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Reception

Development

Target; 2006 is a Windows-based remake of Target; Renegade, the acclaimed 1986 Spectrum beat-’em-up by Imagine.

This action-packed beat-’em-up allows up to six players to take on the criminal underworld. Fight your way across the city using fists, feet and anything handy that’s lying around! Take on vicious biker gangs, mobs of punks and shifty-looking guys in baseball caps! Fight everybody, including your friends!
Target; 2006 was well-received by the European retro-gaming community from its first release. In particular, a fairly sizable number of downloads came from Spain. It seemed only right to offer a Spanish language version; although there's never been much text in the game, getting through foreign-language menus is often tricky. While the first Spanish language add-on featured Google's terrible translation work, the second was provided by Lex Sparrow, one of the people who'd been enjoying playing the game.

In addition to the positive response from the community, Target; 2006 also received a 70% score in issue 41 of Retro Gamer magazine.
Target; 2006 has quite a long history. Some of the code was begun earlier as a basic scrolling beat-'em-up engine for a game where George W Bush, Tony Blair and Rudy Giuliani would punch and kick their way across the Middle East to find three bosses: Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini. When it became clear that the detailed Capcom-esque graphics were going to be a bottleneck on the production, the game became a remake of a classic Spectrum game instead, Target; Renegade, with graphics lifted directly from the original. Target; 2004 was then abandoned when screenshots surfaced of somebody else's work-in-progress remake of the same game.

Two years later that work-in-progress was still an unreleased work-in-progress, and Target; 2006 was revived. Things moved very quickly, and Target; 2006 was released shortly afterwards. The positive response from the retro-gaming community included offers of improvements for future versions, and included new and improved graphics from Dean Swain and a Spanish language translation by Lex Sparrow.

On the technical side, Target; 2006 is written in C++ and uses several open-source libraries, in particular Allegro for video and audio, but also CGUI for multilanguage support and my own updated version of the AllegroMP3 library, modified to support MP3 files in encrypted and compressed datafiles.

Work on a sequel/remake, tentatively titled Target; 20XX, is still in development.