Space Pizza might have one of the best videogame setups I have heard in a while: it is 2086, an asteroid base full of scientists is hungry, its canteen has been destroyed and you are apparently the only interstellar pizza courier available. Gary Pinkett’s arcade game is heading to the ZX Spectrum Next before the end of 2026, and the latest preview already has us itching to get behind the controls.
The immediate feel brings back memories of games such as Thrust, Utopos and Stardust, with Asteroids-style rotation and thrust giving the ship that familiar sense of momentum where simply getting from A to B can become dangerous. Gary’s own starting points were Thrust, Oids and Space Taxi, with the project beginning as little more than an experiment with movement on the Next.
The task sounds simple enough on paper: load up the pizzas, enter a huge government installation hidden inside an asteroid and find the customers waiting somewhere inside. Twisting tunnels, dangerous machinery, laser barriers and portal systems stand between you and a successful delivery, while the thrust-based controls make momentum part of the challenge.
There is a strong score-chasing side too, with online leaderboards planned for internet-connected Next machines alongside local high-score tables. Global scores and fastest completion times should give players plenty of reason to keep coming back once they have learned how to stop decorating the asteroid walls with interstellar takeaway.
Turn the volume up for the preview too, because DJ H0ffman is creating the music. Gary says the team is largely leaving him to it: “He’ll play the game, get a feel for it and compose the music around that. We have total confidence that whatever he comes up with will fit the game perfectly.”
Gary Pinkett on how Space Pizza grew from a coding experiment
Space Pizza did not begin with a detailed design document or even a plan to make a complete game. “I didn’t really have any plans to make a full game. I just wanted to mess around and see what coding on the Spectrum Next was like,” Gary explains.
That small experiment kept growing. “As I kept tweaking my little Thrust engine, though, I started having bigger and bigger ideas. There was never really a grand plan, it was a case of continuing to tweak things, add new ideas and see where it took me.”
The choice of hardware was similarly straightforward. Gary’s Spectrum Next had been sitting unused for a while when he decided it was time to do something with it, helped by encouragement from his friend Tim Drew. “It wasn’t necessarily a case of the Next being the ‘right’ machine for the game, it was more that it was the right machine at the right time.”
Gary is also far more interested in developing for retro and niche hardware than modern systems. He enjoys the restrictions involved, explaining that limitations force developers to think differently about how they solve problems.
Getting the ship movement right took plenty of work. Gary says the controls are deliberately more forgiving than Thrust, while still leaving players with something to learn and master. “I don’t want the difficulty to get in the way of people enjoying the game,” he says.
That same approach extends to the planned versions for Atari STe, Amiga, Mega Drive and PC Engine CD-ROM. Gary says the aim is to keep each version recognisably Space Pizza, while using the extra hardware where it can add something worthwhile.
“With the 16-bit versions we’re already thinking about additional game modes and other features we could potentially add,” he says. “The biggest uplift on the 16-bit machines will probably be in the sound effects and music departments.”
Work on the Mega Drive version is already under way, and Gary says it is currently close to the Spectrum Next game apart from being silent at this stage. The wider plans owe a lot to Tim Drew, who suggested creating Atomic Windmill and releasing Space Pizza under the new publishing banner.
Gary credits Tim’s enthusiasm with helping the project grow well beyond that original coding experiment. The idea of bringing the game to several other systems is something Gary says he probably would not have considered without Tim pushing him to think bigger.
Space Pizza will be published by Atomic Windmill and is due on ZX Spectrum Next before the end of 2026, with the Atari STe, Amiga, Mega Drive and PC Engine CD-ROM versions planned to follow in 2027. What began as a small Thrust-style experiment has ended up becoming a much larger project than Gary expected when he first started coding on the machine.
Visit the official Space Pizza website for more information, follow development on itch.io, and visit Atomic Windmill to sign up for its newsletter and get notified when the game launches.
