Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

A brief history of 2000AD's 8-bit games

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • A brief history of 2000AD's 8-bit games

    To a young lad growing up on Star Wars and the sci-fi writings of Harry Harrison and Douglas Adams, 2000AD was a natural home when it came to my weekly comic fix. Each issue came action-packed with a range of serialisations that represented the very finest of British art and writing. I didn't have a favourite character; I loved them all. The neo-fascism of Judge Dredd's grimy, flawed universe; the distant revenge-fuelled tale of biologically-engineered soldier, Rogue Trooper; the relatively light-hearted and whimsical Ballad Of Halo Jones; and the unsubtle paean to religious genocide in the fabulous Nemesis The Warlock. These were stories that mixed sci-fi, fantasy and horror themes, eloquently told and brilliantly drawn, and it all started over 40 years ago.
    The first issue would have passed me by (at four years old, I was a little too young to fully appreciate the antics of Dredd and co), but by the early 80s my local newsagent was regularly reserving me a copy of 2000AD, my name scrawled proudly across the top of each issue. Shortly after, I finally persuaded my parents that a ZX Spectrum would actually be good for my education, and eagerly awaited the inevitable arrival of 2000AD's iconic characters in video game form. Today the pull onto modern gaming platforms remains strong, as the release of Rebellion's Rogue Trooper Redux would appear to confirm. But 1984 was when it all started, and with that classic tale of a red-eyed mutant bounty hunter and his Viking chum.
    Strontium Dog: The Death Gauntlet was the brainchild of Mark Eyles, Quicksilva's software manager and a massive 2000AD fan. Coincidentally, 2000AD's assistant editor, Richard Burton, was a gaming and Quicksilva fan, making it a match made in Mega-City One. When Eyles wrote to 2000AD asking for a picture of Tharg to help add thrill-power to his games, it instigated a meeting at a ZX Microfair, and Quicksilva was soon negotiating one of the first character licences of the 8-bit era, and the first official 2000AD licence. This Commodore 64 game, developed in-house and designed by Eyles, didn't, by his own admission, 'work out quite as well as we might have liked'. The player controls Johnny Alpha in his quest to eliminate the nefarious Stix Brothers, and meet up with his pals Wulf and Gronk. It's an unremarkable side-scrolling run 'n' gunner that bears little resemblance to the comic strip, and an inauspicious start to 2000AD on home computers.
    Read more…


    More...
Working...
X