In 1983, when Smash Hits magazine was central to UK pop music media and the “showbiz zap” that Crash magazine set out to align with, the Smash Hits deputy editor was one Neil Tennant. A few years later he would become much better known as the singer of Pet Shop Boys. Many years later still, looking back on the ‘80s for some album reissues, he would provide a rather handy journalistic turn of phrase. The year when they scored three #1 singles and “had the secret of contemporary pop music […and] knew what was required”, when they were critically acclaimed and widely adored, was their “imperial phase”. 

Tom Ewing brought wider attention to the expression when writing for Pitchfork about the period in 2009-2010 when pop music meant Lady Gaga, and then everyone else. There was no one else in the same conversation as her, and that conversation was about how good her music and videos were as well as all the things she did to stand out as she jumped from cresting wave to cresting wave. Taylor Swift has more recently given “imperial phase” another boost by pondering applying it to herself, though in the UK at least, her creative peaks and commercial ones have never quite lined up in the same defining way. 

I wasn’t around for the breakthrough of UK computer games, but from reading the charts and the magazines of the time there is only one candidate in games for a comparable subcultural imperial phase in 1983-1984. Given the way lengthening development cycles would soon prevent games from having the same rapid release rhythm needed for one creative team to dominate the cultural conversation, there’s probably only one candidate ever. For a year or so, computer games meant Ultimate, and then everyone else.

  • Jetpac (Ultimate, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Lunar Jetman (Ultimate, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Atic Atac (Ultimate, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

After Jetpac, Lunar Jetman and especially Atic Atac, anticipation for what Ultimate would come up with next was enormous. Big K magazine described their releases as being “as anticipated as the next Michael Jackson album”. People started sending cheques to Ultimate before any announcements, labelled as being for “the next Ultimate game”. In response, Ultimate took the idea of mystery that they’d flirted with for Atic Atac, and turned it into a defining philosophy. They stopped giving any interviews whatsoever (while still co-operating when it came to things like map-drawing competitions). They took out adverts for their next game which consisted of just its stylised logo, Ultimate’s own logo, and a price. As a calculated move to boost their aura and elevate their games to artistic statements, this strategy worked fantastically.

The new game they were advertising was Sabre Wulf, for which they also almost doubled the price to £9.99 and added some slightly fancier packaging in the form of a bigger box with a bigger inlay to pull out. The Sabre Wulf inlay lays out its plot in the form of some playful purple prose and one section in rhyme – “An amulet to seek thy will/’twas split by quad and hidden still” and so on. This taste for verse would prove a continuing theme throughout the work of Ultimate’s successors Rare, running right through to an (uncredited) appearance in the world’s second-highest-grossing movie of 2023. This way with poetry served as a nice distinctive touch, and if its implementation for Sabre Wulf is not the most amazingly written thing ever, it was still effectively intriguing.

Sabre Wulf sees a new character, Sabreman, fighting his way through the jungle to collect those amulet pieces and make his exit. It is somewhat of a combination of two of Ultimate’s previous games in design. Plenty of magazine reviews picked up on one of them. Early in CA’s Personal Computer Games review, they say that “it’s just a version of Atic Atac”, with the same flip screen maze exploration and chaotic assortment of enemies to battle off. They go on to come around to thinking rather more of it than that, admiring its animation and intricacies.

With Ultimate’s pre-Spectrum past already receding from sight, the other predecessor went much less noticed. Among their arcade games as ACG, though, Sabre Wulf visibly looks like Dingo, with its greenery and brightly coloured flowers, which you dash around avoiding hazardous wildlife. One of Ultimate’s successes in Sabre Wulf is managing to not just achieve the same verdant effect on the Spectrum but scale it up. They made its lush jungle with some precise design to overcome the computer’s difficulties displaying too many colours too near each other. The animation is great, too, with the effect where enemies appear as scattered sticks before coalescing into their forms looking particularly impressive.

