Ocean had reached the top of the charts with Kong, and they were proud of it. When they advertised a new game in Personal Computer News in December 1983, they showed off their feat, including an extract from the PCN chart the week they had been #1. The whole page ad was for Ocean’s whole range, so it included their other old arcade rip-offs, the likes of Road Frog and Caterpilla. Alongside those was their BurgerTime take, where they took a slightly different direction by getting sponsored branding from a British fast food chain, meaning it went out under the name Mr. Wimpy. The main event, though, was something new for Ocean: a game which looked and played like a well-known arcade game because it was actually a properly licensed version of it.

A few years earlier, in 1978, Peter Robinson and David Jones set up Century Electronics in Oldham, Greater Manchester, and started making arcade games. In an industry dominated by Japanese and American companies, they were, at least for a while, a rare British success story and Europe’s biggest arcade developer. They didn’t just create games for others, like Ultimate precursor ACG, but made their own machines, with parts supplied by Dutch electronics company Philips. Many of the games Century made were, in line with other British efforts at this time, rather derivative. Their first release was a Space Invaders clone called Cosmic Invasion. In 1982 they released Logger, an obvious replica of Donkey Kong but with a lumberjack theme, complete with a soundtrack of Monty Python’s “Lumberjack Song”. For their biggest success, though, Century added a bit more to the game they were borrowing from.

Logger (Century, 1982, Arcade)

Jones and Robinson were impressed by Activision’s Pitfall, and decided to take its rope-swinging as the starting point to design a new game. They thought of Robin Hood as the perfect star for it, swinging and jumping across tree-tops and avoiding incoming arrows. However, at some point quite far into development, they decided that the forest was still a bit too close to Pitfall’s jungle, and swapped out the theme. The tree-tops became cathedral ramparts and, with the addition of a few pixels, Robin Hood became the hunchback Quasimodo, though he was still wearing green. Changing Maid Marian to Esmerelda didn’t even take that much. Century released Hunchback at the start of 1983. With a 15-screen course, some attractive graphics, and a carefully-tuned difficulty curve, it did very well. Its success wasn’t even confined to the UK; by July, it reached #2 in arcade charts in the US.

  • Hunchback (Century, 1983, Arcade)
  • Hunchback (Century, 1983, Arcade)

Now that Century had their own distinctive and popular arcade game, it was not a surprise that they found themselves on the other end of cloning. John Dyson, co-founder of Leeds-based Superior Software, made a version of the game for the BBC Micro. Superior flat-out called their game Hunchback. Rather than just leaning on them to change the name, like CGL had done to Microdeal to turn Donkey King into The King, Century took things a bit further. In August 1983, they went to the high court and gained an injunction against Superior to prevent the game’s release. “The days when a home computer software manufacturer can copy and ride on the back of an arcade success are numbered”, said David Jones.

Hunchback (Superior, 1983, BBC Micro)

This injunction was reported in Popular Computing Weekly as being the first of its kind in the UK. After the injunction, the two parties didn’t take long to come to a deal. A month later, Superior’s Hunchback entered the same magazine’s BBC Micro chart at #1, with a share of its profits going to Century. Century had previously looked at home computers as not worth bothering with, with their tiny profit margins compared to those of arcade machines, but the Superior incident made them think again. If Hunchback was going to get converted anyway, they might as well get in on it.

Century soon set up an agreement with Ocean, based a mere eight miles away in Manchester and looking for something popular to adapt to follow Kong. With its fireball-jumping and maiden-rescuing, Hunchback itself owed more than a little to Donkey Kong, so fitted the formula very well. Ocean got to work on versions of Hunchback for all the popular microcomputer formats that Superior didn’t already have covered, and would put them all out as official versions of the arcade game, horrible seaside postcard artwork and all.

Hunchback (Ocean, 1983/1984, ZX Spectrum)

Inevitably for early 1984, the most popular one of Ocean’s versions of Hunchback was the one for the ZX Spectrum. This was programmed, as with so many hits of this time, by a teenager from Merseyside, in this case Christian Urquhart. He and his friend Nick Pierpont had made Transversion, a fast moving game where you dodge being shot at from various angles, and Ocean had picked it up. After that they offered him further work starting with Hunchback. His Spectrum version captures the basics of the game, and the simplicity of its initial screens is a nice match for the Spectrum, lending itself to big chunky sprites.

It misses both the start and end of the arcade version, with no intro where Quasimodo bounds past all the trials he’s about to face. It does at least keep the progress graphic showing how far he has progressed, but it also has some more core issues. Both Sinclair User and Crash highlighted the lack of variety in the graphics and layouts, with Crash’s review also mentioning that “when you jump across the pit on a rope, timing has to be spot on with no +1 or -1 variation. I think that could have been easier”. 

Hunchback (Ocean, 1983/1984, ZX Spectrum)

Jon Hall in Your Spectrum got to the worst part of this with the comment that “the 3D effect sometimes makes it a bit difficult to judge when to jump and so on”. The truly infuriating part of the Spectrum Hunchback is not the precision needed, but the fuzziness of its visual feedback. It frequently looks like Quasimodo has successfully landed on a rope or platform before, a moment later, he freezes and plummets to his doom. Even when it comes time to move onto its more developed challenges, the basic jump never stops being a sticking point.

Hunchback (Ocean, 1983/1984, ZX Spectrum)

Playing a current arcade hit at home proved too attractive for the lukewarm reviews to stop the Spectrum Hunchback becoming the first new #1 of 1984. Christian Urquhart was keen to point out as much to Crash when they interviewed him a few months later. Ocean gave Urquhart a permanent contract. Alongside the game’s success, things got even better for Ocean, through no credit of their own. Century had struggled to make anything remotely as successful as Hunchback and went into liquidation early in 1984. Ocean were able to snap up the game rights and would no longer have to share any part of their profits with the people who came up with the concept. They were now fully free to ride on the back of Hunchback‘s arcade success. Century’s collapse was reported in the computing press the same week as the charts showing Hunchback had become the country’s best selling game.

PCS individual formats chart for fortnight ending 7 February 1984 [date shown is in error], Home Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for weeks ending 28 January 1984 and 4 February 1984
UK games: Hunchback (Ocean, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: Sudden Impact

UK singles: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Relax

UK albums: Eurythmics – Touch

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