Mark Plays… Oil’s Well (C64)(Sierra On-Line)(1984)

#C64 #Gameplay #Arcade

Mark Plays…. Oil’s Well (Commodore 64) published by Sierra On-Line in 1983. The home port originated on the Atari 400/800 line of
computers. It basically is a port of the Ant-eater game (Arcade)(1982) with the theme changed to drilling for Oil.
In the current climate the game might have been ported straight over sticking with the more eco-friendly ant-theme 😉

Ports came out for the C64 and Apple II in 1983, a year later it appeared for the ColecoVision and the IBM PC (proprietary boot disk) and later on in
1985 a release for the MSX. A later visually improved MS-DOS version was
released in 1990, the original Atari-800 programmer was involved with this.

Managing an oil drilling operation you operate an oil-drill and basically drill
and collect the oil you find making sure your pipeline isn’t cut by subterranean creatures. Your drill head can gobble up the creatures and they will end up in your oil tanks. There are golden chalices appearing that gobble up for extra points and similarly golden ‘diamonds/apples?’ floating about will destroy your drill head. Collect all the oil in the level before the timer runs out and you’ll be transported to the next oil field.

A bit of a pac-man maze type game that I played a ton back in the day. I am still quite decent at it although in the past I could easily do multiple runs going through the levels. I’m a bit rusty but this clip shows a fair bit of the
gameplay and the levels.

The only gripe with this game is that you need to have a very good working
joystick🕹 as you really need to be precise in steering the drill-head around. In the gameplay footage you might notice me struggling a bit with that.

Microswitched Competition Pro like arcade sticks for the C64 are the best to use here, not the membrane based Quicshots.

Oil’s Well to my knowledge never came out on the Spectrum but a port of Ant-Eater exists on the Spectrum as well as the Commodore C16! I believe an Oil’s Well inspired game did come out on the Atari-ST.

Enjoy! And if you want, you can try to
beat my score!

Enjoy the video and thanks for wathing – LactobacillusPrime

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