Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet for the Commodore 64 was the first properly-licensed video game based on a 2000AD character. It was coded by Stephen Kellett; co-designed by Mark Eyles, and published by Quicksilva in 1984.
Continue reading Strontium Dog and the Death Gauntlet, Commodore 64
Rogue is an influential dungeon-crawling Role-Playing Game originally created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman (with later contributions by Ken Arnold) for Unix-based mainframes in 1980.
The original version of Rogue used the ASCII character set (text symbols) to create the world, and that is what you can see here in this first commercial version of game, published by Epyx in 1985.
Thrusta is an early 16K ZX Spectrum game written by Patrick Richmond and published in 1983 by Software Projects.
Martin Wheeler‘s 1984 Spectrum game, Sorcery, was a decent hit for publisher Virgin Games. Enough at least for Virgin to convert the game to various other systems, including for the Amstrad CPC, which is the better version.
Beach Head is an infamous war-based action game created by Access Software and first published for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers in North America 1983. It was later released by US Gold in Europe in 1984.
The game is set in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War and features five individual stages of combat, each based on a fictitious amphibious assault of an enemy island. You can play Beach Head at four difficulty settings.
Fortress on the BBC Micro is a bland and overly-difficult Zaxxon clone written by Matthew Newman and first published by Pace in 1983.
Jumpman Junior is the Atari 8-bit cartridge version of Randy Glover‘s classic 8-bit platform game, Jumpman. It was first published by Epyx in 1983.
Since the game came on cartridge the number of levels has been reduced, down to 12, but they are at least all-new levels and not recycled levels from the disk version.
It might look like an outdated pile of crap by today’s standards but Addictive Software‘s 1982 game, Football Manager, was a massive hit on the ZX Spectrum at the time.
The classic Orc Attack was originally developed by Dean Lock for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and published by Thorn EMI in 1983.
You play a guy defending a castle rampart from attacking orcs that are trying to climb up using ladders. The orcs plant the base of the ladder on the ground then bring in sections to raise it up, taking just three connected sections to reach the top. You must run and grab rocks, placed at either side of the battlement, to throw down at the attackers. If the attackers reach the top of the rampart the stones temporarily turn into swords, which you must grab to hack down the invaders that are threatening your castle. When a round is complete you can throw burning oil onto them to torch the remainder.
The classic 1980 arcade game, Carnival, was developed by Gremlin Industries (not to be confused with Gremlin Graphics) – an American company – and manufactured by Sega in 1980. It’s a funfair-themed game where the aim is to shoot moving targets while conserving your limited supply of ammunition for as long as possible.
The King of Grabs 