In 1986, Scanatron released a Commodore 64 game called The Double, made by Paul Barnard and Peter Martin. Taking after Football Manager, it put more of an emphasis on placing yourself into English football history. It came packaged with a written history of the Double of its title: the achievement of winning the league and the FA Cup in the same season, achieved by Preston North End in the first ever league season in 1888-89, and few teams since. As a child I found reading that story captivating, and some of its aura extended to the game itself.

The Double was a tedious game. Zzap! 64 highlighted its “unbelievably slow speed” and it makes Football Manager — a game originally released on the ZX81 in 1982 — look sleek and rapid. The Double also possessed a unique quality of any Commodore 64 game I played back then, in that when our household fridge went through its periodic cycle of powering up or down, the resultant small variation of electricity to the computer would be enough to crash the game. I was so compelled by the prospect of this terrible game that I once got into trouble for getting up early in the morning and turning the fridge off so that I could play it unimpeded.

  • The Double (Scanatron, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • The Double (Scanatron, 1986, Commodore 64)

Speaking of fridges, let’s turn to William Perry, the American Football player who gained the nickname The Refrigerator after someone commented that he was the size of one. At the end of his first season for the Chicago Bears, he scored a touchdown in 1986’s Super Bowl XX as part of their comfortable victory. He was already well on his way to becoming one of the sport’s most famous players, especially in the UK where Channel 4 had only started bringing American Football to greater prominence a few years earlier. A bit later in 1986 he would appear (along with teammate Walter Payton) on Terry Wogan’s popular TV chat show here.

Ocean Software saw an opportunity to capitalise on the sport’s increasing profile and create something with an appeal to both the present moment and its own storied history. This being Ocean, the way to do that was obviously licences. And so they released Super Bowl XX, the official game of Super Bowl XX, where you can play as the Chicago Bears or New England Patriots, the sides which competed that game. Much like The Double versus Football Manager, looking at Super Bowl XX next to Mindscape’s American Football (#1 in non-arcade charts for a week in 1984) doesn’t really suggest years’ worth of progress, but that’s fairly besides the point. 

  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

It does add a bit of direct control of the action alongside choosing the strategic plays, although you are just controlling squares on a small map. Ocean packaged the game with an audio tape where a man takes fifteen minutes to explain the basic rules of the sport and its strategies, bookended by congratulating you on purchasing Ocean’s Super Bowl computer game programme. It ends with him pretending to be the owner of the Chicago Bears calling you to offer you the post as their offensive coach. It sounds like a way to bridge the gap for newcomers and bring them into the sense of participating in a major sporting event. Though Sinclair User’s preview was clearly based around expected knowledge: “You can watch an action replay on the menu screen — here the figures look like huge Fridges and the effect is realistic.”

Finding out about the game’s development is no easy task. Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean’s book Ocean: The History doesn’t mention Super Bowl XX once. Developers Tony Cooper (the ZX Spectrum version) and Kevin Grieve and Grant Harrison (the Commodore 64 one) did not give any interviews about it at the time that I can find. Grant Harrison is the one of the three with the most other credits, including the game I’ll write about in my next post and the Commodore 64 conversion of Underwurlde. He did bring up Super Bowl XX in a later interview with C64.com, but his comment is short enough that I’ll repeat it in full: “Super Bowl XX was a game for Ocean which I thought played well and which did pretty well both in the magazines and in terms of sales. I partnered up with Kevin Grieve for this one, he did the logic and I did the rest.”

  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

A couple of updates from Your Sinclair suggest the usual issues and delays from Ocean’s hurried approach to game development, and worse. The April 1986 issue (written in February) starts a report with “What a fumble! Two weeks after the Superbowl and Ocean still ain’t made it into the endzone with Superbowl ‘86.” In the June issue they followed that with news that the finished Spectrum version had some significant bugs in and Ocean had pulled it from the shelves after release. Its initial sales still contributed to the game reaching #1 in the combined formats UK charts for a week, when added to those of the less troubled C64 version. The Gallup chart published in Popular Computing Weekly also listed an MSX version, but the only such game appears to have been an entirely different Super Bowl game released by Budgie the previous year.

When it came to reviews, Computer & Video Games made the somewhat startling claim that on the day of the Super Bowl “the UK and America came to a complete halt” before saying the game “stands next to Hardball as a great sports simulation”. Most weren’t quite as positive. Crash noted that it “may well lose sales because of its late arrival” before saying that it was “a pity that you have to play it with a friend to have much fun”. Popular Computing Weekly elaborated further on the same point: “Tracking 22 players on screen is a time consuming business for a microprocessor. So it hasn’t got time to be clever […] The computer offense is easily beaten.” The review also points out that it’s possible to lose when massively outscoring your opponent because “when you’ve clocked up over one hundred, your score goes back to zero”.

  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Super Bowl XX (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)

As I searched for more info, there were repeated theme to many of the more general recent comments that came up across retro Facebook pages and the like: people who had much fonder memories of the event than of the computer game. There were also plenty who had liked Mindscape’s American Football much better. Still, in 1986 Ocean had the promotional power to make Super Bowl XX a success, and its sense of occasion was surely enough to make some people stick at it and do battle with the Fridge.

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 29 March 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 29 March 1986

UK games: Super Bowl XX (Ocean, Spectrum/C64)

UK films: Clockwise

UK singles: Cliff Richard and The Young Ones – Living Doll

UK albums: Various Artists – Hits 4

Sources: