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 British population watched on the day Daley Thompson successfully competed his bid for his second gold medal. Ocean Software went on to make Daley Thompson and his decathlon into one of 1984’s most successful computer games. The Olympics wasn’t the only television event on British TV that August. Six days earlier and over on ITV, almost the same number of people tuned into a very different spectacle from Los Angeles: the finale of the science fiction miniseries V. Within a couple of years, Ocean turned V into a hit computer game too.

V’s positioning against the Olympics was deliberate. ITV had been due to carry coverage of the Games but had decided that the costs it would need to pay its technicians were too high and had pulled out instead, leaving the BBC to take on the task. That left ITV needing something big to plug the gap later in the evenings. The initial 1983 miniseries of V and its 1984 follow-up V: The Final Battle had both been a huge success in the US, and since they collectively comprised five feature-length episodes, ITV decided to run all five across the first week of the Olympics, next to the News at Ten. The result was increasingly high ratings each day. For some UK sci-fi context, the 11.55 million figure for the finale was about 50% more people than had watched Colin Baker make his debut in the most recent series of Doctor Who.

The ‘V’ in V stands for Visitors (its enemies) or Victory (its slogan of rebellion). The show was conceived by Kenneth Johnson, who had previously been showrunner for the series The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk. Inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, he wanted to make a series about resistance to a fascist takeover of the United States. As Johnson told it to Vanity Fair in 2023, an NBC executive responded that “I don’t know that Americans will get fascism” and asked “couldn’t it be an outside force? Like the Soviets or the Chinese?”. They settled on V‘s resistance being against disguised reptilian aliens.

The resistance succeeded at the end of The Final Battle, but NBC were keen on a follow-up, so a full length series was made and broadcast in the US from the end of 1984, focusing on the long aftermath. With both its budget and ideas stretched rather further, it proved a bit less of a success. The same went for when it was shown the following year in the UK, with Popular Computing Weekly comparing it to the original as follows: “V the TV series is not very successful (but a lot funnier) and crops up at obscure hours on regional TV.” 

Nonetheless, Ocean Software saw an opportunity, as they often did when any popular licence was available. They intended for V the computer game to come out alongside the series and before Christmas 1985, but as per usual that proved optimistic and the development went quite a way into 1986. The completed game does not involve much reckoning with fascism, nor indeed any reptilian aliens beyond one textual reference to the Visitors’ leader Diana if you complete the game. Instead you explore a reasonably accurately decorated version of the alien mothership protected by various security robots. It does involve some laser blasting, plus a lot of teleporting between floors and using a “communiputer” to hack into the security systems and manipulate them in alien language.

  • V (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • V (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • V (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • V (Ocean, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

The game’s tenuous relationship with the series it’s named after makes some more sense when looking at Ocean’s modus operandi in more detail. Having started off making straight rip-offs of arcade games (Road Frog, Kong), they refined their approach a bit. Sometimes that meant actually picking up the rights to make official arcade conversions, like Hunchback and Yie Ar Kung-Fu. Generally, it meant taking inspiration from a successful game and attaching a licence for some other popular phenomenon to it. Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was one such example, being heavily based on Konami’s Hyper Olympic/Track & Field. Ocean also redid Data East’s BurgerTime as Mr Wimpy, and, with a little bit more of their own inspiration, turned Capcom’s Commando into Rambo: First Blood Part II. When it came to V, well, there’s a reason why the previews or reviews in five different magazines all made reference to Impossible Mission.

  • Road Frog (Spectrum, 1983, ZX Spectrum)
  • Kong (Ocean, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Mr. Wimpy (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Mr. Wimpy (Ocean, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (Ocean, 1985, Commodore 64)

Impossible Mission, Dennis Caswell’s Commodore 64 spy puzzle-platformer, equal parts stylish and ingenious, had a title with its own obvious TV inspiration, from Mission: Impossible. The game came out in the UK in early 1985, then narrowly missed the top of the UK chart that October when U.S. Gold released a Spectrum version. Impossible Mission involves exploring a rather sci-fi facility with a lot of narrow corridors and whirring interfaces, avoiding security robots, using computers to change security arrangements to your advantage, and solving esoteric puzzles through a separate interface that took up a significant proportion of the screen and could be switched to when the player character was stationary.

  • Impossible Mission (Epyx, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Impossible Mission (Epyx, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Impossible Mission (Epyx, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • Impossible Mission (Epyx/U.S. Gold, 1985, ZX Spectrum)
  • Impossible Mission (Epyx/U.S. Gold, 1985, ZX Spectrum)

V has pretty much all of that, though it switches the ratios somewhat. Even more of it takes place in corridors, with less other platforming action, and much more of an emphasis on the puzzle side of things. It’s possible to play Impossible Mission for hours without engaging with its puzzle interface. In V, you can’t get out of the first room without hacking into the door controls, manipulating a sequence of six alien numbers to match via a set of buttons which each change a couple of numbers at a time. Developer Grant Harrison, who likely worked on V at the same time as Super Bowl XX, later said “in hindsight I think we should have been a bit more explanatory about the code system used for opening doors, et cetera. Sometimes when you write games you can get too close to them and take things for granted.”

I got nowhere when I first started V, so I watched a few seconds of someone’s gameplay video, and after following along enough to get the code concept I got out a notepad and enjoyed figuring it out. In 1986, you couldn’t look up other people’s playthroughs in the same way. In the Zzap! 64 review of V, Julian Rignall complained that “the instructions are appalling and tell you nothing about the game”. The reviewer at Computer & Video Games had even more of a problem. “The first obstacle had this reviewer thoroughly stumped”, they say, before recounting the advice they got when they called Ocean, without any indication they ever got further. “If you are a code-cracking type of genius, you’ll probably enjoy the game”. They still gave the game a 5/10 for playability and 6/10 for value.

  • V (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • V (Ocean, 1986, Commodore 64)

A minority of reviewers got along rather better. John Gilbert in Sinclair User wrote that “slowly I was hooked and drawn in. Frustration turned into a determination to suss it all out and I was converted.” Others at least compared V favourably to its televisual iteration. ZX Computing wrote that “V is a large and complex game, and just for once the game more than lives up to the original ideas that inspired it (mind you, the TV series wasn’t a particularly hard act to follow, was it?)” alongside saying that the show “made Blake’s 7 look like Hamlet”. Computer Gamer were similarly sniffy about this American import. “I thought that the TV series was pitched at the level of Star Trek meets Crossroads and Dallas, the game is a vast improvement on this”

Grant Harrison described V as his favourite of the games he worked on. “The storyboard was good and it had a nice mix of arcade and puzzle.” He also listed among his favourite of other people’s games to play, alongside Uridium and Elite, “Mission Impossible”. It’s possible that he meant the 1979 Scott Adams text adventure. On the other hand, there is the evidence of V, and before that his colleagues at the developers known at different points as Softstone and Kaos actually worked on the Spectrum conversion of Impossible Mission.

Gary Liddon pointed out as much in Zzap! 64’s review when saying more baldly than any other critic that V “seems to be an attempt at a poor man’s Impossible Mission”. He also showed that low expectations from the show didn’t always help perceptions of the game. “I didn’t like the film, I didn’t like the TV series, I’m happily indifferent to the books having not read any of them and I hate the computer game.”

Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 12 April 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 12 April 1986

UK games: V (Ocean, Spectrum/C64)

UK films: A Room with a View

UK singles: George Michael – A Different Corner

UK albums: Various Artists – Hits 4

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