Monty on the Run – “Bon Voyage Monsieur Le Monty”

Manic Miner did not have very much to say about mining. Its name and ostensible theme came from Miner 2049er, but anything mine-related was incidental to all the other weird and wonderful things it pulled. Sequel Jet Set Willy took Willy even further away from the mines. When coal mining became a major British news story right around Jet Set Willy’s release, with the start of the national miners’ strike in March 1984, there was no way of linking that to computer games. In Sheffield, someone had a thought: what if there was?

Ian Stewart was originally from Surrey, but moved to Sheffield and later set up a computer shop called Just Micro, together with Kevin Norburn. The shop was a big success in “the Ultimate days where a single shop would order 300 copies of Atic Atac”, and led to them setting up a software label called Gremlin Graphics. One of their first programmers was 19-year-old Pete Harrap, who they got to know over an extended series of visits to Just Micro in relation to a tricky repair job on his ZX Spectrum.

Between them, Ian Stewart and Pete Harrap came up with an idea for a Spectrum game. It would be a platformer, very much in a Manic Miner style, although with a more linear version of Jet Set Willy‘s ability to move between screens. It would have a mole as the main character. And that character would go into the mines. Not just the mines as an abstract concept, but specifically the British mines whose miners were on strike. Pete Harrap would later call the concept “a really good marketing hook that no-one else could use”, referring in part to the fact that his own father worked in a mine in Hatfield as a training officer. 

During development, Stewart and Harrap decided that Monty Mole, as they called their character, would be a strike-breaker, collecting coal, and that the game’s ultimate antagonist would be Arthur Scargill, the leader of the miners’ union. It turns out Elite wasn’t the most Thatcherite British hit game of 1984 after all. Pete Harrap would say that his father had been completely in favour of the strikes, but not the means by which they had been initiated. Ian Stewart, decades later, called Wanted: Monty Mole’s subject matter “unashamedly a PR stunt” and “opportunistic”, proclaiming himself to be “not a political person”. The stunt worked. Their game made the newspapers and radio and TV news. They offered to donate 5p from each copy sold to strike funds, an offer which was not taken up.

“Beat the pickets in the King Arthur video game” ran the headline to the Daily Mirror’s story, which somehow avoided mentioning that the main character was a mole, instead referring to “Monty the moderate”. The BBC’s brief report included as part of its intro that “it may be politically biased, but it is highly topical”. Anticipating the attention, Stewart had got Tony Crowther to retrofit a different Commodore 64 game he was working on to become Wanted: Monty Mole too. Together, the versions’ sales were enough to at one point put the game at #2 in some combined charts, behind Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. That August, right after its release, much of the press reported on protests against the first miner to cross the picket lines in Wales. His name was Monty Morgan.

Looking to quickly capitalise on the success of Wanted: Monty Mole, Gremlin put out a sequel barely half a year later. For that one they didn’t turn to Harrap or Crowther but handed the creative reins over to Chris Kerry. Another Sheffield teenager, Kerry had joined on the back of his success with Jack and the Beanstalk. For Monty is Innocent, in which you try to rescue Monty from jail, Kerry made a more ambitious version of what he had already been doing with his Jack games, a series of impressive single visuals which the characters don’t so much move within as skate over the top of. Monty is Innocent only came out on the Spectrum, and made #6 in the combined formats chart in February 1985.

The high point of the series’s popularity came with the next release the same year. For Monty on the Run, Pete Harrap took over again on the lead Spectrum version. He returned to the style of the first game, with some additions, from the cosmetic (Monty somersaulting each time he jumps in an Impossible Mission or The Way of the Exploding Fist style) to the more substantial. There is a bit more room to move in different directions from its rooms, with the first section in a sprawling house taking more direct inspiration from Jet Set Willy, and some new and inventive ideas of what to do within.

Monty on the Run made less of an obvious grab for the news than Wanted: Monty Mole, but it did still have an eye for the topical. One later screen with some vehicle action is called Drive Sir Clive’s C5, in reference to the Sinclair C5 electric tricycle that Clive Sinclair had launched at the start of 1985. Gremlin’s Ian Stewart had been one of the first to buy a C5 and used it to promote his Just Micro shop. He was among a rather small set of people who bought one, and the C5 became an infamous failure. 

Together with the nearly-as-poor launch the previous year of the Sinclair QL (a higher powered but less games-friendly successor to the Spectrum), the C5 disaster contributed towards the company Sinclair getting into a bad financial state. Within six months of Monty on the Run’s release, Sinclair sold off the rights to its computers and the Sinclair brand, to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad. (Not the world’s worst ever coming together of a purveyor of electric vehicles and a sometime host of The Apprentice.)

As well as the C5 in Monty on the Run, you also get to fly around with a jetpack, or rather a Jetpac, since the section in question is named The Ultimate Experience. At least you get to fly around if you brought the jetpack with you at the start of the game, when you are tasked with choosing 5 potentially useful items from a selection of 21. Pick the wrong ones and you will come up against impossible obstacles. As S.J.E. in Home Computer Weekly noted, even outside of the trial and error of it all, “a major problem is knowing which object Monty has encountered or is carrying has caused a given effect”. Added to the somersaulting, there’s definitely a line to be drawn through to the Dizzy series working out those kinks a couple of years later.

Within a few screens, you enter a room and find yourself in a narrow passage. A clock with wings comes at you from the other end of the passage, blocking your way. There is, though, a small extra space at the top of the passage. It looks like the task is to jump up there with perfect timing to make it over the clock. After many attempts, it turns out not to be possible. The solution instead is to stand still exactly where you are, and the clock stops just short of hitting you. That is Monty on the Run all over.

