Play Gribbet from Amstrad Action in your browser

Gribbet is an Amstrad CPC game that was published as a listing in Amstrad Action (AA) March 1991. On this web page, you can play the game, and see the original listing as it appeared in the magazine. Click the game window to activate it (including sound), and then follow the on-screen instructions.

About the Gribbet type-in from AA

Gribbet is a memory game, where you repeat a musical pattern, similar to the Simon toy that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The frogs sing a song, and then you use the keys to conduct them to repeat that same song. The song gets one note longer each time. I like the frog characters in this game, and think this listing is pretty good entertainment for the time taken to type it in.

I've added the title screen, croaky music, and in-game instructions in my online version of the game. The original listing in Amstrad Action was stripped back to just the main game element.

The frog sprite was inspired by a ceramic frog ornament that my parents brought back for me from a trip to Devon. It sat on my desk, beside my Amstrad.

I've used colour swapping to make the frogs blink. Their eyes are set to flash between white and the dark green eyelid colour, at an interval that means they're white most of the time. This is a nice effect because once you've set it up, Amstrad BASIC takes care of that simple animation. In this emulator, the timing for this game is slightly off, so the frogs seem to doze off from time to time.

As for my other listings, the sprites were created with my Amstrad CPC Sprite Designer, and the sprites were converted to BASIC DATA statements using my Data Maker tool. You can download Gribbet, the Sprite Definer, and Data Maker and more on my disc.

In 2016, I wrote a new version of Gribbet for my book Cool Scratch Projects in Easy Steps. It uses the Scratch programming language, which is a popular way to learn to program today. You can see one of the new frogs on this page.

The Gribbet listing from AA

Load another game into the emulator

• Play The Further Adventures of Fred
• Play BAS Invaders (an Amstrad Addict type-in)
• Play Alien Intervention (an Amstrad Action type-in)
• Play Gribbet (an Amstrad Action type-in)
• Play Wallbuster (an Amstrad Computer User type-in)
• Watch Fishtank (an Amstrad Computer User type-in)
• Play Misfit (from my book The Basic Idea)
• Play Paclone (an Amstrad Computer User type-in)
• Play Chords Tutor (an Amstrad Computer User type-in)
• Play 3D Mapper (an Amstrad Computer User type-in)
• Use the User Defined Graphics generator
• Reset the machine and program something yourself
• How to embed the Amstrad CPC 464 / CPC 6128 emulator in your website

You can download my Amstrad CPC games and utilities disc to use these programs in your favourite emulator.

Where next?

• Sean's Amstrad CPC homepage, including Amstrad type-ins and my Amstrad BASIC programming tutorial.
• Download my disc of Amstrad games and utilities
• Read my books to learn to program in Python or Scratch