In 1983, three men set up a new magazine focused on Spectrum games. Partners Roger Kean and Oli Frey had experience in publishing. They previously worked on the gay magazine HIM, ending up running it before having to sell off the rights after the police destroyed all its stock in a raid under the Obscene Publications Act. Joined by Oli’s brother Franco Frey, they wanted to bring a new energy to the world of writing about games. Kean told Home Computing Weekly: “Computer games represent a major new area of entertainment, but producers and distributors aren’t treating it with the sort of showbiz zap found in the pop music industry. Yet in many ways the two are very similar”. For their magazine, they went with a short and sharp name that did not include the word “computer”, and called it Crash. The title’s resemblance to that of pop magazine Smash Hits is unlikely to have been coincidental.

In an editorial in the first issue of Crash, Kean described an encounter at a trade event with a representative of a leading software house who had seen some samples of the planned magazine. “He disapproved of trying to con people with exciting artwork that has little to do with the quality of graphics contained in the programs available, and our intention of having plenty of exciting artwork in the magazine was basically dishonest”. Other developers would prove rather better suited to Crash’s pop-powered mindset. Ultimate Play the Game, creators of Jetpac and Lunar Jetman, were already bigger on exciting artwork (and exciting writing) than fussy technicality, and would only get more so. Their best period would line up perfectly with the rise of Crash.  

Ultimate’s way with visuals came in part from having two team members with that as their focus. Carole Ward had trained in graphic design; Tim Stamper’s artistic abilities can be seen in the cover art he painted. Alongside programming-focused Chris Stamper and John Lathbury, they worked as a collective, credited in adverts as “The ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME design team”. The group told David Kelly of Popular Computing Weekly in August 1983 that they always worked together on each project, starting off with planning and design on paper. Rather than the lone programmers or big teams for hire seen elsewhere, they were four people with different skills working in harmony. It sounds rather like a band. It allowed them to produce a varied range of games which nonetheless had a common feel. They gave their cassettes a release schedule with the rhythm of a pop singles campaign. 

When planning their releases for the end of 1983, Ultimate opted for a double-pronged approach. They had Lunar Jetman, the sequel to their biggest hit, to consolidate their position. Then they immediately followed it with something newer and even more ambitious, in the form of Atic Atac. Set in a big haunted house, Atic Atic is a top-down flip-screen explorer where you run around fighting enemies, picking up objects and trying to figure out how to escape. There are hints of each of Ultimate’s lesser known 16K games. The movement and shooting is like Cookie, the colour-coded switching of different pickups a more developed version of that in Pssst. The freeform exploration gameplay is on a scale they’d previously only attempted on Tranz Am.

Instead of the big empty space of Tranz Am, Atic Atac is packed with things to see, items, special enemies and secret passages. It also tones down the deadliness of enemies compared to previous games so its difficulty manifests quite differently. If you don’t have quick enough reflexes, your health will get worn down quicker over time than the availability of food to counter that, and you’re unlikely to escape. Along the way, though, you get plenty of chance to explore a bit. Since the setting is large and full of trapdoors, you’re quite likely to send up exploring different bits of the house each time, too. Atic Atac even gives you a choice of three different characters (knight, wizard and serf – a bit like Gauntlet minus even the one female option), each with access to different secret passages, to further push that variety.

That gave Atic Atic a new kind of appeal compared even to the comparatively sophisticated Lunar Jetman. Its arcade aspects are pared down to a sharp point — dodge and shoot stuff, bouncing your shots off the wall if needed — to add the mystery and mapping aspect of an adventure like The Hobbit. Only instead of getting static screens described to you, you can see this whole sprawling setting, working out its secrets room by room and floor by floor. The lack of clear instructions that was a quirky novelty in Lunar Jetman becomes the centre of the game. Doors open and close by themselves, strange things move around, and it’s up to you to figure it all out. Colour-coded keys to open certain doors is an obvious one, but as well as figuring out the routes to do that in, there is less self-evident stuff in there. Like using a spanner to defeat Frankenstein’s monster.

Given that even something like Flight Simulation ended up sending players off to add their own imaginative overlays, it’s not surprising that Atic Atac’s atmosphere and open-ended nature was greatly inspiring to many. One player, Tim Child, would go on to use the experience of playing Atic Atac as the starting point for a classic of British children’s television, the pioneering game show Knightmare. As part of its blue-screen-aided adventure, it even had a health counter modeled on Atic Atac’s, except instead of a roast chicken slowly being eaten away it was someone’s head. Other Atic Atac players didn’t take things so far, but spent their time drawing out maps of the haunted house. Which is where Crash comes back in.

The first ever issue of Crash featured a preview of Atic Atac, promising a full review next time with “an overall rating well into the 90s”. Delays in publication meant issue 1 eventually came out in January 1984, more than a month after the game. By that point Atic Atac was already a huge hit. People still carried on playing it and sharing their experiences, though, and Crash came back to it several times. Crash didn’t get any interviews with Ultimate, but neither did any other magazine any more.

When Roger Kean and Crash did eventually get to talk to the Ultimate design team under a different guise in 1988, they asked about this. “Was it a conscious policy to be mysterious? Was it seen as good PR?”. Tim Stamper denied it, saying that they had just been too busy. This seems unlikely, not least because of what they evidently weren’t too busy to do. Which was to create a physical trophy based on the key you ultimately use to escape in Atic Atac, to be offered as a prize in Crash #5.

Rare Replay (Rare, Xbox One, 2015)

Crash promised the ACG Key trophy to whoever could “produce the best, most accurate map of the rooms comprising the game Atic Atac”, with all the passages, staircases, and fixtures and fittings. Two issues later they dedicated four pages of the next issue to the results, a selection of images from the top entries, and a pull-out map drawn by Oli Frey based on those entries. Crash and Ultimate would go on to repeat the exercise for several more of their games. That helps shows how Atic Atac was where Ultimate made a transition to a different level. They had properly discovered how to wield the power of mystery and to inspire dedication and creativity. They also now had just the right like-minded outlet to help spread the word even further. Ultimate had the keys to open more new passageways ahead.

  • PCS individual formats chart for fortnight ending 4 December 1983, Home Computing Weekly
  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 9 December 1983, Personal Computer News
  • MRIB combined formats chart for fortnight ending 20 December 1983, Personal Computer News
  • ASP individual formats chart (arcade) for week ending 7 April 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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