At a glance: Zany Golf · Apple IIGS · Electronic Arts / Sandtrap, 1988 · Miniature golf · Score: 8.5/10
Will Harvey was barely out of school when he made the IIGS sing — literally, with Music Construction Set — and in 1988 he turned to the serious business of miniature golf played across a hamburger. Zany Golf, developed by Harvey’s Sandtrap studio and published by Electronic Arts, is nine holes of the most inventive crazy golf ever committed to a disc: bouncing burgers, teleporting holes, a pinball table, a haunted castle, and a final hole guarded by moving walls and pure spite. It is also, not coincidentally, one of the finest IIGS games ever made — the version of Zany Golf against which all its many ports are measured.
The controls could not be simpler, which is the point. Aim with the mouse, pull back to set power, release. Everything else is Harvey’s imagination: each hole is a self-contained puzzle in which the architecture itself is the opponent. Hole one teaches you the bounce off a giant hamburger. By hole four you are timing shots through a castle’s drawbridge rhythm; by the pinball hole you are less playing golf than refereeing a riot the ball started. A par system and a stroke limit keep the pressure honest — run out of strokes and the round ends, however close the hole was.
Nine holes, nine inventions
What elevates Zany Golf from a good miniature golf game to a classic is that no two holes share a gimmick, and every gimmick is fair. The Walls hole moves its barriers on a readable rhythm. The Fans hole lets you steer the ball in flight with gusts — an absurd idea that becomes, within two shots, a skill. The Castle, the Energy hole with its teleporters, the Anthill with its subterranean second course: each is a small essay in teaching a rule, testing it, then twisting it once. The last hole, Enigma, combines moving walls, teleporters and a hole that will not sit still, and finishing under par across all nine remains one of the great quiet achievements of eighties gaming.
Multiplayer is where the design fully blooms. Up to four players share the mouse in hot-seat, and Zany Golf becomes a theatre sport: the groan when a rival’s ball lips out, the silence before a pinball-hole gamble, the particular cruelty of watching someone discover the anthill for the first time. The game tracks scores without fuss and never outstays a hole’s welcome — a full four-player round is an evening, not a lifestyle. It is, quietly, one of the best same-room multiplayer games on any Apple.
The definitive version
Zany Golf travelled widely — Amiga, DOS, Genesis and more received ports — but the IIGS original remains the connoisseur’s choice, and not only from platform loyalty. Harvey built it for this machine: the super-hi-res courses are crisp and witty, full of background jokes that survive the decades, and the mouse control is pixel-exact in a way the joystick-driven conversions never quite reproduced. The sound design is the clincher. The Ensoniq chip delivers springy boings, clattering bumpers and a set of jaunty musical stingers with a warmth the other versions’ bleeps cannot match. This is a game about physical comedy, and the GS gives it a proper soundtrack to pratfall to.
Nine holes, nine inventions, zero filler — Zany Golf is the IIGS’s most perfectly judged game, a miniature in scope and a masterclass in design.
If there is a criticism, it is the one the game chose for itself: nine holes is nine holes. A master of the course will see everything Zany Golf has in an afternoon, and the absence of a course editor — the obvious sequel feature — still stings decades later. But brevity is also the game’s discipline. There is not a wasted shot in it, and its replay value lives where it should: in shaving strokes, in four-player grudges, in the perfect Enigma run you will chase long after the first completion.
A word on legacy
Zany Golf’s afterlife says plenty. It was successful enough to be ported everywhere, imitated often, and remembered fondly enough that its name still functions as shorthand for “crazy golf done right.” For the IIGS specifically it proved something the platform needed proved in 1988: that its best games would not be conversions at all, but originals designed around its mouse, its screen and that remarkable sound chip. Harvey, the teenager who had already given the machine its music software, understood the GS natively — and it shows in every bounce.
The Harvey touch
It is worth lingering on the authorship, because Zany Golf is an auteur game in an era that rarely admitted to them. Will Harvey had already written the IIGS’s music software as a schoolboy, and the sensibility that made Music Construction Set — the belief that a computer interface should feel like play — runs through every hole of this design. The aiming system is a musical gesture, pull and release; the sound effects are composed rather than recorded, little Ensoniq performances timed to the comedy; even the score screens have rhythm. Games designed by committee do not feel like this. Zany Golf feels like one person’s joke, told perfectly, nine times.
Practically speaking, the modern player is spoiled: the game is System-friendly, loads in a blink from contemporary storage, and its mouse control translates flawlessly to a contemporary desk. It is the rare vintage title you can hand to a complete newcomer — a child, a sceptic, a visiting in-law — and watch the whole design explain itself in one hole. Most classics require context and forgiveness. Zany Golf requires a mouse and nine holes of your afternoon, of which it will politely take the whole evening.
A note on difficulty, honestly stated
Zany Golf’s one stern feature should be flagged for new players: the stroke limits are real, and Enigma — the final hole, a moving-walled, teleporter-riddled examination in everything the course has taught — has ended more perfect rounds than the other eight holes combined. The game keeps no permanent record of your shame, however, and its rounds are short enough that failure is merely an invitation to narrate what happened to the room. Consider it the design’s final joke: after eight holes of generosity, the ninth reminds you that mastery was the point all along — and then lets you chase it, smiling, for years.
The verdict
Zany Golf is essential. As a puzzle game it is inventive hole after hole; as a multiplayer game it is a riot; as an IIGS showcase it is the original and best version of a much-travelled classic. Nine holes has never stretched so far.
One last endorsement, from the social side of the desk: Zany Golf may be the single best first game to put in front of someone who has never touched an IIGS. It needs no genre literacy, no historical framing, no forgiveness — just a mouse, a rival or two, and nine holes of escalating invention. The machine sells itself somewhere around the hamburger. The rest of the evening is the game keeping the customer.
Fore, as they say on the first tee. Mind the hamburger.
Score: 8.5/10 — Will Harvey’s crazy-golf masterpiece in its definitive form: nine perfect puzzle holes, peerless sound, and four-player chaos from a single mouse.