One popular repeating story in games history is that of technical advances powering improved experiences. Being able to do more technically allows you to make better games, the idea goes. Often, it’s a story told to promote individual games. A lot of marketing over time hasn’t talked about mechanics, narrative, or the interplay of the two, but has instead been about marvelling at advances in technology. Better graphics. More things on screen. More polygons. Ray tracing! Blast processing! The usual hope from a business perspective is that out of that also comes more popularity, higher sales, and a pathway to growth. History also offers lots of examples of other outcomes. A particularly strong and early such cautionary tale is that of Legend software, the creators of Valhalla.

In my post on The Hobbit, I talked about how it used the new technological capabilities of the Spectrum. Obviously this included the coloured pictures it illustrates its locations with, but increased memory also made possible the complex instructions you can give and the independence of its characters. After its massive commercial success, other people looked at what it had managed and thought that they could do similar. One of those people was the owner of Microl, a company making spreadsheets and other utility software for the Spectrum. His name was John Peel — not the celebrated radio DJ, although this John Peel told the story that he and the other John Peel once got drunk together for a magazine feature.

The Spreadsheet (Microl, ZX Spectrum, 1982)

Peel wanted to get into the increasingly lucrative world of games, and thought that a graphic adventure like The Hobbit was the way to do it. He set out to make something that would push the capabilities of the Spectrum further still, and assembled a large team to do so. That comprised Graham Asher, Richard Edwards, Charles Goodwin, James Learmont, Jan Ostler (later Jan Peel), and Andrew Owen. After “days ploughing through dictionaries”, they named their new company Legend, and set to work. Their game would not just have static, empty illustrations, but instead its characters would be on screen. Everything would be shown and not just told. They had a smart idea for the story to use. Tolkein had drawn extensively on Norse mythology for The Hobbit, with its dwarves and runes, so why not go back to the source? They made a game with Thor and Loki, where you move through Asgard, Midgard and Hell, in search of Valhalla.

Valhalla (Legend, ZX Spectrum, 1983)

Valhalla took some of the freshest aspects of The Hobbit a step further. They made it so that it draws pictures of every one of its many locations, with a lot of variations on the theme of castles and mountains. Its stick-person characters all move through its world of their own accord, eating and drinking and fighting. Rather than set puzzles, it mostly works on emergent gameplay. You can give it complex commands including summoning characters from other locations to ask them to do things for you. Like The Hobbit, they might or might not agree to those things. For Valhalla Legend even added an alignment system, tracking your allegiance to the good or bad side and having characters react to you accordingly, something well ahead of its time.

It’s not hard to see how much of a technical achievement Valhalla was. The thing is, the strengths of the game it was inspired by were not entirely based in its technical innovations. The Hobbit didn’t have space to give a lot of detail to its worlds and characters, but what was there worked really well. Its descriptions of locations like “narrow place with a dreadful drop into a dim valley” gave it atmosphere. Its dark places felt properly mysterious. Thorin sitting down and singing about gold was memorable not just because he did it by himself, but because sitting down and singing about gold was funny and fitting to the character. Valhalla’s versions of Odin and Boldir and everyone else lack even that level of individuality, their nature as robots even more apparent. The only time the game shows much personality is if you enter a swear word. At which point you get assaulted by a newly arriving character with a message reading “Mary is not amused”, in reference to Britain’s self-appointed morality police commissioner Mary Whitehouse.

Valhalla (Legend, Commodore 64, 1984)

Things get worse with the mechanics of Valhalla. Not only do other characters act without waiting for you, you have to wait extensively for them. Generally when you type a command into Valhalla and press enter, it disappears with no feedback. Then, after other characters have crawled their way across the screen to do whatever they wanted to do, you finally act. One of them may have attacked you in the meantime, rendering your action out of date, in which case you reset the same process. It’s painfully slow and unresponsive, and soon sapped away at any will I had to figure out more of its mysteries.

From my modern perspective, its advances over The Hobbit all make it worse to play. On release in 1983, it was mostly a success with critics. Micro Adventurer mentioned it arriving to “a rapturous reception”. Many reviews hailed its fabulous graphics. John Lettice of Personal Computer News wrote that he had ”very little that even approaches a complaint about Valhalla”. Commodore User called it “a complex, well thought out adventure”. Home Computer Weekly reviewer D.C. dramatically urged readers to “pawn your Microdrive for this and start saving for their next”. Combined with some effectively intriguing minimalist adverts designed by Jan Ostler, plenty of people were persuaded. Valhalla was a big commercial success. 

