Batman – “Batcraft parts”

For Jon Ritman, playing Knight Lore for the first time was a revelatory experience. As he later told Retro Gamer, when he first saw Ultimate’s isometric 3D platform adventure game, his jaw hit the floor. “The graphics were startling at the time […] I loved the way sprites just neatly slid behind objects in front of them”. Years later he would still call it his favourite Spectrum game ever. “When I first saw it I had no idea how it was achieved”, he continued. He set out to work out the secrets of its construction, though, and to make his own version. He more than succeeded, going on to work on a game which at least rivals Knight Lore as the definitive example of the genre.

Ritman’s career in games started some years earlier at the beginning of his twenties, when working for Radio Rentals. That was a retail chain which had switched from the 1930s origins of its name to mostly renting televisions. He saw the potential for microcomputers to become another line of business, and got himself a ZX81 to see what it was all about. Soon he was hooked, and learning to program to make his own games. He sent off his game Namtir Raiders, based on Irem’s arcade space shooter Uniwar S, to various publishers and Yorkshire-based Artic soon signed it up for release.

He moved to the Spectrum and carried on making games for Artic, with 3D Combat Zone, Dimension Destructors and Bear Bovver all making it into the UK charts, albeit with #20 the highest placement. That was success enough to make it worth his while to give up his day job and focus on programming. He was less than satisfied with Artic’s promotion of his games, however, seeing their adverts as dull and ineffective. When he suggested something different for Bear Bovver, they messed up the timing. He and Artic employee Chris Clarke decided to leave the company behind and try their luck elsewhere.

Searching for ideas that might be popular, they looked at the success of International Soccer on the Commodore 64 and saw an opportunity – the Spectrum badly lacked a decent football game. They started making one, and were alarmed not long afterwards to learn that Artic were already on the case. They were alarmed until they actually played Artic’s World Cup Football, anyway; the Spectrum still badly lacked a decent football game. Jon Ritman expressed as much to Ocean boss David Ward at an industry event and told him that he was making something much better. Ocean followed up, and published Ritman and Clarke’s game when it was ready.

In line with Ocean’s widespread approach of tying in games with existing popular phenomena, they carefully named it Match Day. This was to suggest the BBC’s Match of the Day without any official tie-in, and each match starts with a bit of that show’s theme music. Ritman had avoided looking too closely at International Soccer, and created a game with its own feel. As Richard Moss memorably describes it in his history of football games A Tale of Two Halves, Match Day’s footballers “have the look of a gentlemen out for an evening jaunt, his arms pumping and knees lifting with unnecessary enthusiasm as he walks briskly, mechanically and purposely forward, stiffly upright, eager to get a good puff going before he returns home for tea.” Idiosyncrasies aside, it functioned as a much better football game than World Cup Football and was a big success. It reached #2 in the chart in January 1985, held off the top spot by Ghostbusters.

By then, Ritman had had his fateful encounter with Knight Lore, and knew what he wanted to do next. He also knew, as Bear Bovver and Match Day well evidenced, that he didn’t have the artistic or graphical skills to do his idea justice. He turned to Bernie Drummond, a friend who played in a new wave band and did their artwork alongside assorted other cartooning. Drummond had never worked on a computer game before, but soon showed that he could produce something suitable, and Ritman commissioned him for more art, giving him outlines of what he wanted and having him come back with a set of possible options.

As they developed their isometric game and could see it working technically, they needed a concept and a character. Jon Ritman suggested the old comics character Batman with some hesitancy, given Batman’s lack of popularity at the time, just before the comics run that became The Dark Knight Returns started changing things. Bernie Drummond reassured Ritman that some kids he played football with regularly talked about watching the 1960s Batman series on TV. 

That series had been shown in the UK on and off since the ’60s, and ITV channels had started a long run of repeats in April 1984. The show would reach peak popularity in late 1987 and early 1988, when TV-AM technicians went on strike and most of ITV’ s morning programming was replaced with Batman repeats. (The technicians were in the same union as those who ITV didn’t want to pay enough to be able to show the 1984 Olympics, ultimately contributing to the success of Ocean’s game version of V). Even before that unlikely boost, though, Batman was enough of a cultural force to be a goer. 

Drummond turned his artistic talents to producing a delightful pixel art Adam West Batman, and Ocean worked out a licensing deal with Batman owners DC. The only change DC ended up requiring in the game involved the initial plan to call its power-ups ‘bat-pills’. “Batman doesn’t take drugs” came the instruction. It was changed to ‘bat-powers’. That things mostly went smoothly fitted with how much the use of the Batman licence was right in Ocean’s wheelhouse. They had done Rambo: First Blood Part II as a clearly Commando-inspired game, and V as a “poor man’s Impossible Mission”. It was entirely in keeping to release a Batman game that was basically The Dark Knight Lore.

