fighting game from 1994 I tried out last month called Ballz. Quartz looks like a much better game, however.

Share your thoughts. Be nice!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.