“LYKEBYKE” MS Dos / Olivetti Game circa 1990-1992

Help locating old / Pre year 2000 games you used to play.
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Forgetmyname
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“LYKEBYKE” MS Dos / Olivetti Game circa 1990-1992

Post by Forgetmyname »

Saw an old post about this - I'm bringing it back to life!!

UK residents/ ex pats
Dos games community, can anyone please help?

This MS Dos game called LykeByke (definitely the right name) came out in the UK at least around 1990-1992, I think we got it as a floppy disk that came with computer world / weekly, one of those type magazines.

It was amazing.

You had to - using only the arrow keys on your keyboard and the fast reaction time and dexterity of your fingers -direct and steer an expanding and growing thin line around various mazes WITHOUT this line touching any of the sides of the maze. So that meant turning up, down, left and right at all the tight corners, and your timing had to be spot on to the fraction. It was a test of nerves every time.
It was a sort of online spin off buzz wire / wire loop
Game.

(each level had a different pattern, and each level increased the speed of the growing line so it became harder and harder not to 'crash' and be out of the game.)

We spent hundreds - and I mean hundreds - of hours on this game, and I don't believe we ever made it right to the end but came close a couple of times. We felt that due to the speed of the line on the final levels it wasnt possible for anyone to complete the full series.

I remember some of them being square mazes, others being spirals, towards the centre of the screen. When you 'crashed' there was a noise akin to the 'X' sound on family fortunes.

It was a very plain, simple game with hardly any colours or background details but honestly my 7 year old brother and 5 year old me were *obsessed* with this game. We got the Sega Mega Drive around the same time (extremely high tech back in the day) but we actually still preferred LykeByke sometimes because it was just so thrilling and adrenaline filled.

Due to my Dad being a techie we had a home computer (Olivetti) in 1989/1990 before pretty much anyone in the UK had one. There may be people out there like us, that got hold of the game through the computer magazines, or perhaps inherted the game when they bought those Olivettis second hand a few years later.

It's a fantastic piece of our childhood, but other than that one other post on here from 10 years ago mentioning it, I can't find anything else on the entire internet about it.

I'm sure someone who developed it is still out there and I am sure it's lying around in many long forgotten about floppy disk collection. Those things were so flimsy and cheap looking, it sort of devalued the games themselves, coupled with the fact they were freebies with magazines, but a lot of them were really well made games ahead of their time. The market for that sort of relative creativity is completely different these days.

Anyway, thanks for reading, have a nice day!
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