The increasing success of Code Masters in 1987 prompted rounds of coverage of the Darling brothers as young business whizz-kids. They were far from the first such story. The next new game at #1 after Code Masters’ Grand Prix Simulator was from a fellow budget software company whose own business whizz-kid had been at it so long he was now into his twenties. Back in 1985, when South England news programme Coast to Coast featured Richard Paul Jones of Interceptor Micros (and the expensive car he’d bought from their profits), they could even include footage from an interview he did for them two years prior, when he had been 17.

Richard Paul Jones was born in West Germany, and grew up there, in Hong Kong, and in Northern Ireland, a similarly international childhood to that of the Darling brothers. He told Graeme Mason of Retro Gamer in 2013 that he had never really been into games. He was more broadly interested in technology, “and of course, how to make money from it”. He had first opened a successful video rental shop and then ended up befriending a fellow Hampshire college student called Jeff Minter, who was rather more interested in computers and games. Jones didn’t want to do programming himself (“it seemed like much too hard work”) but saw an opportunity. He and Minter bought a Commodore VIC-20, Minter wrote some new games, and in 1982 they formed Llamasoft together, with Jones handling the business side. Before long, their games were selling well in the UK, and they also signed a deal with fast-growing US publisher HES.

  • Andes Attack (Llamasoft, 1982, VIC-20)
  • Andes Attack (Llamasoft, 1982, VIC-20)

Richard Paul Jones wanted Llamasoft to take on more programmers and expand. Jeff Minter wanted to keep on going it alone, an approach which hasn’t served him too badly in the decades since. Jones left, started looking for other programmers, and formed his own company, Interceptor Micros. In a 1983 Popular Computing Weekly interview, Jones offered a further reason for the breakup with Minter: “He thinks I am a capitalist.” Jones’s career and his comments when asked by Coast to Coast about his staff’s views on working for him (“I think they’re rather glad to have a job”) don’t suggest Minter was wrong. Having set up Interceptor, its first releases were likewise some VIC-20 games taking heavy inspiration from various popular arcade games, and it started doing rather well too. 

When Jones talked to Coast to Coast in 1983, he talked about his plans to expand into cassette duplication for other software houses. In that bit of video, he has a blown up magazine clipping from Popular Computing Weekly on the wall behind him. It’s too blurry to make out words, but shows just enough to be able to work out that it is the VIC-20 chart from the 24 February – 02 March 1983 issue. Someone has used a highlighter on the Interceptor games: Penny Slot at #9, Vic Rescue at #6, Alien Attack at #2, and Frog at #1. Frog was, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, an obvious Frogger clone. Occupying the three other spaces in the top 5 between those Interceptor games? Three games from Llamasoft.

  • Frog (Interceptor, 1982, VIC-20)
  • Frog (Interceptor, 1982, VIC-20)

Richard Paul Jones and his business partner Julian Jones (his father) carried on looking for more programmers, paying them a flat fee upfront rather than working on royalties. Their discoveries included Ian Gray, who wrote a lot of games for them including derivative hits Crazy Kong and China Miner. Interceptor didn’t go as ambitious as some of their early contemporaries like the short-lived Imagine, and they didn’t manage a mainstream breakthrough on the scale of Ocean. However, the fact that they carried out the whole development and manufacturing process for their own games from start to finish helped to mean that they didn’t need to. They steadily employed more people including many other teenagers and continued to release a lot of different games that sold pretty well. Richard Paul Jones was able to buy his gold-coloured Rolls Royce.

  • Crazy Kong (Interceptor, 1983, Commodore 64)
  • Crazy Kong (Interceptor, 1983, Commodore 64)
  • China Miner (Interceptor, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • China Miner (Interceptor, 1984, Commodore 64)

That focus on volume also set up Interceptor rather well for the beginning of the budget games era. They set up their own budget label, Players, in 1986, and while it didn’t have any hits that year, it slotted neatly into their overall approach. They continued to receive a lot of submissions, some by frequently returning programmers. By that time the Joneses, who at the time of the Coast to Coast item in 1985 reviewed every game submitted to Interceptor, had largely given the job of evaluating incoming games to Simon Daniels. At some point in early 1987, the pile Daniels worked his way through included a game called Joe Blade. 

  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Amstrad CPC)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Commodore 64)

Joe Blade was the work of Colin Swinbourne, a 19-year-old nearby in Hampshire. Swinbourne was a relative newcomer to making games, having been seriously writing them for less than a year, but was already rather accomplished with his Spectrum. His first couple of games had been rejected but Simon Daniels at Interceptor was definitely not going to do the same to Joe Blade. 

