Soft Aid – “Feed The World”

“The games industry was in the ascendancy, but was still in the shadow of the music business in those days” said Rod Cousens, when reflecting on the events of 1985 to Mark James Hardisty for his book A Gremlin in the Works: 1983-2015. Cousens was the head of the publisher Quicksilva, and the key force in the creation of a charity compilation which raised hundreds of thousands of pounds and spent 16 weeks at #1 in the UK charts, a feat which would be unmatched for years afterwards. Gallup switched to fortnightly charts for much of the duration, as if the totality of its success had rendered more regular updates unnecessary.

The specific music industry inspiration for Cousens was Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and the funds it raised to try to alleviate famine in Ethiopia. He got in touch with Bob Geldof and secured his endorsement to create something similar in the software space, called Soft Aid, with the money going towards the Band Aid Appeal. The Soft Aid cassette also included audio of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” on the reverse side from its software. Soft Aid was part of a much wider wave of responses; during Soft Aid’s run at the top of the charts, the Live Aid concerts happened, and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World” became the UK’s #1 single for a couple of weeks. So did The Crowd’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, a charity single for a disaster closer to home.

Cousens worked with trade publication Computer Trade Weekly to get support from across the British industry for a compilation, offering up Quicksilva’s own Ant Attack as an example of the kind of game that they would be turning to charity ends. They worked on compiling dual sets of games for Spectrum and Commodore 64 to maximise their reach, trying and failing to extend to an Amstrad CPC version as well. Not all companies offered games as impressive as Ant Attack, but lots offered something, brought together at the attractively low price of £4.99. As well as the final tracklisting of ten games for each system (with Activision’s Pitfall! swapped out late enough that it still appeared in the listing in some adverts), the inlay has a list of thanks for others who had offered support: Artic, Llamasoft, Micromega, PSS, Softek and Software Projects.

The charity angle is not the only way in which Soft Aid took after recent developments in the music industry. If you’ve been looking at the #1 round-ups at the end of my posts, you might have noticed a repeated theme on the album charts: since the release of the first Now That’s What I Call Music compilation at the end of 1983, the Now series and other compilations of hits from many different artists had become a regular presence at the top of the album chart. The dominance became so regular that in 1989 the UK’s music chart compilers responded by splitting compilation albums off into their own separate chart, which continues to this day. The soundtrack to KPop Demon Hunters has been #1 in the UK compilations chart for the last 11 weeks.

Soft Aid’s most lasting impact on home computer games was likewise in showing that it was possible to bring together different publishers for a common cause. Many other such examples soon followed, including some for charity but many more for the common cause of profit. By the end of 1985, Virgin had put out a compilation called Now Games.

Living up even more to the Now That’s What I Call Music model of bringing together the biggest hits was The Hit Squad’s They Sold a Million (which was accurately titled collectively, not individually). They did manage to release that on ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, and it comprised Ultimate’s Sabre Wulf/The Staff of Karnath, U.S. Gold’s Beach-Head, Ocean’s Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, and Software Projects’ Jet Set Willy. They Sold a Million reached #3 on the combined formats chart in November 1985. Games compilations didn’t take off the extent of needing their own chart, but I will get to write about a couple more of them.

The actual games on Soft Aid feel somewhat orthogonal to its success, but going through them all gives an interesting overview of an assortment of works of UK publishers in 1983 and 1984, from arcade rip-offs to inventive moves into 3D. To give a sense of what it all adds up to, what follows is a set of capsule pieces on each of the eighteen games (not twenty, because two games appeared on both formats). Happily, I have some help on the Spectrum side from Chris Arnsby, who writes the excellent Where Were They Now?, in which he tracks down the locations of the offices of various developers and magazines while reflecting on their history. 

Spellbound (Beyond, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

[Iain Mew]

In 1984, home computer rip-offs of recognisable classic arcade games were still a regular sight. So it was that in the May 1984 issue of Computer & Video Games, they mentioned “Q*bert copies are beginning to proliferate on the Spectrum in the same way as copies of Pac-man twelve months ago” and reviewed three of them. As with Donkey Kong clones in 1983, Ocean came top of the bunch in those reviews and in the charts, with their Pogo reaching #9. Lowest rated of the three was Spellbound, by P. W. Norris for Beyond.

Bombast and self-promotion was The Edge’s bread and butter. “Over the past few months I had been bringing together some of the best talent worldwide to form a unique group of programmers, graphic artists and musicians. Clearly Softek’s game creation and marketing division had grown immensely in the first half of 1984. The creative group requested to be able to form an independent division of Softek.”; That’s Tim Langdell, managing director of Softek announcing the formation of The Edge via a press release. You might call it hype but Tim Langdell would call it the birth of a megagame. It turned out, a megagame looked a lot like a hybrid of Jetpac and Lunar Jetman. Starbike fused the graphics and gameplay of both to produce something with the playability of neither.

The first of two games to appear on both formats’ versions of Soft Aid, Kokotoni Wilf was one of the biggest and most recent hits on the compilation, having reached the combined formats top ten in October 1984. Elite Systems couldn’t exactly go further back, since it was their first game. Richard Wilcox had released one previous game as Richard Wilcox Software: Blue Thunder, a helicopter game based on a recent film. He then assembled a team including Rory Green on graphics design, and programmers Neil Bate for the  Commodore 64 and Andy Williams and Stephen Lockley for the Spectrum, and they launched as Elite just in time for confusion with the game of the same name.

Kokotoni Wilf, as the second word in the name hints towards, is one of many 1984 games to take after Jet Set Willy. It is distinguished by invention on two fronts. First is in the story and setting, where you are a wizard’s protege travelling across time to collect pieces of an amulet. Second is the fact that he has given you magical wings, and the implications for gameplay, with the ability to fly taking it slightly away from the platforming norm. The versions on the two formats each have opposite drawbacks. The Spectrum one controls well but is horribly garish; the Commodore 64 one looks much better but gives the character a nasty momentum that needs constant compensation. Those issues aside, they’re both quite enjoyable as well as original.

The Pyramid is a quite simple and well-executed single-screen shoot-’em-up with a couple of twists. You float around in a space-bubble shooting at rubbish bins, mutant eyeballs or whatever. In order to move on, though, you need to collect a diamond and use it to go through your choice of exit. Each of those will take you to a different next location, Out Run-style. “It all adds up to a game you could spend a great deal of time playing” said C.A. in Personal Computer Games, although not everyone quite agreed. M.B. in Home Computing Weekly: “the whole thing could become a little tedious in time”.

Horace Goes Skiing (Melbourne House/Psion, 1983, ZX Spectrum)

[Chris Arnsby]

Part two of the Horace trilogy. Part one saw Horace eating flowers in the park (The Move consider a lyrics rewrite), and part three would see him battling spiders, but in part two he took to the slopes. At least he did eventually; first Horace must cross a busy road twice because the ski slopes and the ski hire shop are dangerously located on either side of a dual carriageway. Yes, it is oddly like Frogger. The road crossing game is frantic, the skiing is slower paced. The two sections would quickly get tiresome as individual games, but together the combination works surprisingly well. The slower, less high stakes skiing sections provide a chance to unwind after the more stressful traffic dodging. The game is basic but charming. It has no hidden depths but it was a good choice for the Soft Aid compilation because in short bursts, it’s fun. 

Horace Goes Skiing was possibly the most widely seen of the Horace games. In addition to Soft Aid, the game also featured in the 1984 Spectrum Six Pack which is where I first encountered it. At least, it was in the six pack if you brought the original rubber-keyed Spectrum set. If you were tempted by the Spectrum+ then Horace Goes Skiing was inexplicably swapped out for the design and modelling program VU-3D.

The second of the games to appear on both formats’ version of Soft Aid, Gilligan’s Gold is one of Ocean’s series of games taking heavy inspiration from an arcade game. After their unofficial version of Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, they looked all around closer to home. That led to a more official version of Century Electronics’ Hunchback from the UK. It also brought them to Gilligan’s Gold ripping off a French arcade game from 1982 called Le Bagnard or, in English, Bagman.