It also has lifts which in some cases you need to take and in other cases kill you, teleporter beams which change colour and require precise timing to get through un-transported, and crushers which move with inconsistent timing. As Crash observed of the first Monty game, “Monty requires a deal of luck in certain situations, like the crushers. While this might be thought to reduce the playing skill element, it does add one of sheer thrill and nerves.”

Monty on the Run’s chart success was helped by the fact that this time the Commodore 64 version, converted by Micro Projects, was substantially the same game. More than that, it had extra background details to the graphics, and a unique selling point in its music. “The Commodore game explodes into life with the best sound we have yet encountered” said Computer & Video Games, and Zzap!64 made so much of the music they gave over half of their review to a profile of composer Rob Hubbard. 

The inspiration for the music came from Pete Harrap listening to old records and picking out Charles Williams’s “Devil’s Galop” as a piece of music which “really sounds like you’re legging it”. Since that was in copyright, Hubbard worked out something which takes clear inspiration but stands out as its own rather thrilling piece. Harrap was delighted with the musical results, even if it meant some people seeing his own Spectrum version of the game as the lesser one.

Not only was Monty on the Run a success in the UK, it had an uncommon level of reach elsewhere for a UK home computer game of the time, with Japanese developer Jaleco porting it to Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System, something that had only previously happened with Knight Lore. Or rather, Jaleco released a game that had “Monty on the Run” on the title screen, but is not a port in any standard sense. Monty the Mole is not even present, with a human as the main character (perhaps the Daily Mirror’s Monty the moderate?) and it is a platformer in a style even more different than the C64 Wanted: Monty Mole had been.

On closer inspection, Jaleco’s Monty on the Run does include a surprising number of elements from the original in there somewhere, though – equipment selection, a jetpack, crushers, teleport beams. Its title screen has a pretty excellent version of Rob Hubbard’s music. It is clearly the work of people who studied and enjoyed Monty on the Run, even if they didn’t replicate it. The Japanese title is モンティのドキドキ大脱走 (Monti no Doki Doki Dai Dassō, Monty’s Great Heart-pounding Escape). It appears to have come out the same month, July 1987, as 夢工場ドキドキパニック aka Doki Doki Panic, another platformer with “Doki Doki” in its name and different characters compared to its Western release. The Western release in that case being called Super Mario Bros. 2.

Monty did not get any further runouts on the Famicom, but several more on UK home computers. Auf Widersehen Monty, planned by Pete Harrap as a goodbye to the character, was a #5 hit in May 1987. That Christmas, Gremlin joined the evolving Spectrum magazine cover tape wars by providing a short new Monty game, Moley Christmas, to Your Sinclair. It’s a very meta game in which you make your way through the production and distribution of the game itself. In 1990, Gremlin put out one more Monty game, Impossamole. That one has Monty as a gun-wielding superhero and was developed by Core Design of future Tomb Raider fame. It appears to have mostly been a trial run for their Rick Dangerous 2, released later in 1990. Impossamole reached #11 in the budget charts after its budget reissue in 1991.

In 2011, Pete Harrap talked to Eurogamer about the possibility of making a new Monty Mole game. When asked about the rights, he replied that “it would be debatable whether it still belongs to me or it belongs with a company that was bought by a company that was bought by a company that was bought by a company”. At some point after that, Ian Stewart took a more thorough approach to making sure he definitely had the rights. 

As a result, in 2024, Monty on the Run reached another Nintendo platform. You can buy The Monty Mole Collection on Nintendo Switch, with emulated versions of the Spectrum and Commodore 64 Wanted: Monty Mole, Monty on the Run and Auf Wiedersehen Monty, as well as Spectrum-only Moley Christmas and Monty offshoot Sam Stoat: Safebreaker. You can also buy its component parts on Steam. The collection was put out through a company called Imagine Software, a name from the appropriate era with its own complex ownership history.

The versions on Switch don’t have many extra features, but there are some. I found that having a rewind function readily available on a button makes it easier to take in the charms of more of the games’ rooms without quite such an investment of time and patience. It’s fascinating to remember that originally the sadistic difficulty was not just seen as no problem, but as a winning feature. That was of a piece with a character who was created as cussed from the beginning.

---

---

---

Sources:

• A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, Mark James Hardisty, Bitmap Books, 2016
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum: a visual compendium, Bitmap Books, 2015
• Interview – Pete Harrap, C64.com, 2006
• Wanted: Monty Mole, Jesse Dekel, Organise magazine, 2019
• BBC Archive – #OnThisDay 1984: Arthur Scargill found himself cast as the antagonist to a monocle-sporting mole, in Wanted: Monty Mole, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Wanted: Monty Mole, Crash No. 9, October 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing, also available at Crash Online
• Software reviews – Monty on the Run, Computer & Video Games No. 49, November 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Monty on the Run, Home Computing Weekly No. 131, 24-30 September 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Monty on the Run, Zzap!64 No. 6, October 1985, accessed via Def Guide to Zzap!64
• Monty on the Run, Crash No. 20, September 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Monty on the Run – Famicom Disk System, Gremlin Archive, Mark James Hardisty, 2016
• Moled Wine: The warming tale of Gremlin Graphics’ unlikely Christmas hero, Will Freeman, Bitmap Books, 2022
• Peter Harrap wants new Monty Mole, Robert Purchese, Eurogamer, 2011
• Gremlin Graphics presents: Bounder’s World and the return of Super Cars, David Jenkins, Metro, 2011

---