By mid-’80s standards, Ritman and Drummond took a very long time over Batman’s development, and by the time it came out the genre was becoming a crowded one. Bo Jangeborg and Jack Wilkes’ Fairlight and Dusko Dimitrijevic and Mario Mandic’s Movie had both hit the top of the Spectrum charts, and Ultimate themselves had followed Knight Lore up with Alien 8, Nightshade and Gunfright. Nonetheless, Batman was impressive. “This is yet another Ultimate lookalike, but believe me it’s a good one”, said Jerry Muir in Sinclair User. “The game’s a definite development since the Knight Lore days” wrote Tommy Nash in Your Sinclair. “Batman keeps up a constant speed no matter how many objects there are in a room – none of those short, slow steps that held Sabreman back.”

In some ways, Batman sticks more closely to the basics of the Knight Lore and Alien 8 model than any of the others. Bernie Drummond’s art gives it an entirely different feel, though. He too had been surprised and impressed by Knight Lore and its “Disney style graphics” and “big, visually distinct, solid sprites”. His specific take for Batman was inspired by “Batman comics where Batman would be fighting the foe on a giant typewriter, a bit Alice in Wonderland”, which is a delightful explanation for the game’s various outsized objects and creatures. 

Drummond’s art for Batman also reflected his general inclination towards ornate detail. Knight Lore had walls represented by just a few patches of brickwork amidst the space so as not to be too busy. Alien 8 had simple geometric patterns. Batman is set in the caves below Batman’s headquarters (which the manual refers to as both Bat-caves and catacombs, but sadly never Batacombs), and for its crepuscular world Ritman and Drummond lowered the height of walls and went all in with dense, complicated pixel art, to evocative effect.

Jon Ritman also added some crucial gameplay tweaks in going from Knight Lore to Batman. One of these was an early instance of checkpoints. As Crash wrote in their review, “the reincarnation stones scattered around the play area are extremely useful, as they give you the opportunity to lose a few lives trying to suss out a problem and come back later with a few lives remaining”. Although there’s only so far that goes in ameliorating the same use of cruel traps, like some conveyer belts being indistinguishable from normal platforms, that had been a feature of the genre since Knight Lore. Playing Batman now, I found using an emulator’s more advanced version of reincarnation stones a necessity for much progress. 

I can entirely sympathise with Mathew Kumar’s experience of coming to the game last year, inspired by childhood nostalgia for a later Ritman and Drummond game. “Playing Batman has to be one of the most demoralising gaming experiences I’ve ever had, genuinely feeling like being trapped in a carnival funhouse until I can solve a Rubik’s cube while a car alarm goes off (don’t play this without making Batman’s footsteps silent…)”. The sound was clearly a talking point in 1986 too, with one Popular Computing Weekly reader writing in and saying that “Batman is terrific and I find that I do not even mind his footsteps. They are so much in character with his dinky footwork.”

At the beginning of the game, Batman’s dinky footwork is entirely bound to the ground. You can move around, dodging some randomly moving enemies, but have no way of getting off the ground. You can see some doorways tantalisingly placed up a step, unreachable. After a short while, you acquire Batman’s Batboots, and it’s only then that you can jump, and go back and go through those doors. There are similar set-ups with his Batbag, Bat-thrusters and Batbelt, all of which give you extra movement abilities and unlock previously closed off paths. It provides an additional level of discovery and anticipation which adds a lot to the enjoyability of exploration. 

This is a very familiar approach from modern games, but in early 1986 it was another matter, and rather forward-thinking. In Kate Willært’s excellent recent video on the etymology of ‘Metroidvania’, the popular modern descriptor for a type of exploration-based platformers, she provides a helpful definition. “Metroidvania: A video game subgenre of platform adventure in which progress is made by discovering and acquiring dual-purpose abilities that allow access to previously blocked paths”. Since in Batman your enhanced jumping and ability to pick up objects not only helps with exploration but also assists you in dealing with the game’s enemies, I think that makes it clear. Batman is a Metroidvania, in 3D, released before Metroid.

Or, at least, Batman begins as a Metroidvania, before turning into something more typical for the time. You can collect all of Batman’s equipment before even seeing 20% of the game’s rooms. For the majority of its quest to find the pieces of Batman’s Batcraft to go and rescue Robin, he has his full set of abilities, and progression is no longer gated by gaining them. Reviews didn’t dwell on the possibilities of the opening section much because it was fairly insignificant to the game as a whole.

On the other hand, it’s worth putting that in the context of the game’s difficulty. Jon Ritman did more playtesting than some of his peers – he got his girlfriend to play Batman a whole week before completion, and adjusted some rooms as a result – but he became well aware of players’ struggles with it. “There is a room (about 9 rooms in) with an exploding bridge that many buyers never mastered”, he recalled in one retrospective interview. “That should not have been so early in the game”. Perhaps the gathering of powers was as far as many players got.

