Bear Essentials & Deep Winter Origins

1 December 2020 · Updated 26 February 2026

Graham Axten’s The Bear Essentials on the C64 is one of those games that lodges in your brain. A bear wandering through a forest, foraging, surviving. Simple concept, beautifully executed. I played it and couldn’t stop thinking: what if you took that core idea — survive in the wilderness — but pushed the atmosphere much harder? Darker. Colder. More desperate.

Dusting Off Colony

I had a pile of scrolling code sitting around from “Colony,” which was the original working title for Parallaxian before it became… well, Parallaxian. The Colony scroller was a straightforward left-right character scroll with colour RAM updates — nothing fancy, but solid and tested. It seemed wasteful to leave it gathering dust, so I pulled it into a new project file and started mocking up a winter forest scene.

The Duck Hunt Incident

The initial concept was a bird migrating south for winter. Don’t laugh. I grabbed some Duck Hunt-style bird sprites as placeholders and had them flying over the scrolling treeline. The problem was immediately obvious: there was a massive disconnect between the cartoony bird sprites and the more realistic, moody scenery I was building in the charset. The bird looked like it had wandered in from a completely different game. It was jarring.

That disconnect was actually the best thing that could have happened, because it forced me to rethink the whole concept. Instead of a bird, what about a person? Instead of migration, what about survival? Instead of heading south, what about being stuck?

The Pivot

Deep Winter crystallised from that moment. A lone figure in a frozen wilderness, trying to survive until spring. Find food. Find water. Find heat. Every day the temperature drops a little more. Every day the resources get scarcer. The scrolling forest backdrop from Colony became the game world itself — not just scenery to fly over, but terrain to explore, forage through, and ultimately survive in.

Funny how the best ideas sometimes come from the worst prototypes.