There are not one, not two, but three entire games based around the Australian soap Neighbours. Also, only the first one is licensed!
One of those unlicensed games was a freeware Amiga point-and-click game, which has recently got a bit of attention online for the sheer oddness of it existing. (You can see the full story here.) The other one has been mostly forgotten about, apart from a few playthroughs and things on Youtube. We’ll be looking at the latter in this post.
A Nightmare On Robinson Street
Release Year: 1990
Format: Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Developers / Distributors: Players Software / Your Sinclair

Apparently retitled due to copyright worries, Nightmare On Ramsey Robinson Street is basically a quick asset flip done for the benefit of the popular computer magazine Your Sinclair. Players Software simply took one of their existing titles – “LA Drugs Bust” – and cut out loads of levels, redid the graphics, and considered the job a good’un. The whole thing was given away on a free tape which came with the February 1990 issue of Your Sinclair.
This is a first-person 2D “gallery” shooter, modelled on arcade games of the time like Operation Wolf. Instead of killing, I dunno, “commies”, you must shoot very very slightly disguised renditions of the cast of Britain’s favourite Australian soap (yeah, up yours Home & Away!). In the context of the early 90s, this made some kind of cultural sense as not everyone was a fan of the show. The coders at Players Software were clearly among that group, as indeed was Victor Lewis-Smith (at a minute into the video below):
When you boot the game up (which is designed to work with 48K models for maximum compatibility, backward compatibility fans), we get a loading screen which advertises someone’s Speccy fanzine (“Sinclair Fan”, which I can’t find on archive.org, but maybe you can?) and their upcoming game – Joe Blade 3.
Joe Blade was a weirdly anonymous yet quite popular Spectrum action game, which was popular because it was a cheap title with decent graphics (by Speccy standards). In it you controlled a cartoony Jesse Ventura-a-like, and you ran around kicking people in the head to collect points, which came in the form of those blow-up numbers you get now for spelling out someone’s age on their birthday. You also had to defuse bombs that were in dustbins for some reason by matching icons that looked like they came from The Krypton Factor. And there were all these old blokes in macs who didn’t bother you, but you could kill anyway, who wandered around the levels seemingly trying to find sex workers. That is the end of my elaboration on Joe Blade 3.
So when you start the game proper, you get the following scrolling message at the bottom:
YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE OR YOUR ULTIMATE FANTASY – WELCOME TO “A NIGHTMARE ON ROBINSON STREET” – WRITTEN BY SIMON HOBBS FROM AN ORIGINAL IDEA BY SIMON DANIELS – CLEAN UP THE NEIGHBOURHOOD BY ELIMINATING THE VARIOUS PERSONALITIES – FLEET STREET REPORTERS AND STUDIO TECHNICIANS – THEN GO ON TO FACE THE TERRIBLE END OF LEVEL GUARDIAN
This is then followed by a long sales pitch for their games (in which the prices are written out in a really weird way – “Nine-ninety-nine”, without even a pound sign?) and then they ask… you written any good games lately? You could contact them about your wares by calling a phone number which I would say was now a sex chat line if such things still existed, but I don’t think they do.
And then you go into the game itself… and it’s a really crap, quickly knocked out version of Operation Wolf or whatever. Quelle surprise. The celebs you shoot are obviously meant to be poor old Kylie and Jason – the latter of which helpfully has a “J” on his shirt because they weren’t confident in the graphics alone – plus some random smiling nerd (?), cameramen walking down the street, and paparazzi popping up from behind background fences to take photos of, erm… endless clones of Kylie and Jason shooting people who then get murdered themselves? If you’d shown pictures like that to Kelvin McKenzie in the distant pre-AI-slop days of 1990, he’d have gone insane in much the same manner as the protagonist of a Lovecraft story.
(Oh, and you lose points if you shoot Bouncer, which is the one thing about this scenario that makes sense.)
Despite the lack of overall effort, it’s notable for simply existing – being distributed nationwide with a popular computer magazine as a weird sort of advert that happens to involve murdering multiple Jason Donovans in cold blood. Oddly, this silly throwaway game fits into a curious sub-sub-sub genre of UK gaming, mostly forgotten, and mostly having nothing to do with Charlene Mitchell or Scott Robinson. It slots in between another couple of free magazine games from Your Sinclair, and their rival Sinclair User.
Like many 8-bit UK game magazines of the time, YS would frequently give away cover-mounted audio cassettes containing demos of upcoming games and “Exclusive” games, which tended to be shite you’d play for a few minutes and then go back to the demo of the better game on the other side.
(Later on, the same magazines started re-publishing older, formerly full-price games and triggered a major crisis within 8-bit side of the British games industry… but that’s outside the scope of this article.)
In their November 1988 issue, Sinclair User gave away a game on their free cover tape called Bear A Grudge. This was a quick and simplistic version of Space Harrier, a popular Sega arcade game that also served as the launch title for the Mega Drive. You piloted the “Kamikaze Bear” – an ideologically dubious teddy bear character who was the half-arsed and boringly realized mascot of Sinclair User – and blew away digitised versions of the cartoon caricatures of the magazine’s staff.
Or at least, you tried to, but you could only shoot one bullet at a time, and pressing fire again would automatically “cancel” that bullet out and create a new one. And as pointed out by one reviewer on Spectrum Computing, this means that “when you’re autofiring it means you’re shooting entirely blanks!”. And everything else about the game, aside from the music, was awful as well.

The most notable aspect of the game is the use of digitised versions of the cartoon drawings of the staff, which Sinclair User, er, used instead of photos. Interestingly, YS also did the whole cartoons-instead-of-photos thing for their staff as well. (I don’t know if YS or Sinclair User came up with it first, but it must be noted that late period Sinclair User crudely fashioned themselves on the younger upstart YS from around 1987 onwards). With all that in mind, enter one Damien Scattergood, a young programmer from Ireland.
Damien was responsible for “YS Capers”, which was produced the best part of two years later. Whether it was a deliberate attempt on Damien’s part to better the woeful Sinclair User attempt isn’t clear. It’s another game following in the steps of Operation Wolk and its ilk, and is much the same as “Robinson Street”, only with actual effort put into it. And like that Space Harrier clone, Damien digitised YS’s own cartoon versions of their writers for sprites. He sent it into the magazine, and they decided it was good enough to put on the cover-mounted “Smash Tape”.

The fact that in both games you’re killing the staff of your favourite computer magazine is, of course, a deeply odd one. (The same endlessly respawning / Kelvin McKenzie-maddening thing also happens here, as an unavoidable aspect of the gameplay.) To their credit, YS brought up the confusing unwholesomeness of the concept in the instructions:
It seems (ahem) that we’ve all gone mad you see, and are out to kill you, our dear readers, by shooting out at you from the safety of your TV screens!! (Perish the thought.) Only you can stop us!
(Above from the July 1990 issue of Your Sinclair)
To conclude, I do miss the days when video / computer games could do stuff like this – or rather, had the impulse to do so. The days of getting modern versions of the same thing distributed via newsagents up and down the land may be over, but perhaps there’s some kind of modern equivalent on itch.io that isn’t focused around the usual big franchises (which appear to all be dying in any case). Maybe someone – maybe me? – could make an 8-bit adaption of Afternoon Plus With Mavis Nicholson, with the aid of modern tools. Until then, you may want to check the link below.
Download A Nightmare On Robinson Street
at Spectrum Computing!
(Playable in pretty much any ZX Spectrum emulator)