In 1902, cinema was still in its infancy, and people were still working out what they could do with it. One big breakthrough of the year was the science fiction spectacle of Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans La Lune. Plenty of others were also coming up with ways of using the possibilities of manipulating film for effects unachievable in live productions. Many tied their tricks to more familiar narratives, seeking to draw people into a new medium with something they already understood. Among those was ambitious American director Edwin S. Porter. He directed a film more than twice as long as any effort from his studio to date, and he based it on the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk.

Twice as long still only meant Porter’s Jack and the Beanstalk was ten and a half minutes long, and it used just ten different shots. In the absence of words, or the highest clarity of picture, using a familiar story meant audiences could parse what was happening with, say, magic beans, with the minimum of exposition. Instead, the film could focus on some lovely-looking painted backgrounds, and emphasise set pieces like the beanstalk growing up into the sky, and the (not very giant-looking) giant falling from the beanstalk to the ground. It was successful enough that Porter ended up remaking it ten years later. I don’t know whether Chris Kerry, teenaged computer programmer in 1980s Britain, ever watched the film from 1902. In parallel circumstances, though, he ended up producing something rather similar.

Chris Kerry grew up in Sheffield, and got his first experience of computers at school, playing a basic imitation of Galaxians on Nascom’s early Z80-based British computers. His school later bought BBC Micros, and Kerry did his first bits of programming on those. He studied computer studies, with his ambitions towards geology thwarted by timetable clashes. His interest grew further when his older sister Corinne bought a ZX81, and his programming expanded to games and machine language. He worked a paper round, saved up to buy a ZX Spectrum, and made his first professional game on it. He sent Gremlins, another Galaxians take-off in which you shoot uranium-eating gremlins from Jupiter, to Liverpool publishers Thor. They were impressed enough to take him on for that game and more.

  • Gremlins (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Giant’s Revenge (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

Alongside Gremlins, Kerry had sent Thor a prototype of his next game, which would prove much more successful. He had ambitions to show off what the Spectrum was capable of, the kind of images and tricks which it could pull off beyond plain black backgrounds. As the structure for a story to do that, he took a familiar fairytale, and made his own Jack and the Beanstalk. There were a lot of sensible reasons for this kind of choice. Kerry was still a teenager, writing for an assumed audience including children. In the UK, the continued pantomime tradition of family theatre productions, mostly based on fairytales, was a big vector for audiences to have been even more exposed to those stories. Taking Christmas 2024 as an example, the number of different Jack and the Beanstalk pantomimes put on in the UK easily ran into the double figures. There’s no reason to think that would have been any different in the ’80s.

Pantomime fell out of popularity in the US before the end of the 19th century. The way that pantomime in the UK has brought a continuity of tradition right through from then has an effect on how early film’s theatre influences read. Porter’s 1902 Jack and the Beanstalk, with its happy fairy whose wand has a star on the end, and its dancing cow with two pairs of very obviously human legs, scans to me as more than a little pantomime.

For Porter and Kerry alike, the use of a fairytale has the effect of making the narrative a lot easier to parse despite much of it being pushed off-screen by their young medium’s limitations. As for Kerry’s reasons for choosing that story specifically, the reasons might have come from within the world of games. Not to bring everything back to Donkey Kong, but a game narrative about climbing a structure and then cutting a giant brute down was certainly already a familiar shape. Nintendo would go on to give Donkey Kong successor Super Mario Bros. its own magical plants growing up to a world in the clouds filled with golden coins.

Intent on producing colourful sights, Chris Kerry worked together with his brother Steve on designing and producing the graphics for Jack and the Beanstalk. Just as with the Stampers at Ultimate, the model of a programmer Chris and his more artistically-inclined brother worked out well for them. Constraints meant that they settled on five static backgrounds, even fewer than the seven in Porter’s film. If played through without error, the game Jack and the Beanstalk is considerably shorter than the ten minute length of the film.

Like in Porter’s film, the game’s repeated centerpiece is the beanstalk reaching from the ground to the top of the screen. The biggest difference comes when the game has a rather larger, sleeping giant take up fully half of one screen. For the return to the stalk for the fall at the end, though, sprite sizes had a similar limiting effect to the technology of 1902 cinema, rendering the giant much closer to a standard human size.

The vivid graphics were the element of Jack and the Beanstalk which most wowed reviewers. S.F. of Home Computing Weekly called them “excellent”, and Computer & Video Games went for “superb”, comparing them to an illustrator’s drawings. Crash described the game as “very colourful, well-drawn and lively and the 3D effect has been used well on the second screen”. ZX Computing put Jack and the Beanstalk in its round-up of the best games of 1984 and led with its “superb cartoon graphics”. It showed that the “Spectrum really can do some impressive things.”

Other elements were less impressive. Crash giving the graphics a higher percentage score than the overall game was representative of the typical sentiment. Home Computer Weekly also called it “frustrating but challenging”. To call Jack and the Beanstalk a platformer would be to overstate its coherence. It has a jump button, but where to use it is none too clear, as where you can and can’t go on the screen is mostly a matter of trial and error. On the first screen, you basically just have to stick to the beanstalk while avoiding enemies, but things soon get more complex and awkward. C&VG carried one reader tip which consisted of basic explanations of where to go on the second screen. In an interview with Crash the following year, Chris Kerry himself summed up Jack and the Beanstalk rather nicely. “It wasn’t very good, but you learn from your mistakes. The screen pictures were good, but the graphic movement was terrible!”

Nonetheless, in a medium where basic gameplay conventions were far from settled, using a familiar story to show off some fancy sights proved successful. Kerry and Thor landed a #1 hit in ASP’s arcade chart for a week in June 1984. Like Porter before him, Kerry got brought back to revisit Jack, producing two sequels, Giant’s Revenge and The House That Jack Built, within a year. His teenage success story was not unique, but still enough to catch the attention of the computer press. Home Computing Weekly ran a front page news story highlighting his potential tens of thousands of pounds in royalties, which by Kerry’s later accounts was less than accurate when it came to Thor. The story also quoted from a couple of teachers at his school. “Headmaster Ken Cook says he is not worried about Christopher dropping ‘A’ levels and he is sure he will be a big success in computers”. That would prove more correct.

  • Giant’s Revenge (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Giant’s Revenge (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • The House Jack Built (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • The House Jack Built (Thor, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
ASP individual formats (arcade) chart for week ending 9 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 09 June 1984

UK games (arcade): Jack and the Beanstalk (Thor, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: The Evil That Men Do

UK singles: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Two Tribes

UK albums: Bob Marley and the Wailers – Legend

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