Game, Set and Match – “Over 20 exciting events”

Out of all the UK number one games I’ve covered from 1983 to 1987, Game, Set and Match is the third to have been a compilation rather than a single game. Those three compilations rather tell a story of the progression of compilations in the UK. First was Soft Aid, in which Rod Cousens and co managed to bring together a large number of software houses to supply old games, for the purposes of a charity compilation.

In the world of music, Band Aid, the motivating starting point for Soft Aid, opened the floodgates for a lot more all-star charity singles, for increasingly loose definitions of star. Soft Aid did prompt further charity software compilations. Activision’s Electric Dreams Software, run by Rod Cousens, released Off the Hook, with proceeds going to the Prince’s Trust and their work for drug addicts. It reached #3 in the chart in May 1986. Other examples followed like Centresoft’s Kids Play: The Back Pack, released in 1987 in support of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

The wider effect of Soft Aid, though, was to open the floodgates for software compilations in general. If you could persuade companies to give their games another outing for charity, you could do it for profit as well. Virgin were quick off the mark with the Now Games series, the first one reaching #2 in September 1985. The Hit Squad’s They Sold a Million followed soon afterwards, with a focus on fewer, bigger hits from across British software. 

Others put more of an emphasis on quantity over quality, and so it was with Beau Jolly’s Computer Hits series. Their self-explanatory 10 Computer Hits 3, became the next compilation to top the charts, in 1986. That featured different line-ups across a truly remarkable number of different computer formats, with Beau Jolly’s music business veteran staff working their way down a very long list of possible games to make the deals to put it together.

That grab-bag model started to fade when increasingly up against budget reissues that made it cheaper than ever to buy the specific old games that you wanted, and against magazine cover tapes offering an even better price for a more random selection. The next evolution of compilations was for the bigger software houses to flex their power and their back catalogue and produce compilations largely from their own games, with a bit more of a guiding theme. And few came bigger or more powerful than Ocean Software.

The Hit Squad, of They Sold a Million, had indeed been an Ocean label, and would go on to be Ocean’s budget reissue label. They wouldn’t revive that until a bit later, however, so Ocean’s two big 1987 compilations were released under the Ocean name. One was Live Ammo, a collection of military-themed games which reached #3 in the combined formats chart in December 1987 and included The Great Escape, Top Gun, Green Beret, Rambo and Army Moves.

If 1987’s charts so far taught us one thing, though, it’s that British computer game players as a collective loved sports games, with the top spot taken at various points by BMX Simulator, World Class Leader Board, Milk Race and Run for Gold. And happily for Ocean, they had a catalogue with a lot of sports games. For Game, Set and Match, they decided to pull out the stops and combine the model of compiling their own games on a theme with the one of signing up other company’s old games too. The result was a compilation twice the size of Live Ammo, which they sold at £12.95 rather than £9.95.

Ocean’s old games were central to Game, Set and Match, though, and in particular those from their deal with release conversions of Konami’s games under the Imagine label. Konami hadn’t quite approached sports with the same consistency as Namco and their Family sports series, but they still supplied Ping Pong, Tennis and Hyper Sports. Putting Hyper Sports together with Ocean’s own alternate Hyper Olympic sequel Daley Thompson’s Supertest allowed them to boast of “over 20 exciting events” on the cover thanks to their multi-sports nature.

Also from Imagine, but not Konami, were Super Soccer and World Series Baseball, though sadly the latter’s amusingly named sequel World Series Basketball didn’t make it. Ocean instead made a deal with Activision’s Gamestar label for GBA Championship Basketball, a single-screen two-on-two take on the sport that’s as limited as many of the others on the compilation. Alongside that they got a deal for Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing, with one of the more in-depth career modes around, bolted onto a simple gameplay setup for the actual matches.

A presumably easier deal to put together brought in CDS Micro Systems’ Pool, the work of Mike Lamb, now an Ocean employee. Lamb had based it on an arcade pool game he’d played at university. That was only on the Spectrum version of Game, Set and Match, though, with Visions Software Factory’s Snooker replacing it on the Commodore 64 — a game which had previously appeared on 10 Computer Hits 2, and, for the BBC Micro and Electron, 10 Computer Hits 3. The Commodore 64 version also replaced Konami’s Tennis with Psion’s Match Point.

Racquet sports were among the easier ones to come up with some variation of for 8-bit computers, and so as well as table tennis and tennis, squash was represented by Jonah Barrington’s Squash from New Generation Software. That was another one dating back to 1985, and a game whose clipped speech synthesis reading out the scores is probably the most impressive thing about it.

ACE magazine described Game, Set and Match as “a positive orgy of muscle-wrenching athletic action” and concluded that “just about all the games on offer are high quality and were very well received on their first outing, but some of them do go back rather a long way…”. Crash suggested it “looks set to start a completely new trend in theme compilations” and only quibbled with the inclusion of Super Soccer over Ocean’s superior Match Day (“because so many of you have already got the latter, I am told”). Tony Dillon in Sinclair User ended his review on a similar note: “And there’s… Super Soccer. I’m sorry, but that has let down the entire rating by being just crud”. 

Over on the Commodore 64, Julian Rignall of ZZap! 64 called the contents of Game, Set and Match “a wide variety of sports games which range from the excellent to the forgettable”, and appears to have been the only one to have reviewed it. 

Across formats, Game, Set and Match hit the top of the chart for a week in November 1987, and Ocean followed it with Game, Set and Match 2 the following year, which didn’t repeat the feat despite a slightly more impressive selection of games. Sports games were an easy sell, the themed compilation model worked, and few were in as good a position as Ocean to do anything with those obvious facts.

---

---

---

Sources:

• Now Games, Off the Hook, Live Ammo, Game, Set & Match, Game, Set & Match 2, chart histories at Computer Hits
• A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, Mark James Hardisty, Bitmap Books, 2016
• Blockbusters bargain bundle, Home Computing Weekly No. 131, 24-30 September 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Joke free zone, Your Sinclair No. 21, September 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Dev Story: Mike Lamb, Antstream Arcade, 2019
• Buyers’ Guide – Game Set and Match, ACE No. 4, January 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• All Together Now, Paul Sumner, Crash No. 45, October 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Twilight Zone – Game Set and Match, Sinclair User No. 70, January 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• A crucial Christmas compilation comparison – Game, Set and Match, Julian Rignall, Zzap! 64 No. 33, January 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive

---