Space Colony

written by Matthew Reed

Space Colony from a 1981 Adventure International catalog

Space Colony was a TRS-80 adaptation of the 1978 Taito arcade game hit Space Invaders. It was written by Kim Watt and sold through his own company, Breeze Computing. Kim Watt was better known in the TRS-80 world for his disk utility, Super Utility. Space Colony was also sold by Adventure International for $14.95 for the Model I disk version, and $9.95 for the Model I tape version.¹

Interestingly, Space Colony wasn’t the first version of Space Invaders that Kim Watt wrote for the TRS-80. He had earlier written Invaders, a game distributed by Level IV Products. Space Colony was a good rendition of Space Invaders and had superior graphics and game play to Invaders. But it had one very unusual feature: it was one of the few commercial high-resolution Model I games.

Normal instructions screen

80-GRAFIX instructions screen

The tape included in the Space Colony package contained both a normal version of Space Colony and also a version designed for the 80-GRAFIX high-resolution add-on. Both versions played exactly the same, but the 80-GRAFIX version offered a high-resolution representation of the game screen.

Normal game play

80-GRAFIX game play

Space Colony and Kim Watt’s other games were soon overshadowed by the success of Super Utility. Space Colony wasn’t advertised beyond early 1981.

In 1986, PowerSoft collected four Kim Watt games (including Space Colony) in a package called “The Kim Watt Games Disk.” As far as I know, the high-resolution version of Space Colony wasn’t included in that package.

Related Posts:

Armored Patrol

Donkey Kong

Crazy Painter

Arex