The game stars Popeye on a quest to find 25 hearts and bring them back to Olive Oyl, across a seaside town environment made up of several linked screens. Asked by King Features to make the characters look very much like the ones in the comics, programmer Don Priestley found himself constrained by the Spectrum's single-color sprites. His solution was to build every character by joining several differently-colored sprites together, making them large and colorful, but also causing them to take up a big portion of the screen.