Valhalla (Legend, ZX Spectrum, 1983)

John Peel reported that Legend spent more than £70,000 on creating Valhalla, a massive sum at the time. It sold well enough to make back more than twenty times that amount on the Spectrum alone. In November 1983, the Spectrum version broke up Ultimate’s domination of the UK chart #1 spot. When Legend released the Commodore 64 version the following year, it spent four weeks at the top of the non-arcade chart. One of the advantages of basing the game on mythology rather than a novel was that they could use familiar characters without having to negotiate any rights. There was no requirement for each copy of the game to include a copy of a book, like The Hobbit had. However, since The Hobbit had, as a side effect, established that you could sell games at the premium price of £14.95, Legend did the same for Valhalla. John Peel bought himself a Porsche from the profits.

It did not take forty years for the faults I can see with Valhalla to make themselves apparent. When it got a budget rerelease in 1986, Computer & Video Games described it as “not a bad buy, if you’ve got the patience of a saint and thrive on bugs”. In October 1984, Big K put it in a round-up of “all manner of guffware, naffware and barfware”, calling it “hugely uninteresting and AGONISINGLY SLOW to play”. Even quicker than that, just months after its release, Your Spectrum had it as one of their misfires of 1983. “It lacks the depth and problem-solving aspects of a true adventure game”, wrote Gavin Monk, before going on to offer a familiar explanation for the good reviews. “Every magazine wants to have the first review published and the trouble is that checkouts on adventures just cannot be rushed”. He quoted an anonymous magazine reviewer as saying “I only just had enough time to load Valhalla – let alone review it”.

Valhalla (Legend, Commodore 64, 1984)

Legend may have succeeded with Valhalla, but there were warning signs that it had relied a bit too heavily on hyping new graphical capabilities, and that this might be a hard trick to repeat. Legend did not heed those warnings. John Peel did not refocus on storytelling and making the company’s success more sustainable for the benefit of the people working for it. Instead, Legend spent an unprecedented £250,000 on going bigger still, scaling up to a bigger team for The Great Space Race, a “spectacular futuristic romp” which a total of 14 people worked on. To the press, Legend promised “sophisticated animated 3D graphics” for something “closer to Star Wars than anything that’s been seen so far” Characters would have “full facial animation” which would “reflect their feelings”. Reading this 1984 equivalent of L.A. Noire’s promotional claims definitely made the word “doubt” pop into my head.

The Great Space Race (Legend, ZX Spectrum, 1984)

The Great Space Race was a space trading game released in late 1984 which came in a lavish package complete with an extensive background story. It therefore had the misfortune of being readily comparable to Elite, the year’s biggest success in British games. That would be a tough comparison for any release. Still, at this point, Elite was only available on the BBC Micro. If The Great Space Race had offered even a pale imitation of that experience for Spectrum owners, that could have been a workable niche. It did not meet that low bar. 

It does, technically, have some 3D looking bits and also big animated pictures of its characters which change to different expressions, flicking between a couple of states in straightforward response to your decisions. These sections are at least as ponderously slow as Valhalla, as is the rest of The Great Space Race. Mostly it is a set of menu-based interactions which don’t even match up to the menu-driven bits of Elite, despite having none of the same action to go with them. The Great Space Race reviewed terribly, and didn’t trouble any sales chart at all. 

The Great Space Race (Legend, ZX Spectrum, 1984)

The British games press that had helped hype Valhalla wouldn’t leave the failure of The Great Space Race alone, with some getting personal (and sexist) along the way. Sinclair User ran a profile by Bill Scolding opening with a description of meeting “the Peels, the obsessive genius and his insanely loyal wife”. Next to this ran a photo of John and Jan Peel captioned “turkey busters” in reference to The Great Space Race. When Crash sent software editor Jeremy Spencer to meet Legend, he got most hung up on the timeless question of whether its base in Chingford truly counts as London, but took a general new approach of scepticism and irritation. 

Legend released one more game, a tunnel shooter called Komplex. Such was the hangover from The Great Space Race that they made an offer to sell Komplex for half price to anyone who sent them proof of purchase of that previous game. Komplex came out to no particular response, and Legend folded before they could release its completed follow-up Komplex City. On the eve of that game’s planned release, in August 1985, John Peel was still talking up the technically revolutionary things Legend were working on. He told Computer Gamer that they were going to produce a sequel to Valhalla which “will be a ‘computer movie’ in the tradition of Valhalla, and will be in advance of current games now as Valhalla was when it came out”. Legend stopped there, but the spirit of such proclamations has lived on long since.

  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 25 November 1983, Personal Computer News
  • ASP non-arcade chart for week ending 28 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP non-arcade chart for week ending 4 August 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP non-arcade chart for week ending 11 August 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP non-arcade chart for week ending 18 August 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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