Month: February 2025

  • An Obscure Video Game Adaption Of Neighbours (And An Obscure Bit Of Video Game Magazine History)

    An Obscure Video Game Adaption Of Neighbours (And An Obscure Bit Of Video Game Magazine History)

    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.

    You’re the worst character ever, “Kam”.

    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)

  • The Great Big Utterly Massive 1979 ITV Strike Datablast – Part 3

    The Great Big Utterly Massive 1979 ITV Strike Datablast – Part 3

    Oof! Finally, here we are, with the last installment of dry facts and possibly ill-advised attempts at making light of industrial unrest.

    How were people coping?

    We’ve already seen a few blase opinions from those tourists in the Channel Islands – but what about everyone else? Well, obviously they were watching the Beeb – but they weren’t entirely happy about it.

    What with the strike starting in August, the BBC were sticking stubbornly to their usual summer schedule of repeats and sport. It must be understood that back in 1979, the very act of repeating any TV show for any reason whatsoever would cause The Great British Public to flail around their living rooms screeching like car alarms.

    The idea that not everyone might have seen the original broadcast, and as a result might have wanted another chance to catch something they’d missed (or even if they had seen it and just wanted to watch it again in those pre-Sky-pre-streaming stone age times), never seemed to occur to anyone.

    Indeed, in their twilight years, these would be the same sorts who watched 4:3 aspect ratio television with everything insanely stretched to 16:9 because “we paid for a widescreen telly, and we’re going to use all of it!!!”.

    Nevertheless, a lot of viewers complained that the BBC ought to be putting on something more interesting than the fucking cricket. Of course, the reality of the situation meant BBCs 1 & 2 couldn’t simply be converted to Non-Commercial ITV – as explained by the “Comment” section of the Wolverhampton Express and Star on Wednesday 29th August 1979:

    Leave the Beeb alone! THE BBC has been severely criticised for not “‘plugging the gap”’ during lTV's blackout. Short of opening a new channel or coming in with their own version of Crossroads, it is difficult to see what the Beeb could do without undermining its own schedules, prepared weeks in advance. Had it disrupted existing programmes and altered BBC 2 standards to conform with typical ITV output, it would have been accused of cashing-in and hitting a competitor when he is down. The BBC could not have anticipated the ITV strike and, in any case, it is best left to pursue its own targets without becoming a temporary reflection of ITV.

    So, pretty obvious there. And when the calendar turned to autumn and the BBC ended the repeats, they began showing their own new programmes – which had quite an effect on their overall ratings. With no competition from ITV over September and most of October, BBC1’s ratings went through the roof, out up into the sky, left the atmosphere and probably touched the surface of the moon.

    One of the more notable examples of this was the extraordinary, never-repeated achievement where the first two Doctor Who serials of the Autumn 1979 season – Destiny Of The Daleks and City Of Death – got phenomenal ratings the show has never matched since.

    By the end of the former, ratings had risen to 14.4 million viewers, as calcuated by JICTAR. The last episode of the latter got just over 16 million, a level only achieved this century by a handful of football matches, various government announcements made during the pandemic, and the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

    (For a full in-depth look into Doctor Who’s relation to ITV’s woes at the end of 70s, look at the nicely-titled Doctor Who And The 1979 ITV Strike, which sadly will not get a novelization from Terrence Dicks.)

    A grim addendum

    Before we continue, here’s a bit of business I have to properly address. In the previous part of this series, I mentioned that Yorkshire Televison broadcast a special message in place of the usual blue caption asking for information on the Yorkshire Ripper, then still at large. Well, here it is, shown below for completeness’s sake. It’s taken from Adam Martyn’s video on the ITV strike, which is also well worth watching:

    …Brrrrr. Let’s get back to the matter at hand, as quickly as possible…

    Restarting… a timeline of events from “Everybody out!” to “Welcome home!”

    The first of these articles had a rundown of events leading up to the strike. So it stands to reason to do the same for how ITV crawled out of that massive hole…

    10th September, 1979

    • The intended date of the start of ITV’s 1979 autumn schedule. It comes and goes with people either watching BBC1, BBC2, or listening to the classical music over that apology caption. Or maybe they went to the cinema or a Joy Division gig, who knows?

    21st September

    • ITV management put another offer on the table to the collected unions (to refresh your memory, that’s the ACTT, EEPTU, and NATTKE). ITV declare it to be a “final” offer; reader, it wasn’t.
    • The offer didn’t impress the unions, mainly consisting of ITV’s original offer of 15% now backdated to July, with the additions of a promised further 5% increase the following July, and two other cost-of-living related increases for 1980 and 1981.
    • In return, the unions would have to accept the use of electronic news gathering equipment (also known as ENG). In other words, that would be the increased use of video over film cameras on location.
    • The three unions all decided to hold off from either reccomending or refusing the offer, and put it to their members in a national ballot.
    • Paul Fox, one of the heads of Yorkshire TV and part of the negotionating team, warns everyone that management were willing to start an emergency service, operated by themselves, to transmit the new autumn schedule. (Something like this had happened once before in 1968.)

