Developed by Beam Software and published by Melbourne House in 1986, The Lord of the Rings is a text adventure game made by essentially the same team who created the classic Spectrum text adventure, The Hobbit.
Was it the first official Lord of the Rings game ever made? Possibly. There were definitely many unofficial Lord of the Rings rip-off games on the market before this, but this is arguably the first properly-licensed Lord of the Rings game for home computers.
If you can stop laughing at the amateurish loading screen for a few minutes you might find a reasonable conversion of Konami‘s infamous Green Beret arcade game here. Emphasis on the word “might“…
A version of the classic Access Software golf game, Leaderboard, was ported to Atari home computers by Kevin Homer in 1986.
The original Leaderboard was developed by Bruce and Roger Carver for the Commodore 64 and was published by Access Software in North America and US Gold in Europe. Leaderboard was the best-selling C64 game of 1986 in the UK.
This Commodore 64 conversion of SNK‘s classic arcade game, Ikari Warriors, is considered to be one of the best vertically-scrolling shooters on the system. It was programmed by John Twiddy and published by Elite Systems in 1986.
Rather than produce another platform game, Ocean Software chose to make a graphical adventure for their third Hunchback game. Which was an unusual choice.
Hunchback: The Adventure again features Quasimodo trying to rescue Esmeralda, this time from the evil Cardinal of Notre Dame. It’s a three-part game, requiring the same number of loads. In part one Quasimodo must escape from Notre Dame itself, and from the Cardinal’s many guards who are trying to stop him. In part two he must make his way under the city of Paris until he reaches the Cardinal’s mansion. And finally, in part three, he must challenge the Cardinal and escape with Esmeralda in tow.
Cyberun is a notorious release from Ultimate Play the Game and US Gold, first published in 1986.
Released in 1986, Cyberun was arguably Ultimate Play the Game‘s most successful Spectrum game after the label’s sale to US Gold. The game received a Crash Smash in issue 28 of Crash magazine. Although it really shouldn’t have…
This Amstrad CPC conversion of the classic ZX Spectrum game definitely benefits from having better use of colour than the original. It also runs a little faster than the Speccy version, which makes it slightly more playable.
Considered by those who know it as an early precursor to Grand Theft Auto, Mike Richardson‘s excellent Turbo Esprit is an action/driving game where the aim is to catch and arrest drugs smugglers by driving around a city and pinpointing them using a map. It was first published for the ZX Spectrum by Durell Software in 1986.
