In April 1983, UK magazines Home Computing Weekly and Personal Computer News each carried an advert for “the world’s greatest arcade games”. It was from the company Spectrum Games, and promised “Authentic Arcade Action” and “Machine Code Thrills” across four different games: Cosmic Intruders, Road Frog, Rocket Command and Monster Muncher. Or essentially, for anyone familiar with the popular arcade games of the time, Space Invaders, Frogger, Defender and Pac-Man. The advert came complete with an order form to cut out and post off, freepost. Send your form and a cheque for £5.50, and Spectrum would supply you with one of their incredible games. There was just one catch. None of those games existed yet.

That is the story as some of those involved have told it. Regulations around mail order allowed 28 days to fulfil an order, and, they say, Spectrum Games made full use of that time to create those games. There is mixed evidence to support this. In 2019, someone posting to the Spectrum Computing forums as Paul Owens, author of Road Frog, gave a completion date for that game of November 1982, well before the adverts. On the other hand, he mentioned Road Frog was the first of the games to be completed and also said that “some games in the early adverts were what we came to call vapourware.” As well as Road Frog, Rocket Command and Monster Muncher definitely exist and can be played, but Cosmic Intruders is another matter. Games That Weren’t has it on its list of missing titles as of a couple of months ago. The adverts appeared for several months, well beyond 28 days, but perhaps Spectrum committed to those upfront and were just pushing their luck.

  • Road Frog (Spectrum, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Rocket Command (Spectrum, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Monster Muncher (Spectrum, ZX Spectrum, 1983)

David Ward and Jon Woods, the two owners of Spectrum Games grew up in the Wirral, Merseyside, and ran a clothes shop together for a while. Then Ward moved to America and ended up running a nightclub in Los Angeles, where he gained experience with both arcade games and operations of dubious legality. As he describes it, the local mafia operated the arcade business and were keen for his club to be part of it. Pac-Man and Space Invaders soon became a great source of income, even after the mafia took their sizeable share. 

When Ward moved back to the UK, he talked to his old friend about the possibilities of bringing arcade games to the increasingly popular home computers. Within a couple of years Ward and Woods established Spectrum Games to do just that. They made the short journey to set up in Manchester so that they didn’t have to directly compete for coders with Liverpool’s successful software houses Bug-Byte and Imagine. They also soon realised that while Spectrum sharing a name with Sinclair’s computer had its advantages, it might also be a source of confusion and limitation. So not long after that initial mail order experiment, they exchanged the name for something big sounding: Ocean. Around the same time they also acquired Paul Finnegan, a sales manager previously at Imagine, and his contacts with retailers helped them move beyond mail order and into being able to sell the kinds of numbers that could reach the charts.

Road Frog programmer Paul Owens originally applied to work for Spectrum Games as a summer job in between university terms. He ended up becoming a permanent employee and ditching his degree in polymer chemistry. Since he had proved himself with his first game, Ward asked him to work on something else, giving him another generous 28 days to do so. Like Matthew Smith with Manic Miner at a similar time, for Owens’s second Spectrum game he was given the task of doing something in the style of Donkey Kong. In his case, much more literally a version of Donkey Kong, to be called Kong. Given the timing, perhaps David Ward had been reading the charts in Personal Computer News as well as taking out adverts, and was responding to the success of Donkey King. If a Donkey Kong clone for the Dragon 32 could be UK #1, surely the prospects were even better for one on the most popular microcomputer around.

They were not the only ones to have this idea. In Computer & Video Games’s January 1984 issue, it reviewed four different Donkey Kong rip-offs for the Spectrum. Alongside Ocean’s effort were Killer Kong from Blaby, and two different games called Krazy Kong, from PSS and C-Tech. A couple of months later, hip new Spectrum magazine Crash went further still, making Donkey Kong mania the cover story of its second issue and reviewing six such games. Alongside Ocean’s Kong and a couple of the same rivals, it included one by Anirog also called Kong, and two slightly less direct copies, Temptation’s Godzilla & the Martians and Phipps’s Killer Knight. It’s difficult to get the exact release dates for some of those games, but Ocean’s definitely wasn’t the first.

  • Killer Kong (Blaby, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Krazy Kong (PSS, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Krazy Kong (C Tech, ZX Spectrum, 1982)
  • Kong (Anirog, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Godzilla & the Martians (Temptation, ZX Spectrum, 1984)
  • Killer Knight (Phipps, ZX Spectrum, 1984)
  • Kong (Ocean, ZX Spectrum, 1983)

I played Ocean’s Kong before any of the other games, but after playing Donkey King, and it immediately struck me as much less of a successful recreation. You control a stick-man in place of Jumpman, for a start. Climbing its ladders is incredibly finicky, resulting in large numbers of deaths from not quite standing in the exact right spot. And within two attempts, I noticed a fundamental flaw with the first level: the barrels follow the exact same path every time. If you use one of the ladders they don’t go down, you are completely safe. It removes the kind of route calculation and reaction that was at the heart of playing the original.

Ocean’s game was, however, the pick of both magazines’ round-ups. Some of this can be attributed to the other games being even worse, which several definitely are. C&VG didn’t actually say anything nicer about Kong than “the game is fairly close to the arcade game, strikes just about the right balance in difficulty, and has some useful extras”. Crash, though, went much further. One reviewer, Chris Passey, called it “a close copy to the original” and Matthew Uffindell wrote that “all four screens are identical to the arcade original”. This is one of the more bizarre claims I have read in a review from 1983, even allowing for an unspoken understanding with readers that the Spectrum wasn’t going to be able to genuinely match the arcades.

The explanation, as much as there is one, comes with the second half of Uffindell’s sentence: “…even the detail of the ape smashing down the girders into different angles at the start”. All of the other games have flat platforms, with the exception of C-Tech’s, which has little else going for it. Uffindell went on to mention the music, the hammer power-up, and the opening screen saying “How high can you get?”, all present and correct. He clearly valued these over any gameplay shortcomings. Even Donkey King hadn’t included the girder-stomping. Given the importance the original game put on its brief narrative vignettes, it makes sense that including a semblance of these was given a lot of weight by reviewers, and, presumably, players.

By the time those magazine issues came out, Kong had already been to the top of the UK charts, and Ocean had paid off Paul Owens’s student overdraft. Their approach, and scaled-up business, had worked. David Ward was concerned, though, that the arcade boom might prove a fad. In the long term, they needed to do something else than just copying arcade games. They had already shown at least that identifying the right popular phenomena, and focusing on presentational elements, could be a formula for success. It would prove a very good starting point.

MRIB individual formats games chart for fortnight ending 27 October 1983, Personal Computer News

Top of the charts for week ending 29 October 1983

UK games: Kong (Ocean, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: National Lampoon’s Vacation

UK singles: Billy Joel – Uptown Girl

UK albums: Culture Club – Colour By Numbers

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