Flagship Titles

Paradroid is the game that made Andrew Braybrook's reputation, and forty years on it still holds up as one of the most elegant designs in the C64 library. The premise is simple: a fleet of spacecraft has been overrun by its own robot crew. You control the Influence Device — the lowliest droid aboard — and must work your way up the robot hierarchy by taking over progressively more powerful units via the game's circuit-combat mini-game.

That mini-game is the invention that makes Paradroid extraordinary. When you initiate combat with a higher-class droid, both players are represented as circuits on a shared grid. The goal is to control more circuit nodes than your opponent before the timer runs out. It is a puzzle, a test of memory, and a timed decision problem — all embedded in a shoot-em-up. Nothing else on the C64 mixed those registers in quite the same way.

Braybrook documented the development process in a diary published in Zzap!64 across multiple issues, describing the false starts, the technical constraints of the hardware, and the moment when the circuit-combat concept finally came together. The diary is worth reading alongside the game itself — it contextualises the design choices in a way that nothing else from the era does.

Zzap!64 awarded Paradroid a Sizzler rating of 97%. It won the Golden Joystick Award at the 1986 ceremony — the most prestigious mainstream games industry award of the time.

Uridium is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of work. Reportedly written in approximately six weeks, it is a horizontal shoot-em-up requiring the player to strafe and eventually land on massive alien dreadnoughts — each with its own surface geography, turret placement, and gap pattern to learn and exploit.

The game runs at a speed that was, in 1986, genuinely shocking on the C64. Braybrook squeezed performance out of the hardware through careful optimisation and a disciplined approach to what was actually necessary on screen. The result was a game that looked and felt faster than it had any right to.

Rob Hubbard's title theme for Uridium is one of the most celebrated SID compositions in the history of the format. Driving, atmospheric, technically demanding — it set the tone for every session and became inseparable from the game's identity. Forty years on, it is still cited in discussions of what the SID chip was capable of in skilled hands.

Zzap!64 awarded Uridium a Sizzler award. Retro Gamer published a "Making Of" retrospective that, alongside Braybrook's own diary from the original development, provides an unusually complete picture of how the game was built.

Gribbly's Day Out arrived in the same year as Paradroid and shows a different facet of Braybrook's design sensibility entirely. Where Paradroid is cool and systematic, Gribbly is warm and character-driven — a platformer with a genuinely strange protagonist (an alien blob protecting its young) and a mechanical hook built around parental protection rather than combat.

The game established Braybrook's reputation as someone who could produce work of real personality, not just technical merit. It demonstrated that Graftgold was not a single-genre studio — and it did so in the same year as Paradroid, which makes the dual achievement the more remarkable.

Braybrook composed the score himself, as he did for most of his own titles — a playful, character-appropriate piece of SID music very different in tone from the atmospheric work on Paradroid.

Fire & Ice: The Daring Adventures of Cool Coyote is the most striking departure in the Graftgold catalogue — a lush Amiga platformer that arrived after seven years of shoot-em-ups. Where the C64 titles were defined by precision and restraint, Fire & Ice is generous and colourful, full of detailed scrolling landscapes and an expressive protagonist who throws snowballs at fire-themed enemies.

The shift required Braybrook to master a different set of design problems: character animation, multi-layered scroll, level design that rewarded exploration rather than reflex. The result was a game that held its own against the genre leaders of the time and demonstrated, conclusively, that Graftgold's reputation rested on more than a single genre specialisation.

Jason Page's score for Fire & Ice is one of the most accomplished Amiga soundtracks of the era — playful and melodic in a way that perfectly matched the game's visual character. Page had not previously worked with Graftgold; his contribution here helped define the Amiga-era sound of the studio.