Le Bagnard was the creation of Jacques Brissé and Alain Valadon, working at Valadon Automation, a company that moved from factory automation to making arcade games, via ripping off the arcade machines of others. Their first game, it had an early example of synthesised speech, and an inventive take on climbing ladders and collecting things. It plays out across several connected screens and has you lugging heavy bags of gold around and dropping them on enemies when you need to. The Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions of Gilligan’s Gold look very different from each other but get the combination of strategy and frantic action about equally right. “It’s a bit like a Harold Lloyd Buster Keaton arcade game” said Crash, and Computer & Video Games compared it favourably in the mine game genre to China Miner. On which more below.

The jewel of the Soft Aid package; understandable because Ant Attack came from Quicksilva, who were managed by Rod Cousens, the brains behind Soft Aid. It makes sense for him to be generous as an incentive for other software houses to not just donate whatever terrible piece of unsold software was clogging up their warehouse. Along with Horace Goes Skiing and The Pyramid, Ant Attack dates to 1983 and is one of the older games on the compilation. It was part of a wave of end of year games which really showed off what the Spectrum could do: Atic Atac, Wheelie, Deathchase, and Ant Attack.

The graphics of Ant Attack are remarkable (Crash magazine gave them 100%), a three-dimensional city rendered in black, white, and grey. These colours were forced on programmer Sandy White by the limitations of the Spectrum but they are so moody and evocative that the more colourful Commodore 64 version, with its green background, looks a bit jaunty and wrong. You play boy, or girl, and only two things are stopping you from wandering through the city of Antescher and exploring at will. One, the city is riddled with giant killer ants who will eat you alive given half a chance. Two, the slightly cumbersome controls. Other companies would build on the remarkable foundations laid by Ant Attack and work out how to add more user-friendly controls to later 3D games.

Atari released their 3D tank duel arcade game Battlezone in 1980. That was a very long time ago in games by 1984, enough that Sinclair User dismissed Quicksilva’s Spectrum version of it by saying “it would have been better if Atari had not given its permission to Quicksilva to produce Battlezone as the game is no better than the original arcade version.” Around the same time, three computer science students at Leeds University were working on a more advanced version of the same. Graeme Baird, Ian Oliver and Andrew Onions called their game 3D Tank Duel, and Crash implied that Baird scored a zero on a university graphics exam because he was too busy working on graphics for the game.

3D Tank Duel looks a lot like Battlezone, down to the tank sights changing in the same way. However, it has a couple of colours rather than just green on black, and it scrolls reasonably smoothly. That was enough to get a begrudging positive mention in the same Sinclair User review and to be recommended ahead of Battlezone in Computer & Video Games. It was a top ten hit but not a massive one, so perhaps it was its triumph over a Quicksilva game which led to it being on their compilation. If so, its placement on the compilation just after Quicksilva’s own much more impressive 3D game is an interesting one.

Plod, plod, plod, plod, die. Plod, plod, plod, plod, die. Plod, plod, plod, plod… plod, plod, plod, plod, die. That’s my memory of playing Jack and the Beanstalk. The instructions say “As Jack you have to search for the castle’s riches, being careful not to wake the sleeping giant in the parlour.” What you actually have is a game whose colourful animated graphics conceal a screen with one, narrow, safe route to the next. Essentially it’s a walking the plank simulator. One wrong step and you are dead. Frustration quickly sets in, especially when you learn you can die in stupid and unfair ways, like walking off the sides and bottom of the first screen. 

Everyone involved would go on to produce better work. While the Soft Aid package was being put together Thor Software was well on the way to transforming into Odin Computer Graphics (in defiance of Norse mythology, Odin was the son of Thor) and programmer Chris Kerry, after the false start of Monty is Innocent, would write some great games for Gremlin Graphics.

Martin Wheeler, the author of Sorcery, was just 14 years old when it was released. It would be impressive regardless, a flip-screen game which you fly through at pace avoiding enemies and collecting objects, working out how to open its doors and progress. Reviews made comparisons to Imagine’s Alchemist and to Ultimate’s Atic Atac, which makes sense, but it’s even bolder in getting quickly to whatever works.

