Streaker (video game)


Streaker is an arcade adventure game published by Mastertronic on their "Bulldog" label in 1987. The game runs on Amstrad CPC, MSX and Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Overview

The hero of the game is Carlin, a naked man who has been mugged and stripped, and needs to find all of his clothes. Carlin is in a town on the planet Zuggi, which resembles a town in Earth in many ways, with locations including an hotel, a cafe, a supermarket and a chemist's shop. As Streaker finds more clothes, he is able to enter more and more locations. The game is won when he is fully dressed.
The game is an arcade adventure, somewhere between a puzzle-based adventure game and an action game. Gameplay is controlled through a nested menu system, as in Mastertronic's Spellbound. There are a multitude of items in the game, many of which can be used and some of which seem to have no purpose. Streaker can pick up keys to open doors, eat food items to raise his hunger levels, and needs to solve a number of simple puzzles.

Game setting

While most aspects of life on Zuggi are very similar to Earth, there are a number of fantastic elements in the world. For example, Streaker may teleport by using a number of different coloured beamers. These will teleport Streaker to the location of the corresponding beampad. These beampads can be moved by Streaker and are a good way to avoid thieves. Nice touches include Streaker's ability to advance time by acquiring a stopwatch and the "Save" and "Load" options appearing after Streaker picks up a Tape Recorder.

In-game characters

Streaker's quest is made more difficult by the presence of a number of thieves. They will steal Streaker's clothes on contact, or cause him to lose a life if he is naked. The clothes may be regained from the thieves by finding and offering the thief an item that he wants.
The thieves are as follows:
Despite the rather unusual aim of the game, there does not seem to be any prurient content therein. During the 1980s, young children occasionally unwittingly perplexed and embarrassed their teachers by telling them they had spent an evening "playing Streaker".