Joe Blade 2 – “Yer dead meat mate!”

1988’s chart-topping games in the UK included an unprecedented number of sequels, accounting for more than half of the games I’m writing about, and six of them in a row. Some of that was a coincidence of the timing of long-awaited games like Football Manager 2 and Starglider 2, with significant changes from their predecessors. Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge offered an early glimpse of the enhanced remake concept, to a timetable dictated by the Olympics. There was another trend, though, at a time when the industry continued to consolidate and things were getting trickier for many — companies turning around sequels in a much quicker and easier way. Joe Blade II was one of those. (Or Joe Blade 2 was – it’s maybe indicative that the game and its packaging are less than consistent there).

In 1987, Joe Blade’s formula of combining simple action, exploration and puzzle mini-games, all executed smoothly, had made it the biggest success so far for Interceptor Micros and their budget label Players. Its author Colin Swinbourne worked on a few other games for Players, including Thing! and Tanium, (as well as making Brat Attack for a Sinclair User cover tape) but those didn’t prove a success on anything the same level as Joe Blade. So less than a year after the first game, he started work on the sequel.

News of Joe Blade II caught the interest of British games magazines. Crash wrote that “Colin Swinbourne is terribly busy at the moment finishing Joe Blade II — follow up to the superb Joe Blade”. “He’s back, back, back!” declared Your Sinclair, Smash Hits style. Meanwhile, Sinclair User provided “The shortest Preview in the World” (“Ths pc frm J. Bld 2 from Plyrs. Lds actn nd grt grfx. Strtdt:Jly. Prc: £2.99”) but it was still a preview. The shorthand, in its own way, showed the value of an established name.

The letter-swapping times code sequences were one of the elements which stood out most in the original game, so this time around, Colin Swinbourne developed that out further, with a looping sequence of four different varieties of timed mini-games involving picking numbers at the right moment and swapping them into the right place. The rest of the game, in turn, is rather simpler than its predecessor, with no ammo-limited shooting, and somewhat simplified navigation.

This comes with a change of setting, from an evil fortress to a London of the future (1995) which, per the game’s instructions, is “crawling with punks, thugs and muggers” leaving ordinary Londoners too scared to venture outside. Luckily for the residents of this no-go-zone, here comes Joe Blade to rescue them: “teenage pin-up and pop idol, media celebrity, hero of the people, defender of the flag”. Leaving aside the fascist undertones (as ACE magazine asked, “since when was being a punk a crime?”), Joe Blade II‘s story is distinct from the first game’s in that it leaves the equivalent of the bomb sequences as making no sense at all in-world. Unless it’s just left unmentioned that the terrified citizens have all been fitted with self-destruct sequences.

Narrative quibbles did not prove any issue to things working out very well for Players with the combination of a familiar character, well-tuned gameplay and a little bit of novelty. Joe Blade II got some broadly positive reviews, with Amstrad Computer User hailing “more variety to the graphics” and Crash’s Phil King writing that “After an impressive debut, Joe’s second appearance is no disappointment”. His colleague Nick Roberts wrote that “There is enough playability in Joe Blade II to last a life time”. The game ended up spending 13 weeks in total at the top of Gallup’s combined formats budget chart, starting in October 1988 and only finally leaving the top for good in February 1989.

Not everyone saw Joe Blade II as having long-term appeal. Gordon Houghton in Zzap! wrote that “the game’s far too easy — and that’s not really on — not even at this price”. A reader wrote into Your Sinclair to say that “after three goes at Joe Blade II I had completed the game”, providing the end-game message as proof. Over in Your Sinclair, Tony Dillon expressed disappointment with “our mate Colin Swinbourne” in much more colourful (not to mention psychotic) terms: “Joe Blade II is a bit like watching a ballet: it’s all very pretty and artistic, but you soon end up wishing someone would cut loose with a machine gun”.

For Joe Blade III, which followed a year later, Joe Blade did get his gun back. He also got much of the structure and narrative of the first game back, except this time he was rescuing hostages from baddie Crax Bloodfinger’s new lair, a tower called Crax Plaza. Crash’s reaction to this was much the same as mine: “If you’ve ever seen the film Die Hard starring Bruce Willis you will know the sort of story line (I wonder where Players got the idea from?)”. 

This sequel got more universally positive reviews but didn’t make it to any chart on record, and the series ended there. This time it didn’t even get a Commodore 64 release; C64 artist Robert Browne completed work on Joe Blade III and handed everything over to series programmer Kevin Parker, but it seems we won’t ever see it in the light of day. Cause and effect on the format omission and the game’s lack of success could go either way round. 

Although there were no more Joe Blade games to come for Colin Swinbourne, his career in games continued for more than a decade more, with a long stint working on art for virtual life sim Creatures and its sequels. Joe Blade II, meanwhile, did end up with a different kind of longevity after all. In 2023, Lazslo Rajcsanyi newly created a Game Boy port of it, with an impressive amount of the original game intact.

The series’s 1980s end with Joe Blade III seems to have come through the exact opposite issue to near-contemporary Renegade III, similarly a flop compared to predecessor Target: Renegade. Where that game went too different, Joe Blade III  instead proved so over-familiar that it removed anyone’s reason to buy it. Perhaps it didn’t help that Joe Blade’s niche as squat cartoon action hero with a ridiculous name was being usurped by Core Design’s Rick Dangerous.

The extent to which Joe Blade III couldn’t match its competition was perhaps better typified by another game that shared its budget status. It’s one that went unrecognised in an interesting note in Sinclair User’s review of Joe Blade III, celebrating that the Joe Blade series had reached a third game. “How many successful budget-only series of games can you name?” it asks. “Well, there are CodeMasters’ ‘Simulator’ games, but they are less of a genuine series than a load of different games with the word ‘Simulator’ tacked onto the end.” Around the time that was written, Code Masters also released their own third game in a genuine series of budget games that combined action, exploration and puzzles. The second game in that series had eventually knocked Joe Blade II off the budget chart top spot. Much more than Players, Code Masters had cracked how to make such a series work. I’ll be getting to Dizzy soon.

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Sources:

• Zeppelin Lands, Crash No. 52, May 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Future Shocks – Joe Blade II, Your Sinclair No. 30, June 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Preview 4 – Joe Blade, Sinclair User No. 76, July 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Snippets – Joe Blade 2, ACE No. 11, August 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Review – Joe Blade 2, Amstrad Computer User No. 49, December 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Joe Blade II, Crash No. 57, October 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Zzap! Budget Test – Joe Blade II, Zzap! No. 44, December 1988, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Letters – Finished…, Your Sinclair No. 38, February 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Games review – Joe Blade II, Tony Dillon, Sinclair User No.80, November 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing 
• Joe Blade 3 (C64), Frank Gasking, Games That Weren’t 64, 2012/2020
• Colin Swinbourne credits, MobyGames
• Budget – Joe Blade III, Crash No. 73, February 1990, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Bargain Basement – Joe Blade III, Your Sinclair No. 51, March 1990, accessed via Spectrum Computing

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