Trailblazer is a well-regarded, ball-based racing game written and designed by the prolific Shaun Southern of Mr. Chip Software and published by Gremlin Graphics in 1986.
Trailblazer did apparently originate on the Commodore 16 and was expanded to take advantage of the Commodore 64‘s extra memory, and the result is a suped-up version of the original game.
Costa Panayi‘s final game on the ZX Spectrum was published by Gremlin Graphics in 1989. It is an isometric shoot ’em up in the mould of Zaxxon, and it is technically very impressive.
I have to admit that, in spite of the slightly wonky graphics/cut scenes, I have a real soft spot for Gremlin Interactive‘s 1997 PC MS-DOS release, Realms of the Haunting. Mostly because I was lucky and got to visit Gremlin‘s offices in Sheffield to see the game in production, and to talk to the people who were making it. I drove all the way from Bournemouth – where I worked as a video games magazine editor – and spent an entire day there to preview the game for PC Power magazine.
An old-school 2D racer, developed and published for the Super Nintendo by a British company (Gremlin Graphics), way back in 1995.
Top Gear 3000 is a futuristic race game with tracks set on various different planets, with you driving fairly standard-looking sports cars.
Costa Panayi‘s laser-bending puzzle game Deflektor was published by Gremlin Graphics in 1987.
Now this is a weird one… Monty On The Run (aka Monty no Doki Doki Daidassou) is a bizarre Japanese conversion of a famous British platform game. It was released by Jaleco in 1987 and bears little resemblance to the classic original.
The original ZX Spectrum version of Monty On The Run is a real improvement over its predecessor, Wanted: Monty Mole.
Wanted: Monty Mole on the Commodore 64 is somewhat different to the ZX Spectrum version, although it does try to follow the spirit of the original.
You play as Monty, a mole who must explore a huge mine in search of, well, coal.
Back in 1985 Bounder was a fresh idea, like a bolt out of the blue to gamers… It’s an overhead ball/maze game where the maze is miles above the ground, and the idea is to make sure the ball bounces on the platforms of the maze, and not in the air.
Back in 1984 in the UK there was an infamous, historic miner’s strike that lasted for over a year and caused hardship for many communities. Rather than sit and spectate, young Peter Harrap wrote a satirical platform game about a mining mole and published it, with all the profits going to help the struggling, striking miners. That game was Wanted: Monty Mole, and it launched Pete Harrap on his career making video games, and also the Monty Mole ‘franchise’. Although I can’t really call it a franchise because it wasn’t. It was simply a series of games.
The King of Grabs 