Either way, Batman was a critical and commercial success, something which set both its creators and Ocean up very well for the future. Amstrad Action, playing the CPC version, wrote that Batman was “not much like the DC comic strip, but an awful lot like the TV series – this game is very witty and totally absurd. It’s also ingenious, wickedly difficult and graphically miraculous”. Back on the Spectrum, Computer & Video Games declared that “once you start playing you will soon realise you are dealing with a game which is destined to become an all time classic”. Batman, however, is not the game I meant when I started this post off by referring to Jon Ritman working on perhaps the genre’s definitive text. That was Ritman and Drummond’s follow-up, Head Over Heels.

There is an intriguing note in Sinclair User’s Batman review when discussing the game’s plot. “Originally, Robin was meant to have a starring role […] but then they hit a stumbling block. How do you make it easy for the player to control two superheroes simultaneously? It was at this point that Robin was conveniently kidnapped!”. I wasn’t able to find any interview where Ritman or Drummond mentioned having the idea of two player characters that early, but it would be an odd thing to have made up.

Whenever the idea came in, they decided to make dual characters the defining element of their next game, built on an improved version of the framework they had used for Batman. The game would have two characters with different abilities who could work separately or joined together, with players switching between the two at will, even when they were in different places. Ritman saw this primarily as a way to expand on the possibilities for puzzles. Crash and Sinclair User both got as far as publishing details of the forthcoming game with the characters named as Foot and Mouth. Jon Woods of Ocean intervened to tell Ritman and Drummond that they could not call their characters, or their game, that. Perhaps with the Tears for Fears hit of a couple of years earlier in mind, it became Head Over Heels.

Head Over Heels was a tour de force for both Ritman and Drummond. One obvious technical challenge was getting it to support two rooms at the same time, something which Ritman said he had put off coding out of worry about its difficulty. He actually achieved it in about two hours. This time he also put even more careful thought into designing the game’s rooms, and sent it for some earlier playtesting. Compared to Batman, Head Over Heels’s puzzles are more interesting and, at least initially, much more approachable. It has something recognisable as a difficulty curve, and such bright ideas as keeping some tough platforming challenges as side paths which reward you with extra lives rather than being essential to progress.

Drummond, meanwhile, got to go further with cartoon proportions and fully indulge in whimsy and cuteness. He took Alien 8’s dalek mouse hybrid and turned it into a dalek Prince Charles, initially designed after a Bash Street Kids character before Ritman pointed out the resemblance with funnier potential. The game’s level of detail and invention is impressively consistent, and the main characters are a triumph. Despite the names, it’s not just Head that is pretty much all head and no body. “This both made the collisions look more convincing and gave more pixel room for facial features”, Drummond said later. He ultimately based Head on Snoopy and Heels on “a bulldog chewing a wasp” and they are distinctive and effective. 

The charming aesthetic and lower difficulty level were not the only way they set out to make an inclusive game, as Drummond later explained. “The characters were never intended to be male or female; as a politically aware youngster, I was nervous of appearing sexist, racist and brutalist.” The game’s manual has a section about the game’s story which manages to avoid using any gendered pronouns… before its character glossary goes right ahead and uses “his” for both Head and Heels.

Head Over Heels’s longer version of Batman’s opening stretch iterates its design ideas and builds on the strength of the new characters in a particularly sublime way. Head and Heels start off with access to the same room, but are separated by an impenetrable fence. They go off on their separate paths, Heels collects a version of the Batbag, and they tantalisingly cross over on different parts of the same screen once more. After more trials still which test their different abilities, they are finally, ecstatically, united, just in time to use their combined powers to escape into the game’s main hub world. It’s a perfect combination of gameplay and narrative.

Sinclair User’s Jim Douglas called Head Over Heels “A very wonderful ticket to runny-jumpy-avoidy city. Choc-full of puzzles and humour”. Computer & Video Games called Head Over Heels “graphically immaculate”. Crash reviewers said “everything fits together perfectly” and called it both “definitely the best Ritman/Drummond game yet” and “the ultimate game”, adding that “it proves to all disbelievers that there is still something left in the forced perspective 3D world.” Even just a year on from Batman, though, tastes were changing, and Head Over Heels only reached #12 in the charts.

It went on to be thought of as one of the Spectrum’s best games, and continued to sell over time. Like Batman, Head Over Heels got a slightly more colourful Amstrad version alongside the Spectrum one. This time, though, Ocean also released a Commodore 64 version a little later, developed by Colin Porch. Development involved some lengthy phone conversations with Jon Ritman where they walked through every step of the code for the two versions. It paid off; Steve Jarrett in Zzap! 64 wrote that “The programmers have achieved a considerable coup for Ocean in managing to convert what is considered to be the arcade adventure on the Spectrum to the 64 with almost no loss of speed, clarity or playability”. I can confirm this in reverse, in that it was the Commodore 64 version I played and adored as a child, but the Spectrum version feels nostalgically perfect to me now too.