“I think it’s a great example of what one talented person can produce,” he later told Graeme Mason of Joe Blade. “Colin Swinbourne not only wrote the game in pure machine code, but he also drew all of the graphics in an editor he wrote himself”. Interceptor suggested some minor improvements Swinbourne could make, and agreed to release his game. They also facilitated conversions for the Amstrad and for the Commodore 64, with programming on both by Kevin Parker (not the Tame Impala one).

  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Amstrad CPC)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Commodore 64)

A brief 1988 Q&A in Sinclair User provides some more information on Colin Swinbourne, including that he was a tea-totaller who drank “at least a pint of milk a day” and that he had aspirations to be a graphic designer if he hadn’t become a programmer. He told Sinclair User that “I prefer games that make you think a little, rather than just killing everything” and that “I don’t actually have much time to play games, but I try to get a copy of any that the magazines reckon are particularly good”. His list of favourite games was topped by iconic Spectrum classics Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf.

Joe Blade shows the influence of those old games and their combination of open-ended exploration and gameplay simplicity, although Your Sinclair identified more recent predecesslors (“a cross between Dan Dare [and] Jack the Nipper, with a little bit of Ranarama thrown in for good measure”). It’s a flip screen game with a side-on view where you can jump, but it’s not a platformer in any real sense. There are no platforms and your jump is only useful for jumping over enemies and reaching the occasional window. Most of the challenge instead comes in finding your way through the complex warren of buildings and paths you explore.

  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Amstrad CPC)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Commodore 64)

Your task is to infiltrate the base of the evil Crax Bloodfinger, rescue hostages along the way and plant some bombs to blow the whole place up. As well as being able to exit to the left or right of each screen, there are windows and doors, sometimes locked, which you can go through to another room. Making progress is initially quite straight forward. If you encounter enemies, you just press your fire button once and everyone in front of you dies, without even the need for visible bullets. As Bill Scolding in Commodore User put it, “it’s a bit of a surprise to find that Joe ambles happily around Bloodfinger’s fortified HQ like he’s doing the shopping in Safeway’s, calmly shooting at the guards who obediently fall into neat parcels of bones”. 

Along the way, you can find keys, food to recharge your health meter, and uniforms that let you disguise yourself as one of the soldiers defending the base. Then there are the bombs. Touch one and you get put into a minigame where you have to swap letters around to the right sequence within thirty seconds or get an immediate explosive game over. It very much resembles the main code minigame in V, but simpler and all the better for it. “It is actually this bomb-priming sequence which sets Joe Blade apart from all the other flipping arcade adventures around at the moment” wrote Sinclair User. “It needs a clear head to actually complete the task in the time allowed”. Steve Jarratt in Zzap! 64 called it ”an infrequent but enjoyable task”

  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Commodore 64)

Joe Blade’s graphics, the lack of bullets included, favour simplicity and clarity. The original Spectrum version is in different colours of monochrome (in the style of another of Swinbourne’s favourite games, Alien 8) for that reason. Action takes place in one letterboxed section of the screen, the better to support smooth animation of its almost entirely horizontal action. I don’t love all the squat, bold characters (the prisoners leering through the bars are frankly off-putting) but as a look it’s both stylish and functional. 

Crash’s reviewer felt similarly, writing that “I was immediately taken by the graphics and the simplicity of Joe Blade” and finding that it followed through well on that: “Joe Blade requires just enough thought to keep you addicted, but not enough to get you bored”. Even those who had a less posiitve first impression ended up praising it. “Great! Another tough guy game straight from the Rambo clone zone” started the Computer & Video Games review of the Amstrad CPC version, before contuing that “I half-heartedly started playing and before long I was hooked” and summarising it as “nice and cheap with ace graphics”. 

  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, ZX Spectrum)
  • Joe Blade (Players, 1987, Commodore 64)

Zzap! 64 concluded that “Joe Blade is a fairly simplistic shoot’n’search game, but it’s made really enjoyable by the pleasant graphics and almost humorous gameplay.” “Joe Blade is very easy to get into, and not so hard to play.” wrote Your Sinclair. “It should give Players a top ten hit.” It did much more than that, heading to the top of the UK charts for two weeks in October 1987. And so Richard Paul Jones and Interceptor, which had been around since well before the 1984 advent of the Gallup chart, at last had their first #1 on it.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 24 October 1987, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 31 October 1987, Popular Computing Weekly

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