  • Dingo (ACG/Jaleco, 1983, Arcade)
  • Sabre Wulf (Ultimate, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

The tone and approach is rather different from Atic Atac even as it falls into the same broad gameplay genre. Atic Atac’s combat was a roiling chaos there to occupy you from moment to moment in between the real business of figuring out objects and keys and trapdoors. Sabre Wulf simplifies the setting to a 2D maze with no doors, adds some power-up orchids to enhance its possibilities, and develops the combat into something distinct. 

As long as you waggle your sabre, you are almost invulnerable from whichever direction you are facing, with one crucial caveat: it only applies when moving left and right. Able to move all around but incapable of turning 90 degrees, Sabreman has no avenue of protection from upscreen or downscreen. The resultant need to dart from one horizontal corridor to another is more tactical than Atic Atac ever got.

As Ross Holman (one of the winners of the Jet Set Willy completion competition) wrote in a review for Your Spectrum: “The real attraction of Sabre Wulf is the combination of simplicity and complexity; a straightforward maze game but with elements […] to raise it to a far higher level.” Meanwhile Crash started off their review by saying that it was “probably the most redundant review in this issue” and that readers would already be playing the game, a comment on the timing of going to print but also on Sabre Wulf’s expected level of success. They weren’t wrong. Sabre Wulf was a success and even had a bit of a “[the] adventures of Sabreman will be continued in…” trail at its end. Ultimate’s imperial phase continued.

In that Pitchfork article on imperial phases that I started with, Tom Ewing writes that “an imperial phase sustains a career but also freezes it: Empires decline and the memory of former glories dies hard.” I will write about how Ultimate sought to escape that one when I reach 1985. In the 1980s Britain that Ultimate and Pet Shop Boys thrived in, the decline of former imperial glories was also rather a live subject. I noted the resonance that The Fall of Rome might have had as places that had been part of the former British Empire continued to make their exit. Within the short time Ultimate had been active, St. Kitts & Nevis and Brunei had gained independence from the UK.

Sabreman, dashing through the jungle on a mission to loot precious objects, is a particularly imperial hero. The British weren’t the only ones telling the kind of problematically nostalgic adventure story that Sabre Wulf does; for the fortnight it was top of the UK game charts, the biggest film at the UK box office was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Nonetheless, the fact that Sabreman is even depicted wearing a pith helmet makes his specifically British imperial nature very clear.

Alongside the rhinos and tarantulas and wulfs, you also encounter spear-wielding “natives” and their huts. The limited possibilities of Spectrum graphics might have helped spare us from even worse in how those people look, but they are already functionally interchangeable with the animals, another imperialist detail. Visions of the jungle would be another theme that would carry through to Ultimate’s successors. Meanwhile, a different developer would go on to take the central themes of Sabre Wulf and Indiana Jones and turn them into one of the most successful British games of the 1990s.

  • Sabre Wulf (Rare/THQ, 2004, Game Boy Advance)
  • Sabre Wulf (Rare/THQ, 2004, Game Boy Advance)

In 2004, Rare returned to Sabre Wulf and released a reboot of it on the Game Boy Advance. There is a fascinating bit in a later Retro Gamer interview with Trevor Attwood, who worked on that game, explaining an initial suggestion to make some changes: “Sabreman went through an identity crisis. The management team were unsure of his global appeal, and thought that with Sabreman being an ‘old explorer’ with overtones of the British Empire and colonisation, this could cause problems”. This concern is faintly surprising given what else was going on in games by 2004. Sabreman ended up in the game basically unchanged beyond being aged up with a grey moustache, and spoke with an English accent. The memory of former glories dies hard.

  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 7 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade) for week ending 14 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for weeks ending 7 July 1984 and 14 July 1984

UK games (arcade): Sabre Wulf (ASP, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

UK singles: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – Two Tribes

UK albums: Bob Marley and the Wailers – Legend

Sources: