Deep Dives

What It Is

Cosmic Cosmiads is a fixed shooter built entirely in PETSCII block graphics. The player controls a tank at the bottom of the 40-column display. Above, a formation of Cosmiads occupies the top portion of the screen; periodically, individual Cosmiads break formation and dive toward the player. Both player and Cosmiads fire projectiles represented as PETSCII characters.

The core loop is familiar from Space Invaders: clear the formation, avoid the dive attacks, don’t let anything reach the bottom. But Cosmic Cosmiads adds one crucial mechanic that elevates it above imitation: a fuel counter. Every shot the player fires costs fuel. Run out of fuel and the tank is immobile and unable to fire. Accuracy is not merely rewarded — it is mandatory for survival.

The Zylon Boss

After all Cosmiads are destroyed, a “Zylon” boss creature appears. The Zylon has a specific weakness: it can only be killed by firing into its open mouth when it gapes. Shooting it at any other time has no effect. This single-condition vulnerability prefigures the vulnerable-core boss design that would become standard in the 16-bit era, though it appears here in pure PETSCII, in 1981.

Technical Achievement

The PET had no hardware sprites, no bitmap mode, and no sound chip. Hipkin built a convincing arcade game from PETSCII character movements, careful timing loops in BASIC or machine code, and the 1 MHz 6502. The fuel mechanic was a design solution to a technical constraint: limiting the rate of fire reduced the calculation load on each game loop. The constraint became the game’s defining feature.

The Premise

Cosmic Jailbreak adapts Universal’s 1979 coin-op Cosmic Guerilla into a PET PETSCII game. The scenario is a role reversal on most shooters: the attacking aliens are trying to rescue prisoners from a central jail structure, and the player must stop them. Aliens score 20 points as soldiers; generals (worth 50) turn into three soldiers if hit, adding a risk-reward tension to targeting decisions. Aliens chip away at the prison wall brick by brick; if they succeed in breaching it, prisoners escape and the game advances to a harder phase.

The Title Screen Discrepancy

The PET version of the game displays “COSMIC FIGHTER” on its title screen rather than “Cosmic Jailbreak.” The commercial name “Cosmic Jailbreak” appears only in Commodore’s product catalogue and advertising materials. Whether this represents a beta build title, a localisation decision, or a simple naming miscommunication between Hipkin and Commodore’s production team is not documented in available sources. The discrepancy is well-documented in the legal case record.

The Royalty Dispute

After Cosmic Jailbreak shipped and sold, Hipkin sought royalties from Commodore Business Machines. Commodore initially denied the game had been commercially released at all. Hipkin’s brother then produced United States advertising materials showing Cosmic Jailbreak was a Commodore best-seller — material Commodore had themselves printed and distributed. Confronted with their own evidence, Commodore settled the royalty claim out of court.

The royalty dispute was the reason a planned Commodore 64 port was never officially completed, though the unfinished C64 version was eventually recovered and released by the preservation community in 2021.

The First Commercial Success

Microchess 2.0 is historically significant as the first commercially successful microcomputer game and the first to sell more than 10,000 copies. The chess engine was originally written by Peter R. Jennings in 924 bytes of 6502 machine code for the MOS Technology KIM-1 single-board computer, completed on December 18, 1976. The PET version arrived in 1978, with a user interface (and an Atari version) contributed by Brad Templeton.

Jennings required 8 KB RAM for the PET version — which excluded the original 4 KB machines but was standard on the 2001-N and all later models. The board was displayed using PETSCII characters: pieces identified by letter (K, Q, R, B, N, P), squares by coordinate. Functional, readable, and remarkable for 1978.

The $1,000 Offer

When Jennings demonstrated Microchess to Chuck Peddle at the West Coast Computer Faire, Peddle offered $1,000 for the full rights to the game. Jennings refused. By the end of 1978, Micro-Ware had earned over $1 million from Microchess sales. The difference between accepting and refusing that offer is approximately $999,000.

Funding VisiCalc

When Jennings merged Micro-Ware with Personal Software in 1978, he deferred his Microchess royalties to help fund a new project Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were developing: VisiCalc. VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet application, the software that convinced corporations to buy Apple IIs by the thousands, and by many accounts the first “killer app.” Jennings’s willingness to defer his royalties made VisiCalc’s development possible.

The line runs directly from Microchess on a PET to the modern spreadsheet application.