10 Computer Hits 3 – “Software & sweatshirt competition”

In December 1982, the London band Incantation had a UK #12 hit with “Cacharpaya (Andes Pumpsa Desi)”, an upbeat panpipe-based instrumental which the composer Michael Land may or may not have been familiar with when working on The Secret of Monkey Island. Incantation even got to perform it on TV on Top of the Pops, introduced by David Jensen and John Peel. Their accompanying album Cacharpaya (Panpipes of the Andes) made the top ten and spent 26 weeks on the charts. The panpipe trend wouldn’t reach its full heights until the mid-’90s, when ten different albums with titles including ‘pan pipes’ charted between 1995 and 1997, but “Cacharpaya” also had some more immediate followers.

Less than a year after Incantation’s album, in September 1983, Paul Leoni reached #17 in the UK album chart with Flights of Fancy: the Beautiful Sound of the Panpipes. This featured a bunch of movie themes, well-known traditional songs and recent hits all played, generally quite slowly, on panpipes: “The Godfather”, “El Condor Pasa”, “True”. It also included, of course, a version of “Cacharpaya”. The album’s success was a breakthrough for a new record label, Nouveau Music. Its owners had taken the name Nouveau from a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau wine they were drinking. And at the same time as setting up the record label, they started up a computer game label which took the other half of the name: Beau Jolly.

That detail on the inspiration for Beau Jolly’s name comes from an article on the label by Graeme Mason in Retro Gamer issue 101. So does essentially everything else I can find out about the behind the scenes of Beau Jolly. I recommend going and reading the article, because it’s an interesting story. I will run through the highlights briefly, before going on to where I can add a bit more to the story of Beau Jolly’s 10 Computer Hits series including the #1 hit third iteration: chart research!

Beau Jolly’s founders, Colin Ashby and Nigel Mason, previously worked for the UK branch of American record label K-Tel, specialists in compilations. K-Tel had scored a UK #1 album back in 1981 with the self-explanatory Chart Hits ‘81, back before the Now That’s What I Call Music series took over that particular patch. Nigel Mason’s job at K-Tel was to pick the tracks for compilations and license them from their record companies. He and Colin Ashby initially left to run their own music compilation label, before giving up on that over funding issues and instead starting Nouveau and refocusing on original recordings. For some value of original.

Over in the world of computer games, they saw more of a chance to go with the plan they’d started with, and started trying to license games, contacting labels starting with the biggest and most impressive. In 1983, that meant Imagine Software. And so, when Imagine collapsed, Beau Jolly were in the right place at the right time. Ocean took the name Imagine, but Beau Jolly took the games, selling sets of them in 16K and 48K Spectrum compilations called The Value Pack and paying for advertising on TV. 

From there they went back to the original plan, putting together compilations of hits from different labels. Nigel Mason told Retro Gamer: “we would go for the biggest games that we could get in terms of sales, popularity and chart position and work our way down from there.” They would put together whatever disparate familiar titles they could get, in a rather similar manner to their other label’s panpipe album tracklisting. They also had an approach to offset some of the risks of high spend on TV advertising: “we would book a three-week campaign which could be pulled after a week – so we would phone up a selected number of our network of stores and work out if the projected sales justified the extra two weeks.”

When the highly successful charity compilation Soft Aid came out in 1985 and prompted a trend for software compilations, Beau Jolly were ahead of the game. As other companies realised the value of their back catalogues more and more, though, and TV advertising costs increased, things eventually got a bit more difficult for them. Their chart peak came in November 1986, with the third installment of their 10 Computer Hits series, following the first two in November 1985 and March 1986.

Beau Jolly released the original 10 Computer Hits on Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum. It reached #4 on the combined formats chart. Each version had its own set of ten games. There was some crossover, particularly for the BBC Micro and its budget alternative the Electron, but more difference than commonality, and no game appeared on every format. In total, Beau Jolly actually licensed more than thirty different games. Each copy of 10 Computer Hits sold on whatever format did contain ten computer games. Ten computer hits, though? To test that, I turn to my favourite 8-bit chart resource… Computer Hits. (You know, that name might not be a coincidence.) 

