On Thursday 9 August 1984, 11.7 million people in the UK turned on BBC1 to watch Olympic Grandstand cover the Olympics in Los Angeles. Fully 20% of the…
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…
Ocean’s contract with Konami to port their arcade games under the Imagine label had quickly worked well with Hyper Sports. Even if it did end up competing with…
1985 was quite a year for Tokuro Fujiwara. He had earlier started his career at Konami, joining from Osaka Designers’ College to do visual design work, initially without…
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…
“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…
The UK chart success of Computer Scrabble in 1984 showed the audience for direct computer versions of modern board games. The makers of predecessor Monty Plays Scrabble had…
Right after Ultimate released Underwurlde and introduced the ability-unlocked-gateway mechanic to 2D platformer maze games, they also put out the much more significant game they had been holding…
Games based on movies go back a long way, including in the UK’s games charts. Earlier in 1984, the charts played host to Richard Wilcox Software’s Blue Thunder,…