How to play Ixion online
- Move your ship: arrow keys
- Fire your cannon: Space bar
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The playfield is a large grid of square tiles, and your ship can only drive where a tile exists. At the start of each round many tiles are missing. To fill the gaps, you shoot or ram a brown sphere, which then bounces around the screen, laying down tiles wherever it passes and destroying any enemies it hits, before it slowly comes to rest again. That rolling, unstoppable sphere is the link to the Ixion of Greek myth, who was punished by being tied to a wheel that spun through the air forever.
Enemy drones follow the same tile rules as you and try to shoot you. Their shots also blow holes in the floor, and a drone takes its own tile with it when it explodes, so every fight changes the map. Your cannon fires in eight directions and its shots bounce off the walls. A timer, shown as a drone creeping towards your reserve ships, costs you a life if it arrives before you have spelled IXION. A bonus stage with two spheres and an empty grid follows each round. Later rounds start with fewer tiles, faster enemies and a faster timer.
Tips
- Move the sphere first. Learning where the sphere will go when you hit it is the key to the game. A good shot opens up paths to several letters at once.
- Fight carefully. Every drone you destroy takes a tile with it. In the later rounds you can easily wreck more floor than the sphere repairs.
Why Ixion was never released
Sega built Ixion for several systems, and an unreleased 8-bit computer version exists too, but did not release it on any of them. Nobody knows exactly why the 2600 cartridge was dropped. Around this time Sega’s American arm was sold to Bally, and afterwards Sega’s 2600 releases were all well-known Bally Midway arcade games such as Tapper, Spy Hunter and Up ‘n Down, so a game based on an arcade machine nobody had seen may simply have had no place. AtariProtos credits the prototype to Jeff Lorenz, who also programmed Sega’s Thunderground, and notes that Stance Nixon started a separate version that was never finished.
Similar games to play next
- Thunderground – Sega’s tunnelling tank game, with a very similar score and timer display
- Amidar – another game about working your way around a grid under pressure
- Tac-Scan – a Sega arcade shooter on the 2600