“Playable and nicely implemented” said Crash, “fast and furious” said Sinclair Programs, and Your Computer went with “a sorcery of endless fun”. The only complaint of most reviews was with the very odd choice of keys, using Q and A for left and right. Virgin took advantage of being part of a big conglomerate for its promotion, with a competition to win flights to New York if you could find the right objects and the special screen below Stonehenge. Sorcery didn’t chart on the Spectrum, but during Soft Aid’s run at the top of the charts it became a huge hit on the Amstrad CPC, reaching #1 on that format’s chart.

A&F Software made their name with Chuckie Egg, one of the more inventive games based directly on the Donkey Kong model and a big hit on the BBC Micro especially. Sean Townsend programmed the Commodore 64 version of Chuckie Egg, and it’s not too hard to see how he got from there to another game involving ladders and platforms. Gumshoe’s additions are that you have to shoot down various “gruesome baddies” along your way before they shoot you, and there are some escalators and trapdoors for further vertical options.

You are, inevitably, out to rescue a woman (the kidnapped daughter of a millionaire) and also get some accountancy elements along the way. You have to pay $2 for every bullet fired, but since you get $10 for each enemy killed it’s not a bad rate at all. The scrolling works well but it’s otherwise fairly basic for a late 1984 game, with very little to it beyond just keeping shooting and climbing. “It doesn’t have anything outstandingly original to offer” said Steve Cooke in Personal Computer Games, but “is very playable”. That was enough to briefly make #2 in Boots’s Commodore 64 chart in October 1984.

Beamrider (Activision, 1983/1984, Commodore 64)

Activision’s commitment in the 1980s to making stars of its programmers means I don’t have to turn further than the instructions to Beamrider to see Dave Rolfe’s account of its history. He worked for Mattel, including programming the operating system of its Intellivision console. Then he moved to Activision. Things were fraught enough between the two companies that he had to programme Intellivision games without using that operating system, since he didn’t have legal access to information about it. 

He developed Beamrider, an Intellivision and Atari VCS shoot-’em-up with a light 3D effect where you and your shots follow a blue grid receding into the distance, based on a concept by colleague Tom Loughry. Loughry was inspired in part by staring at ceiling tiles in his office. They each took a different view of how the enemies should behave, but Loughry’s idea of increasingly complex fixed patterns won out in the end. It got decent reviews on making it to the Commodore 64 in late 1984. “Looked at impassively, it’s just a variant on Galaxian…” said the reviewer for Commodore Horizons. “Fortunately I haven’t had the urge to look at Beamrider impassively”.

Star Trader (Bug-Byte, 1984, Commodore 64)

Developed by a team including Trevor Hall of Twin Kingdom Valley renown, Star Trader is much as its name suggests. You travel through space in a first person view, then stop at one of eight different planets where you use a text-led interface to buy and sell goods and equipment (and also go to the pub, if it’s open). Each shop features “a large picture of the trader in question who, rather like Holiday Inn managers, looks the same whichever shop on whichever planet you are on or in.” as Crash said of the Spectrum version. Star Trader was a minor hit thanks to that version, with the C64 one failing to chart at all.

It came out at just the right time, a couple of months ahead of Elite and well ahead of that game’s Commodore 64 and Spectrum versions, so it was spared the very unflattering comparisons that might otherwise have filled its reviews. Nonetheless, not everyone was a fan of its balance of admin to thrills. “Every planet closely resembles Basingstoke, but even more boring” said The Big K, before lamenting the need to keep buying overpriced sandwiches. “This incessant insistence on the minutiae of everyday life is charming at first, but becomes very tedious after about five minutes”. Still, at least it went down better than The Great Space Race.

China Miner (Interceptor, 1984, Commodore 64)

The basic graphics of Manic Miner ancestor Miner 2049er meant its lead character’s hat looked kind of triangular, particularly on the Commodore 64 version. I wonder if that was part of inspiring Ian Grey’s concept for China Miner, a single-screen-at-a-time platformer which went all in on racial stereotyping in its packaging as a way to distinguish itself. That and intense difficulty, at a level well above even that of its obvious inspiration Manic Miner.