After Ritman and Drummond worked together on Match Day II (released later in 1987 and another #2 hit), Jon Ritman moved on from freelancing for Ocean to a new opportunity. Ultimate were well into the process of switching over to becoming Rare and focusing on making games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. They put out an advert for programmers and Ritman successfully applied. With the technical expertise he had well demonstrated with Batman and Head Over Heels, he got to work on Rare’s internal development software, contributing to systems that they would use in producing some of their classic games in the 1990s. 

Busy with that, Ritman didn’t get any chance to make his own games for a while. That changed in 1994, when Rare were after a game for Nintendo’s Game Boy. Ritman set to work on another isometric 3D platform adventure, Monster Max, once again joined by Bernie Drummond. Drummond relished the challenges presented by the Game Boy’s much smaller screen resolution, and Ritman took the chance to iterate the genre for more modern gameplay tastes once again. 

“Isometric visuals are a difficult perspective for a Game Boy to handle, but it does it very well here”, wrote Deniz Ahmet in reviewing Monster Max for Computer & Video Games, “There’s always plenty of detail on the screen, and there’s plenty of depth in the puzzles. Presentation is very tidy and the control system is very comfortable yet functional.” Monster Max was not a hit, not helped by whatever happened at publishers Titus that led to a months-long gap between reviews and its release. It remains well-regarded, though, and still represented a wonderful full-circle moment. Jon Ritman set out to work out how Ultimate had made Knight Lore, and he did it so well that he ended up making a successor for them.

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Sources:

• Knight Lore: a 30-year legacy, Martyn Carroll, Retro Gamer No. 126, March 2014
• Ocean: The History, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Retro Fusion Books, 2013
• From Namtir Raiders, to a bit of bovver with bears then on to Batman… and beyond, Crash No. 33, October 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive and also available at Crash Online
• Interview with Jon Ritman, Emulate!, 1996, accessed via World of Spectrum
• An interview with Jon Ritman, T.A.G.C.R., 2006
• 213 The Jon Ritman Interview, Retro Gaming Discussion Show, 2018
• Dev History: Jon Ritman, Graeme Mason, Antstream Arcade, 2020
• Q&A with: Classic game designer Jon Ritman, Spillhistorie.no, 2025
• Bernie Drummond interview, Retroinvaders, 2009
• Chatting with Bernie Drummond, Graeme Mason, Wizwords, 2021 
• Playing Catch Up: Match Day’s Jon Ritman, Alistair Wallis, Game Developer, 2007
• The making of Match Day, Graeme Mason, Eurogamer, 2014
• A Tale of Two Halves: The History of Football Video Games, Richard Moss, Bitmap Books, 2024
• Batman TV listing from 1984, @underconsolepod.bsky.social, 2026
• Batman to the rescue of strike-ridden British morning TV, Ed Lion, UPI, 1987
• Batman, Tommy Nash, Your Sinclair No. 5, May 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Great Golden Age splashes, I. M. Baytor, Gotham Calling, 2014
• Batman, Crash No. 28, May 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Batman (Ocean, 1986), Mathew Kumar, exp., 2025
• Letters – Dinky footwork, Hugh T Walker, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 5 No. 22, 29 May – 04 June 1986
• The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread, Kate Willært, A Critical Hit, 2025
• Action Test – Batman, Amstrad Action No. 8, May 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Batman, Jerry Muir, Sinclair User No. 50, May 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Software reviews – Batman, Computer & Video Games No. 55, May 1986, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• The making of Head Over Heels, Graeme Mason, Eurogamer, 2016
• Living Worlds of Action and Adventure, Part 3: Head Over Heels, Exile, and Dizzy, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2017
• Preview – Base over tip after Batman, Sinclair User No. 61, April 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Head Over Heels, Jim Douglas, Sinclair User No. 62, May 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Software reviews – Head Over Heels, Computer & Video Games No. 67, May 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Head Over Heels, Crash No. 39, April 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• ZZap! Test – Head Over Heels, Zzap! 64 No. 28, August 1987, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Monster Max, Apollo Chungus, Hardcore Gaming 101, 2018
• Monster Max – Jon Ritman (interview), Apollo Chungus, Hardcore Gaming 101, 2018
• Review – Monster Max, Computer & Video Games No. 147, February 1994, accessed via Sega Retro
• Combat Zone 3D, Dimension Destructors, Bear Bovver, Match Day, Fairlight, Movie, Head Over Heels, Match Day II, chart histories at Computer Hits

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