Robots

In the earyl 80s, Ken Arnold developed the curses library for Unix at Berkeley, which allowed the cursor to be moved freely across the screen. Three games were written back then, based on this library. Rogue is the best known of these three. Then there was a version of Snake, and finally, Robots. This last one was written by Ken Arnold himself.

Gameplay

Gameplay is simple. You are standing on an open plain filled with robots. Whenever you move, these robots will move a step towards you. If they reach you, they will kill you. They are, however, very stupid. They will always move straight towards you, often crashing into each other on the way. If two robots crash, they are destroyed, leaving a scrap heap. If a robot moves into a scrap heap, it is destroyed as well.

When they come too close, you can teleport to a random location, or you can destroy a single robot with the sonic screwdriver. Usually you get one of those per level. The goal, of course, is to make all the robots crash without letting them catch you. Once they are all gone, you reach the next level, and the screen is filled with even more robots.

The Macintosh Daleks

On 1984-04-02, when the Macintosh was little more than two months old, Johan Strandberg released a version of Robots for this new platform which he called Daleks, after the enemies of the Dr. Who television series. He did not assign keys to the directions, instead there are little arrows around the player character which have to be clicked.

Daleks was the first freeware/shareware game for the Mac, and thus became a sort of myth. The next year, Bob Arning released The New Daleks, a somewhat improved version, since Strandberg's never got past beta.

On the PC

On the PC the concept got only popular with the advent of Windows, and often the Mac's Daleks, not the old Unix game, were the direct inspiration.

Robots on the PC
DRoboWHOids	Asteroid	Daleks
Robots	Tobor	Win~Daleks!