This was the appeal for some reviewers, with C.A. of Personal Computer Games putting the case for it. “It could, for example, take a good hour to work out how to get through the first quarter of the first screen” they write. “You can imagine the frustration at working your way through similar difficulties in later screens”. That then somehow turns into saying that of all the Manic Miner rip-offs, “you’d have to dig deep to find a better version than this”. Its limited success in practice appears to have been based on making it to the Commodore 64 before Manic Miner itself did.

Fred (Indescomp/Quicksilva, 1983/1984, Commodore 64)

In 1983, three teenagers in Spain played Coreland and Sega’s Pengo. They were impressed by that game’s procedurally-generated mazes, and decided to see if they could do similar. Carlos Granados, Fernando Rada and Paco Menéndez were early starters in a burgeoning Spanish Spectrum scene and their resultant maze game Fred got picked up for publication in the UK by Quicksilva. It then got converted to Commodore 64 by Pedro Ruiz, and hit #6 in combined formats charts in April 1984

The game has you as Fred, an Indiana Jones type climbing ropes and moving around some kind of haunted tomb. With its grey stone walls, acid dripping from the ceilings, slow progress and slightly impenetrable air, it is, for the benefit of any UFO 50 players, easily the most Barbuta thing I’ve played so far. The Commodore 64 version was not particularly well reviewed when it made it here, but the Your 64 review gives a clue as to why: “After seeing so many other programs of this type on the 64, one could be forgiven for thinking that Fred is a direct rip-off… apart from the fact that Fred came first!”

Gyropod (Taskset, 1984, Commodore 64)

Taskset, a developer based on the Yorkshire coast in Bridlington, was headed up by Andy Walker, who worked with computers in the civil service before deciding he would rather make arcade games. He and his new colleagues then pivoted to the Commodore 64 when that came out, impressed by “the best value machine on the market”. In an interview with Commodore User, he described prioritising originality, and then “apart from originality, what we’d aim for in a game is relatively simple rules but a high standard of presentation”.

That fits with Gyropod, a horizontal shoot-’em-up where you control a ship that rotates around the outside of a bigger, circular space station, with added on-foot planetary interludes when you need to resupply. Well, the interludes being shoot-’em-up interludes is original; they look rather strongly like Lunar Jetman. “Strong on sound […] with the pictorial side showing flair and imagination” said L.S. in the same issue of Commodore User as the interview. P.C. in Personal Computer Games echoed that but added more reservations: “Gyropod is a brave attempt to inject some much-needed originality into the tired shoot-’em’-up formula but, unfortunately, it falls just short”.

Falcon Patrol (Virgin, 1983, Commodore 64)

Steve Lee, like many young British programmers, bought a Sinclair ZX81 in 1981. Then he swapped it for a Commodore VIC-20 the following year, and stayed committed to working on Commodore games. That’s from the manual to his Falcon Patrol, which also mentions that “he spends most of his time tinkering with a very old Ford Escort”. That affinity for vehicles shows through in the game, a Defender-style horizontal shoot-’em-up that scrolls in two directions and is focused on your impressive vertical-take-off-and-landing fighter plane.

Enemy planes come in from the side of the screen as you defend your desert-based city. The momentum effects as you turn around are neat – “the way you can bank and turn your jet is delightful!” as Computer & Video Games put it. The best visual effect is when you run into one of the other planes, a glancing blow causing flames to sprout ahead of a gradual crash. There isn’t lots to it, but the presentation is such that it’s easy to see why it got good reviews all round, not least from TV Gamer: “Sadly, too few games exploit the full capabilities of the CBM 64 […] Falcon Patrol, however shows exactly what can be achieved by fully utilising its sound and graphics to produce a colourful, addictive and challenging game.”

