Retro Gamer 52 plopped through the letterbox this weekend, and it’s something of a belter. Although there are a number of highlights, the eight-page making-of about the utterly lovely Star Wars arcade game (the vector one with the scratchy samples) is the standout for me.

Although I’m a tad jealous that Darran Jones grabbed that one for himself (well, there have to be some perks for being editor, right?), I also got to write about a classic arcade game: tile-based action-puzzler Klax. This game was devised by Mark Pierce, who now heads the excellently named Super Happy Fun Fun; Mark clearly still has boundless enthusiasm for arcade games, and was a pleasure to talk to.

His game is, in some ways, an oddity. Similarly abstract to Tetris, Klax spawned a slew of home conversions, which I had great fun working through. (Most bizarre: the top-down Game Boy version from 1990, which is actually less advanced than the impressive Atari 2600 effort.) For a while, I wondered why Klax has largely been forgotten, bar an appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures and as half of the dreadful Marble Madness/Klax GBA double-pack from 2005. The answer, I decided, is this: Klax is hair-pullingly, teeth-grindingly hard.

Tetris pretty much lulls you in and takes a while to go crazy, and even relative novices can go for a good while on Zoo Keeper before it overwhelms. Klax, on the other hand, requires ninja tile-juggling skills to progress any distance into the game. One only wonders what Mark Pierce and his partner in crime Dave Akers were like at the time the game was released—presumably, happily completing Defender blindfolded and one-handed.

That all said, the difficulty level didn’t stop me spending a few happy hours, erm, ‘researching’. Perhaps I need toughening up anyway, since one of the games I’m going to be writing about in the not-too-distant is one of the toughest arcade games of the lot.