The chart records preserved from magazines and papers are not exactly free of gaps, so the absence of a game from them doesn’t rule it out from having been a hit of some kind. But it’s more reliable at the top end since really big hits stick around. There are a lot of games on 10 Computer Hits which do not appear to have troubled the charts. Each format has at least one properly big hit, though. Mostly versions of Chuckie Egg, plus Harrier Attack! on the Spectrum and C64 and Skool Daze on the Spectrum. The latter being the most impressive for the original game not already being two years old by that point.

By 10 Computer Hits 2, there were already noticeably fewer big hits included. Which is not that surprising for the process of again working down a list of games trying to make deals, only six months later. None of the C64 games on it appear to have charted at all bar Snooker, which at least was a C64 #1 back in 1983. The Spectrum and CPC likewise each had one #1 from that format’s charts, in Technician Ted and Mutant Monty respectively, while the BBC Micro and Electron had a larger number of slightly smaller hits. It’s easy to call shenanigans at the CPC version featuring Micropower’s little known Gauntlet, which was not the then-new Atari arcade hit of the same name. The TV advert for 10 Computer Hits 2 is on YouTube, alongside some other Beau Jolly ones, and is functional, in line with the covers of their compilations. It reached #4 on the combined formats chart.

So to Beau Jolly’s #1 hit. The BBC and Electron versions of 10 Computer Hits 3 were back up to the level of the first 10 Computer Hits, with their own versions of Snooker plus, on the BBC Micro, the iconic Manic Miner. The Commodore 64 version also had an iconic name, on a bit of a smaller scale, with Jeff Minter’s Attack of the Mutant Camels. Elsewhere on the C64 compilation, I want to highlight the flip-screen exploration game Elidon. Not because it was a hit at all, but because you play as a fairy and I think its presence on 10 Computer Hits 3 probably makes it the first game with solely a female main character to have, kind of, topped the UK chart. (The first similarly chart-topping game with the option of playing as a female main character was Ant Attack, through its appearance on Soft Aid).

For 10 Computer Hits 3, Beau Jolly also managed to do deals for a couple of games for which the timing was perfect — Cauldron and Dynamite Dan had both just got sequels. This meant that while they had been top 5 hits and were a little more than a year old, their labels were presumably happier to give them away on the cheap in the hope of attracting people to buy said sequels. (Kate Willaert has coincidentally made recent videos about both Cauldron II and Dynamite Dan II, which are worth watching). Cauldron appears on 10 Computer Hits 3 across all three of the most popular formats: Spectrum, C64 and CPC; Dynamite Dan appears on both C64 and CPC.

Those kind of deals for actual hits must have helped 10 Computer Hits 3, but I don’t think they were the main reason why it was the one to reach the top of the charts. And neither was the sweatshirt competition advertised on the cover. I suspect that the main reason was Beau Jolly adding versions for even more formats, in the shape of the MSX (biggest hit: Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge) and, crucially, the Commodore 16. As we saw with Speed King a few months earlier, for a period in 1986, serving Commodore’s budget computer was a winning route. The biggest hit on the C16 version of 10 Computer Hits 3 was World Cup, i.e. the Artic game that became the derided World Cup Carnival, but never mind.

Where the first 10 Computer Hits involved licensing more than 30 different games in total, for 10 Computer Hits 3 that had become more than 50 games. There’s a reason I haven’t taken the approach of playing and writing about all of them. It might also help explain why it took a whole year before 10 Computer Hits 4. Despite Beau Jolly finding a whole different way to make that one’s title inaccurate, by including twelve games, it only reached #15 on the combined formats chart. 

Things were shifting, with a whole lot of budget games in the chart ahead of it. Beau Jolly reckoned that someone would only need to be interested in five games on one of their 10 Computer Hits compilations to buy it. However, paying £9.99 for a compilation with five disparate old games that caught your eye must have become less compelling as it became easier to, instead, buy five specific games you were interested in for £1.99 each. By the end of 1987, magazine covertape wars were also getting underway, offering the even more attractive alternative of getting your random old games for free with a magazine. Beau Jolly would continue into the 1990s, but never again capture the moment quite like in 1986.

---

---

---

Sources:

• From the Archives: Beau Jolly, Graeme Mason, Retro Gamer No. 101, March 2012
• Incantation, Paul Leoni, ‘pan pipes’, chart histories at Official Charts
• 10 Computer Hits, 10 Computer Hits 2, 10 Computer Hits 3, 10 Computer Hits 4, chart histories at Computer Hits
• The Spectrum covertape wars, Graeme Mason, Wizwords, 2014

---