    24th September

    • The ACTT decides that it won’t recommend the offer. This means EEPTU and NATTKE will follow suit.

    26th / 27th September

    • Following the ACTT’s refusal, everyone else follows suit and the results of the union’s national ballot overwhelmingly turns down ITV’s offer. Once again, no meaningful progress of any kind has been made…

    Late September / Early October

    • The ACTT put forward another claim. This redoubled their original demand, bringing the asked pay rise to 30%, backdated to July. The cost of living rises would be a 1% rise in pay in January 1980, and another 1% rise in July 1980.
    • ITV turns down this offer flat, delcaring it to be “unrealistic”, and stating that such an demand might lead to pay going up to 50%.

    11th October

    • After weeks of deadlock, a major breakthrough occurs when NATTKE settle for a 26.3% pay rise to occur over the following year. EEPTU, who were negoating along with NATTKE, also agree to settle with that deal.

    12th October

    • With the other two unions forcing ACTT’s hand, the ITV companies work out a new pay deal with ACTT. They agree on an increase of pay between 40 to 45% over the following two years, the precise rise to be decided by the increase in cost of living.
    • The ACTT agree to the gradual introduction of ENG, but without any staff being made redundant.
    • Alan Sapper, leader of the ACTT, agrees not to recommend a rejection and puts it to a national ballot.

    12th – 18th (?) October

    • At some point during this period, EEPTU and NATTKE members vote in favour of the agreed deal.

    19th October

    • ACTT members across the country vote four to one in agreeing to the deal. For some reason, the only ITV company whose staff attempt to reject it are at Border Television. This may have been something to do with “Windscale”.
    • The strike was effectively over – now began the rush to get back on screen.

    Sound on, Vision on

    At 12:47PM on 24th October, ITV returned – for about 15 seconds, about five hours ahead of the actual start time. If this sounds like a weird accident, you’d be right.

    A Thames TV supervisor called Laurie Baker happened to be sitting in the announcer’s chair as everyone at Thames was checking the continuity studio’s equipment. Someone somewhere pressed the wrong button, and Mr Baker’s face was briefly transmitted across the entire nation until the wrong button was un-pressed.

    The actual return of ITV happened at approx 5:40PM, later that night.

    …Unless you lived in the Westward region, in which case two days previously you had been treated to a special transmission of the local news programe Westward Diary. The presenters welcomed (…welcomed, welcomed) everyone back well before Laurie Baker’s 15 seconds of fame. Apparently the lighting hadn’t been sorted out at that point, and everything was quite murky.

    The return of ITV, recorded from UNKNOWN REGION

    To give all the ITV regions a little bit of a way to get back into the swing of things, it was decided that the grand re-opening night would be networked directly from London. Thames TV took the honours, and pretended to be just plain old “ITV” that evening, going to the length of adjusting the Thames clock and having one of their senior announcers – Peter Marshall – addressing the entire nation as one big national channel.

    However, some space was left for individual regions to do their thing. Over at HTV, one of their main announcers – possibly either Terry Dyddgen-Jones or Gwyn Parry – opened up services for Wales & The West with a useful explanation of how all the usual programmes were going to get back on-air over the following week, and precisely what was happening that night. An audio recording of this definitely exists, as I’ve heard it… but, erm, I can’t find it anywhere now.

    Over at Yorkshire, they launched with a full YTV start-up, using a new start-up theme and caption that had been intended to debut the previous month:

    It also seems that STV took the same route as HTV that night – but went much further beyond a mere introduction. From the Scotland On Air wiki (which has proved to be an invaluable resource in putting all of this together):

    STV did its own presentation that evening rather than taking the national service. Chief Announcer Tony Currie did the usual start-up at 17:40 before the ITN News at 5.45 and, during the evening, the station had local commercials and voiceover slides. Currie did an in-vision closedown after the film Chinatown.

    And like STV, it seems most other ITV regions also did their own local closedowns.

    One very well-recalled element of this first night back was the “Welcome home to ITV” graphic package, and the close-harmony sung theme. This jingle and promo package had been reportedly put together about a couple of weeks previously, using unaffiliated technicians and talent, in anticpation of having something ready to go after the strike ended.

    It seems to have only been used for at most a week, possibly only a few days – but everyone watching at the time has had the following burnt into their brains for evermore:

    After the rundown of that night’s programmes, which included The Muppet Show, the TV premiere of the movie Chinatown and the first of many, many episodes of 3-2-1 (of which there was a massive backlog), ITV went straight into the News At 5:45. Newscaster Leonard Parkin summed up the mood of everyone watching and working for the channel…

    Good evening, again… it’s good to be back again, so let me simply say, let’s get on with it.

    Epilogue

    There’s a fair bit more that can be written about the 1979 ITV strike. I’m just going to end this on one final little thing.

    Around January 1980 – a date which at one point was theorised to be the potential end of the strike – Heineken put out an advert that must have caused some viewers to have a heart attack when it began.

    The following is from the History Of Advertising Trust – watch below…