Editor's Note: This article was written by MegaSparky (https://www.youtube.com/@MegaSparkyTunes/featured) and is the first building block towards a more active, more diverse CC Blog. It details a classic gaming franchise that some of you might want to check out. In these next few months, we hope to offer a range of different articles from numerous voices detailing a number of subjects from music to tech to old video games and beyond. Thank you to MegaSparky for contributing!

In 1989, a game called Esprit was released by Application Systems Heidelberg exclusively for the Atari ST. The game puts you in control of a marble, which you have to roll with the mouse cursor to solve tile-matching puzzles, and it features highly detailed graphics that require the use of a high resolution monochrome monitor. Several unique gimmicks are added as the player progresses, and solving the challenges can become quite difficult in later levels. Esprit would become the basis for a more popular game released the following year: Oxyd.

Oxyd was published in 1990 by Dongleware, a label that perfectly describes the way the game functions. The first ten levels or "landscapes" are accessible for free due to the game being shareware, but the rest need to be unlocked by inputting a series of codes from a book. These can be found by following sequences of randomized numbers found inside landscapes, which indicate the exact page, row and column that contains the code needed to unlock blocked paths on the stage the player is on. The game itself is largely unchanged from Esprit, offering brand new levels with the same kind of gameplay and graphical style as well as new gimmicks.

Oxyd would spawn sequels and remakes in the following years. The first of these is Oxyd 2, published in 1991 for the Atari ST, which expands on the formula by including, once again, new levels with new gimmicks while keeping most other aspects with very few changes. In 1992, Oxyd was ported to DOS and Macintosh, and a new low resolution color version for the Atari ST was made. Dongleware released these ports, along with a slightly improved version of the original, as Oxyd General Edition or Oxyd v3, allowing the game to be enjoyed by a wider audience. The following year, another sequel, called Oxyd Magnum, came out for the Atari ST - in both monochrome and color formats - as well as DOS and Macintosh. The second game in the series saw a remake in 1995 named Per.Oxyd, which drastically changed the cartoony style of previous entries by implementing pre-rendered graphics. This new aesthetic was used in Oxyd Extra, published a year after Per.Oxyd and later remade for Windows by Mad Data as Oxyd Extra v2.0.

Many fangames based on the Oxyd series were made, with the most notable being Enigma, which includes a mode that lets you play remakes of levels from every entry in the franchise. However, no official games have been made recently. A new release in the series has been teased more than once until a game simply called Oxyd, described as a redesigned version of the original, was announced for a spring 2020 release via Steam with a gameplay trailer and screenshots included. Despite the product being in a seemingly finished state, it was sadly never released.

To sum up, the Oxyd games, as well as Esprit, offer a nice challenge for action puzzle game fans and a genenerally great looking aesthetic. Due to the amount of sequels released throughout the years, there are lots of interesting puzzles to tackle.