Flak (Funsoft/U.S. Gold, 1984, Commodore 64)

Some games are influential enough to define a genre in their image. All of the more recent sources I found on Funsoft’s Flak are quick to mention Namco’s arcade shoot-’em-up Xevious (1983). Even some of the UK reviews from the time do as well. This is because, well, Flak couldn’t be much more obviously based on it. You fly upscreen over a mostly green landscape, waves of enemies appear, and structures on the ground blink open for just long enough to shoot at you. It doesn’t extend to directly ripping off graphics or layout, but just about everything else is there.

Funsoft released it first on Atari 8-bit computers, where it reached #5 in the UK’s Atari-specific chart. Then U.S. Gold, in their early mode of picking up American war games, gave a release to the Commodore 64 version, likewise worked on by Yves Lempereur. That got slightly mixed reviews (“far from original but […] by far the best version I’ve seen” in TV Gamer; “merely good” in Commodure User) and reached #29 in the multi-format charts in November 1984, when there were not yet so many shoot-’em-ups to go round.

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Sources:

• A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, Mark James Hardisty, Bitmap Books, 2016
• Cassette inlay for Soft Aid, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Blockbusters bargain bundle, Home Computing Weekly No. 131, 24-30 September 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Pi-Man gets Pac-Man treatment, Computer & Video Games No. 31, May 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Pogo, chart history at Computer Hits
• Reviews – Spellbound, Crash No. 6, July 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing 
• Kokotoni Wilf, chart history at Computer Hits
• News Input – Elite under way, Crash No. 9, October 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• 100 Doomsday Castles to be won!, Crash No. 2, March 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Test – The Pyramid, Personal Computer Games No. 3, February 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Possibilities to Explore – The Pyramid, M.B., Home Computing Weekly No. 40, 6-12 December 1983, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• En Saône-et-Loire, sur les traces des premiers jeux vidéo français, William Audureau, Le Monde, 2018
• Reviews – Gilligan’s Gold, Crash No. 11, December 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Gilligan’s Gold, Computer & Video Games No. 35, September 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• 100 copies of Tank Duel to be won, Crash No. 7, August 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Battle of the tanks, John Gilbert, Sinclair User No. 33, December 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – B’Zone/Tank Duel, Computer & Video Games No. 40, February 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• 3D Tank Duel, chart history at Computer Hits
• Cassette inlay for Sorcery, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Sorcery, Crash No. 4, May 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Softfocus – Sorcery, Sinclair Programs No. 21, July 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Software shortlist – Sorcery, Your Computer No. 5, May 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• News – New York or Bust, Home Computing Weekly No. 101, 26 February – 4 March 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• News – Magic prize, Home Computing Weekly No. 104, 19-25 March 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Sorcery, chart history at Computer Hits
• Chuckie Egg, chart history from Computer Hits
• Gumshoe, chart history from Computer Hits
• Screen Test – Gumshoe, Personal Computer Games No. 13, December 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Beamrider, chart history at Computer Hits
• Beamrider instructions, Project 64
• DP interviews… David Rolfe, Scott Stilphen, Digit Press, 2007
• On the beam, Commodore Horizons No. 11, November 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Star Trader, chart history at Computer Hits
• Reviews – Star Trader, Crash No. 7, August 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Star Trader, The Big K No. 10, January 1985
• China Miner, chart history at Computer Hits
• Screen Test – China Miner, C.A., Personal Computer Games No.5, April 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Fred – History, Alfredo Catalina & Miguel Catalina, 8bitfred.com, 2024
• Fred, chart history at Computer Hits
• Action replay – Fred, Your 64 No. 8, April 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Taskset in profile, Bohdan Buciak, Commodore User No. 13, October 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Games – Gyropod, L.S., Commodore User No. 13, October 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Test – Gyropod, Personal Computer Games No. 8, July 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Excerpt from Falcon Patrol manual, accessed via C64 Wiki
• Solitary defender of the fuel, Computer & Video Games No. 29, March 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• 28 game reviews – Falcon Patrol, TV Gamer June 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Flak, chart history at Computer Hits
• Games – Flak, D.G., Commodore User No. 14, November 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Games reviews – Flak, JP Thompson, TV Gamer November 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive 

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