Flap, fetch, deliver: In this retro arcade game you deliver East-German consumer goods as a bird. Avoid balloons and donkeys that inflate your courier. Will you make it to the rumored “state destroying” ending screen? Just don’t pop along the way!
You play as the thrush (“Drossel” in German) of socialism, which distributes consumer goods to all the citizens of the GDR, the German Democratic Republic.
Flap your wings with either ↑ or Space and avoid balloons and donkeys as they will inflate you. Bloat too much, you pop and lose a life.
To pick up goods, simply fly into them; deliver them by touching the consumers’ silhouettes. Note that you can only carry one item at a time.
To finish a level, fill up the consumption meter ("KONSUM") before the time runs out or you burst.
Yellow highlighted people have high consumption, turquoise a litte, and blue people hardly at all.
Delivering goods to the right consumer (i.e. the yellow ones) grants you a piece of a star. Collect four pieces and a star will spawn in the level and bounce around. Pick it up for bonus points and to deflate a little.
The bird only reverses its direction when it collides with something. Use this to your advantage.
“Why is it all German?”
The game is intended to look and feel like it was made in the late East Germany (DDR) on an East German KC 85/4 computer. Why, you ask? Have a look at the THe Story Behind the Game section.
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* The KC-85/4 could, in fact, not address individual pixels, at least not at the color fidelity this game is in. This setting switches the display to tile mode, meaning only portions of 8×8 pixels get updated, resulting in a choppy but more authentic simulation (see the For the Nerds section, below). It's also less enjoyable to play.
Even in German, the name is usual, as it translates to “Inflated Thrush” (a thrush being a small bird). The game’s inception came from listening to a German podcast, Stay Forever, on the topic of East-German computers and games.
In an extra episode, the hosts further told the story how an East Berlin computer club was undermined by a Stasi spy. Dutifully, this unknown person reported the titles of all Western games that were played at this club and took it upon himself to translate the titles of all ~200 games to German, oftentimes hilariously incorrect.
This, now, is the origin of Aufgeblähte Drossel, that botched attempt at translating the title of the ZX Spectrum game Full Throttle to German.
The podcast hosts mused what people perusing this translated list of games might have imagined them to be—and so did I. Aufgeblähte Drossel is my take on it.
The donkey as seen in the game is a reference to Bill Gates’ DONKEY.BAS demo he wrote for DOS 1.1’s BASIC which makes frequent appearences in the aforementioned podcast.
Also, Erich Honecker, last head of state of East Germany, uttered an often-referenced rhyme when he was shown the first 32-bit processor of East German production: “Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, halten weder Ochs noch Esel auf” (roughly “Socialism in its course, cannot be stopped by neither ox nor horse”, instead in the German original it’s donkey in place of horse.)
The products you deliver in the game are actual goods that various East German VEBs, publicly owned enterprises, produced to meet the mandated quota of consumer goods, regardless of the VEB’s primary production. That is how an explosives factory ended up producing fly swatters, or a shipyard bottle openers.
Yep, my game is lore-heavy!
If you, a knowledgeable nerd familiar with KC line of computers, look at the game and think, “wait a second, that’s impossible!”, you’re absolutely right: This game as it appears would not have been possible on the original hardware with its various limitations. All my deviations from simulating the original hardware have been made in favor of gameplay.