Nothing so far has given so clear a picture of the memory holes in UK games history as this one. Following Band Aid, and alongside Live Aid, Soft Aid was an associated fundraising compilation, which came on a cassette containing with both ten games and also “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (presumably leading lots more people to discover the discordant fun of playing computer cassettes in audio players). Soft Aid spent 14 (fourteen!) weeks at #1 in the Spectrum chart, and something similar in the all formats one. And I had never heard of it. It’s not something that gets referred back to. Band Aid and Live Aid came back in the 2000s as Band Aid 20 and Live 8, but there was no Soft Aid 20 or Soft 8. For Soft Aid, there’s an entry in a theoretical record book which no on refers to. Nothing beside remains.
In form, Soft Aid is definitely more Live Aid than Band Aid. It makes no attempt in its content to address the crisis it was charity for, and does not involve any new material, collaborative or otherwise. It wasn’t quite equivalent to a bunch of the most popular groups getting together to play their greatest hits, though. More a case of ten of the more successful publishers getting together to each give away what they didn’t mind giving.
Playing two old #1 games a week is enough of a challenge when one of those games doesn’t turn out to consist of ten games. The games themselves were not likely to have been that big a part of why so many people bought Soft Aid for so long anyway – the chance to get ten games for £4.99 to a charitable cause, yes; what those ten games were precisely, less so. So I am not going to pretend that I spent a long time appreciating each of the ten. I took an approach slightly more generous and patient than I ever took to compilations back when I was still playing games on cassette, though. Then I would have dismissed several on their names alone; now I at least played them all. And since the games had all been out for a while, they’re collectively fascinating for this project in giving a slightly randomised insight into the BC era: Before Charts.
1. Spellbound (Beyond, 1984)
A Q*Bert type game where you control a frog trying to cover a triangle board and avoid getting zapped by a witch and her skeleton crew. Using diagonal controls on a board where it’s not the most logical is interesting, but it suffers from too much jerky slowdown to be much fun. I’m not going to accuse all involved of pulling a fast one in the name of charity, but… there was a different, far better known and regarded game called Spellbound in 1985. I have to wonder.
2. Starbike (The Edge, 1984)
The most basic and standard of side-scrolling shoot-em-ups, almost completely transformed to brilliance by the fact that you get to play as a laser-shooting space biker. It would only be better if it was space pirates on bikes.
3. Kokotoni Wilf (Elite, 1984)
Spelled as Kokotoni Wolf on the cassette inlay and advertising. Wilf is… a bird? An angel? Something fluttering about collecting objects in something like Jet Set Willy if Jet Set Willy was all about dinosaurs and that bit more garish.
4. The Pyramid (Fantasy, 1983)
A single-screen-at-a-time shoot-em-up which relies on some kind of meta numbers game for personality, and didn’t inspire me to make it that far.
5. Horace Goes Skiing (Melbourne House, 1982)
The oldest game on the compilation, and a fine representative of a certain early strain of one-person whimsy, the one person in this case being William Tang. It’s a successor to Hungry Horace, a take on Pac-Man, and this time Horace Goes Skiing is an amusingly sketched ski simulator tacked onto an amusingly sketched take on Frogger’s dangerous road crossing. It’s a game of two halves, Des.
6. Gilligan’s Gold (Ocean, 1984)
I wondered if this was an earlier example of Ocean’s licencing approach and Gilligan’s Gold was an action film or something. No, it’s an unlicensed replication of an arcade game called Bagman. You collect gold, ride mine carts and stick the odd pickaxe in the odd head. Limited but diverting.
7. Ant Attack (Quicksilva, 1983)
The most interesting and compelling game of the ten. I’m guessing that the post-Knight Lore mania for isometric 3D platform games may have led to the excavation of this pioneering one. It’s nothing like the crisp, enlarged cartoon world of Knight Lore, but instead a fuzzy grayscale world of dots viewed from a long way up. The people look like ants from here. And the ants, they really look like ants, but bigger than the people. The ants are the ones in charge of the strange city which the game presents. You dash around, trying to get your girl to rescue the boys trapped there (or vice versa) and contemplating this place which feels like somewhere abandoned and left over to its own rules. The way its hazy glimpsed architecture of dreams combines with a sardonic humour via its text interjections makes it both the most alien and most human game of the set.
8. 3D Tank Duel (Realtime, 1984)
This is our earliest first person 3D game, and unlike Ant Attack does not do that much to suggest the future possibilities, straining hard against the limitations of its hardware and collapsing.
9. Jack and the Beanstalk (Thor, 1984)
A remarkably ugly and clumsily fairy tale rendition which is precisely the kind of thing you put at spot 9 of 10 on a compilation in the safe assumption that almost no one is going to bother with it.
10. Sorcery (Virgin, 1984)
The decision to have objects made out of literal collections of letters is a strong callback (callout?) to the kind of games you could type in yourself from code listed in magazines and run on your Spectrum or Commodore 64. That and a certain slapdash weirdness mean that despite being roughly the same thing as Kokotoni Wilf I got a fair bit more enjoyment from it.
