From the point in 1983 where the Spectrum got firmly established as the UK’s most popular computer (so… my second post), the games I’ve written about have had a few common features. Over the course of a whole year from June 1983 to June 1984, there are certain things that have applied to fifteen successive #1s. They’ve all reached the top of the charts in their ZX Spectrum version, they’ve all been made by people in their teens or (usually early) twenties, and those creators have all been based in the UK or Australia. And now for something completely different.

Commodore 64s started being sold in UK shops at the end of 1982, already a fair bit after Sinclair had released the ZX Spectrum, and took a bit longer to reach many high street shops. It would take the C64 several years to catch up in popularity with the Spectrum, but a look at any mid-1984 chart shows that by then it was already at least clear in second place when it came to selling games. C64 conversions of Manic Miner and Twin Kingdom Valley both reached #1 during April 1984. What it lacked at this time was the same explosion in young programmers inventing games specifically for it.

  • Manic Miner (Software Projects, Commodore 64, 1984)
  • Twin Kingdom Valley (Bug-Byte, 1984, Commodore 64)

In part this was a logical follow-on from its lower sales and the reasons for that, including the C64’s significantly more expensive price. Beyond those factors, getting started on programming graphics for the C64 was also a more difficult task. It’s illustrative that in order to write the simplest of programs to make the text for the summary image at the top of this post, I had to look up the memory locations to poke to change text and background colours (646 and 53281), versus the Spectrum’s rather easier “ink” and “paper” commands. Early C64 owners didn’t have the internet to hand, and its manual was far from exhaustive.

Over in Commodore’s home territory of the USA, they made the C64 available earlier, releasing it in August 1982. One buyer during the time before its UK release was Bruce Carver. He was 31 years old, living in Salt Lake City, Utah, and some way into a career in engineering. The company he worked for, Redd & Associates, had bought a custom computer and handed him the task of single-handedly getting it to work, based on his having taken one computer course at college. In the process of dealing with that responsibility, he found that he rather enjoyed this whole programming thing, and decided to buy a C64 to do some more of it at home.

After some experimentation, Carver produced a program for creating multi-coloured sprites, Spritemaster, something useful enough that he was able to sell it. (With some symmetry, prominent British developers the Oliver Twins would get their own breakthrough three years later with another sprite creation program, in their case for the Amstrad CPC). He released Spritemaster with a cover drawing of him and his children using it, under the name Access Software, having rejected other potential names including Center Soft. When it came to what Carver did next, his location was once again crucial. He went to a Commodore industry event in San Francisco in December 1982, and a Commodore representative was impressed enough to give him a folder of C64 technical information. He told him not to share it with anyone.

  • Neutral Zone (Access, 1983, Commodore 64)
  • Neutral Zone (Access, 1983, Commodore 64)

With access to more understanding about how the computer worked, Carver came up with some new things he could do with scrolling, and made a first-person spaceship shooter called Neutral Zone. From there, an accountant at his day job at Redd, Chris Jones, got interested and joined him in planning for Access’s next game. They had an idea for something with a World War II setting, and perhaps with building on Neutral Zone on his mind, Bruce Carver had a vision of a ship shooting down oncoming aircraft. That would form the central level of a game about removing a dictator from the fictional island of “Kuhn-Lin”, tracking the assault through five stages from start to end.

Beach-Head has a mixture of levels where you control from third person, negotiating your boat or tank, and from first person, shooting at aircraft, shooting at ships, and shooting at a fortress. The levels don’t just hang together thematically, but are linked in the outcome of each affecting future ones. Both of these things were also true of, say, Horace and the Spiders, in the sense that your lives count carried over, but Beach-Head is rather more sophisticated. That includes offering a choice of different routes, letting you skip one stage at the expense of facing greater opposition in the next.

It strives for a type of realism that only Flight Simulation was concerned with out of games I’ve played so far. It doesn’t reach reality, not least because its projectile physics are broken, shooting further even as you lift up beyond 45 degrees. However, it uses the aesthetic of realism effectively, helped by the Commodore 64’s earthier colour palette. The sound is also on a different level to anything that Spectrum games were offering in the UK, with some nice crunchy explosions and something loosely approximating an engine roar as planes fly past.

The game was a success in the US, winning best graphics and best sound effects in a poll run by Billboard magazine and becoming the best-selling computer game of 1983. Of course, that’s not why I’m writing about it. At this point in the story, enter Geoff Brown, from Birmingham – the British one. Like Bruce Carver, he was in his thirties at this point and had an established career before computer games. Two of them, in fact. At the start of the ‘80s he was a teacher, but before that he was a rock singer. Across the ‘60s and ‘70s, he led a succession of bands that released records without quite making it to a hit.

There was The Craig, a psychedelic blues group whose drummer for a time was Carl Palmer, later of prog titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Next was Galliard, with a brassy version of prog rock. Their album Strange Pleasures gets a decent rating from the folks at Rate Your Music, and I’m with them there. Finally, and most successfully, there was Muscles. Their extremely chill rock song with light disco strings “If It Relaxes Your Mind” made it to #47 in Record Mirror’s UK disco chart in summer 1977, sometime around peak disco. This was a sliding doors moment that Geoff Brown would talk about once he started getting interviewed after his business successes in a different medium. Muscles were apparently due to record a performance of the song for Top of the Pops and to be on the nation’s TV screens. Except then Elvis Presley died and the BBC tore up the planned running order.

Outside of his rock exploits, Brown had done a maths degree and a little bit of programming. He bought an Atari 8-bit computer in the early ‘80s, and when he ended up importing an American game he had read about in a magazine, he wondered if there might be an opportunity in saving others that inconvenience. Within a couple of years he was running a huge software distribution business, CentreSoft, together with his wife Anne. He has described her as “extremely tough business-wise”, with their partnership crucial to making them a formidable force. In 1983, they began to think that licensing and publishing games might be even better than just importing or distributing them.

Geoff Brown headed to the US and met with Bruce Carver and Access Software in Salt Lake City as part of a first round of enquiries. He was very impressed by Beach-Head, and could see that its structure with separate levels would lend itself well to conversion from disk to the cassette format more popular here. Brown went all-out to persuade Access to let him publish Beach-Head in the UK, guaranteeing that he would sell 100,000 copies. “I thought, well what can you do? They’re not going to chase me down in England”. Access would not end up with cause to try. For the Browns’ new venture, they chose the name U.S. Gold, and stamped that on a logo with “All American Software” below. Their first big all-American success would not be the last hit American game to feature a war story in a non-specific but Asian-flavoured location.

On Beach-Head‘s UK release in 1984, response was strong. Writing a review for Personal Computer Games magazine, SNC said that “Beach-Head’s spectacular sound and graphics bring amazing realism to your 64 […] put the sound through your hi-fi and the neighbours will think World War III has started”. Computer & Video Games said that it “leaves 95 percent of British Commodore software standing and any shoot-’em-up fanatic will love the game”. The game went on to two separate spells at #1 in the UK arcade game chart, despite the toughest of opposition, and was the UK’s best-selling Commodore 64 game of 1984. It ended up going well past the “ridiculous” sales target of 100,000 copies which Geoff Brown had plucked from the air.

During all three of Beach-Head’s weeks at #1, its counterpart at the top of the music chart was “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the UK’s longest-running #1 single of the ‘80s. “Two Tribes” was peak Cold War pop, with lyrics parodying the ramping up of belligerent rhetoric and a video featuring a wrestling match between the American and Soviet leaders. For Access’s follow-up to Beach-Head later in 1984, they provided an example of exactly the kind of thing Frankie Goes to Hollywood were reacting to. They produced another multi-stage war game, this time ending in visual total destruction of defences in a major city. They named it Raid Over Moscow.

  • Raid Over Moscow (Access/U.S. Gold, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Raid Over Moscow (Access/U.S. Gold, 1984, Commodore 64)

U.S. Gold again published it in the UK, where the game’s approach to its subject matter prompted some opposition. The label was delighted. Members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament picketed their Birmingham office, and as Geoff Brown recalled it later: “I called the local newspapers and said, c’mon down, have a look at this. […] How could you get better PR?”. U.S. Gold’s spokesperson gave a quote to the press to the effect that “Raid Over Moscow is just the present-day equivalent of Cowboys and Indians but with atomic bombs”, the kind of quote which reveals a remarkable amount in the course of its dismissal. Raid Over Moscow went on to reach #2 in the UK all-formats chart in early 1985.

Raid Over Moscow would not be the last hit American game to feature a war story and get a boost from carefully fanned controversy. In this case, Access took a different view from U.S. Gold and eventually chose to row back a little. Some later versions of the game were released in some locations under the name Raid, obscuring the identify of the opposition forces – no Russian. After that, Access released a more direct sequel, Beach-Head II, but diminishing returns had begun to set in and that one only reached #5 in October 1985. Access’s response would be to pivot to something very different, and I will get to talk about that when I get to 1986. They had already demonstrated the possibilities of Commodore 64 games and, with U.S. Gold’s help, opened the way for American games in the UK. I’ll be writing about U.S. Gold again a bit sooner.

  • ASP individual formats (arcade) chart for week ending 23 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) chart for week ending 21 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) chart for week ending 28 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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