In 1984, it was still quite common for people to make games on their own, and sometimes even get them to the top of the charts. The Fall of Rome was the one and only computer game made by Martin Edwardes, a table-top-gaming enthusiast and former civil servant who had worked on the UK’s National Economic Model. Edwardes had been devising table-top games since he was a teenager, and in his twenties was persuaded to submit some games he had devised to World Wide Wargames’ magazine The Wargamer. These games covered quite a range of topics. In 1977 he produced Battle of the Ring, one more take on Tolkien, and then Africa, “a contemporary strategic analysis of Superpower surrogate conflict”. In 1981 he followed these with Simon de Montfort, a simulation of “England’s first constitutional revolution”.

The next game he made was a little different, in that it was written for computers. He wrote Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro versions himself, and it’s not entirely clear which was first. The Spectrum version gives Edwardes credit for the concept but was programmed by Paul Rawling, on whom I could find little information. We will meet Rawling again later in 1984. Edwardes based The Fall of Rome on the latter stages of the Roman Empire. You start in 395 AD when it stretches from Spain and Britain in the west right into Asia in the east. It is coming under increasing attack from assorted groups of outsiders, and you need to marshall your forces to defend it.

You get a visual map of the empire and its surrounds, with particularly little information conveyed this way for the Spectrum version. Most of the game is conveyed through text, with different coloured boxes giving information about the riches and forces in each of your regions in turn while you decide what to do with them. This includes typing in the first few letters of where you want to move them to. It must have been basically essential to consult the paper map that came with the game throughout playing, at least until having played at enough length to know your Thracia from your Pontus by memory.

You have to work your way through each of the empire’s regions in order and make decisions, with no chance to go back and change your mind or see all of the information in one go. Once you’re done with that each turn, it lets you know which particular invasive forces have turned up in each region and you decide which ones you want to attack. You don’t get much information about what happens in the battles, but see the endpoint in terms of your territory. Those Visigoths and Berberi are no pushover, and it is very easy to quickly start losing horribly and finding that your empire slides away into salt and sand. I certainly did. More experienced war game players, in particular The Wargaming Scribe, have shown that with practice there is a way to succeed through strategy.

Publishers ASP ran their own long campaign when it came to advertising the game. This started off with ads which didn’t even mention its name, just promised the forthcoming excitement of “five million barbarians, an army or two of Persians, several thousand upset Armenians, fifty legions of itinerant Italians… and you!”. It would later extend to hiring a squad of people dressed up as Roman legionnaires to appear at the 1984 Computer Fair in Earl’s Court.

Once the game came out, it got some positive reviews, with T.W. in Home Computing Weekly calling it “a gripping game” and warning not to start playing too late at night. Your Spectrum’s three reviewers gave it two hits to one miss and similarly mentioned its addictive qualities, though tempering that with “providing you don’t expect too much razzmatazz-type action”. Crash had a more negative version of the same sentiment, saying it was “quite educational, a reasonable amount of fun at first, but not really exciting enough in the end to appeal all that widely”.

It appealed widely enough for the Spectrum version to be top of the non-arcade section of the charts for three weeks. Around this time the number of games available was growing fast, but finding a niche could still prove very fruitful. There weren’t a massive number of strategy games around, and a well-executed one could be of interest even without a lot of razzmatazz. There was a natural crossover between the type of people that had the patience to type in programs, who were still a decent proportion of microcomputer users, and fans of text-based strategy games. Perhaps the fall of the Roman Empire was a particularly smart choice of subject with added resonance in Britain’s own post-imperial state.

That’s one explanation for the game’s chart success. There is another explanation, which involves going back to the identity of its publishers. The ‘ASP’ in ASP Software stands for the name of its owners: Argus Specialist Publications, a traditional magazine publisher and part of the wider Argus Press. The glowing recommendation from Home Computing Weekly was coming from a magazine published by the same parent company. The extensive, presumably nominally expensive, advertising space was in Argus publications as well. There was clearly some synergy at work.

More than that, for most of 1984 I am using the charts compiled by the ASP Market Research Group, and also published in Home Computing Weekly. I am using these as a continuation of the source of the best charts of 1983 and because they were weekly. But, well, let’s just say that it’s notable that I have not been able to find The Fall of Rome at all in any other software charts of the time which weren’t compiled and published by the same company as the game was.

This is not necessarily to allege that Argus made up the charts to put their own game at the top. That’s probably not even the most likely explanation. It’s more that when you know exactly which retailers contribute to the chart records, and you have an established relationship with them, it wouldn’t be surprising for them to end up well-inclined towards stocking and selling your game. It was a conflict of interest, whether anyone was deliberately acting on it or not.

Around the same time, Computer & Video Games published an article in its April 1984 issue lamenting the inconsistencies of various games charts and the lack of respected research companies involved. It included the tale of “a major weekly music paper which […] had Jet Set Willy in at the number twelve spot several weeks before the programmer had even finished writing it”. This article in turn was essentially an advert for a new chart C&VG and The Daily Mirror would start publishing (a chart which would soon indicate a Spectrum version of Twin Kingdom Valley months before it existed). Motivations aside, though, The Fall of Rome shows why C&VG had a point. By the end of the year, Gallup would take on the role of compiling a more independent and respected chart, one which has essentially continued to the present day.

  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 12 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 19 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 26 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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