Legend

1 Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4

Legend's first game Valhalla was steeped in Norse mythology. Players were sent on a quest around Asgard searching for six mythical objects (Ofnir, Drapnir, Skornir, Skalir, Felstrong, and Grimnir) and encountering gods and heroes. Of course, given the way the company fell, the legend they should have been paying attention to was Icarus.

MiCROL, 38 Burleigh Street,Cambridge CB1

Legend was born out of another company called MiCROL, who were possibly born out of another company called Tempus. Passage of time has worn the runes to the edge of illegibility. Legend's Managing Director John Peel (no, a different John Peel) described MiCROL as "an idea waiting for a computer. When the Spectrum was announced we were ready -the first product, Use and Learn, came out within days of the computer." (POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 15-21 December 1983 page 16). Tempus was a Cambridge based hardware shop (there are some early adverts showing them based at 164-167 East Road before they move to Burleigh Street around the start of 1982). MiCROL, then seems to be a serious (ie, non games) label which used the Tempus address to sell databases, memory monitors, and other sensible software. "Microl was successful, in an unspectacular way, and became the means of financing Valhalla." So, why ain't there not no picture of 38 Burleigh Street? I hear you ask (and your grammar is terrible). Well, apart from the money there does not seem to be a direct link between Tempus/MiCROL and Legend. Unlike A&F who operated out of a Manchester shop called Micro-Link, and advertised the shop as "the home of A&F Software" or Just Micro of Carver Street Sheffield, which spawned Gremlin Graphics. I mention MiCROL here just out of completeness.

1 Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4

John Peel spent £70,000 to develop Valhalla. Adjusted for inflation that's just over £225,000 today. The game picks up a mention in the Coming Soon section of POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (26 May-1 June 1983 page 54):

VALHALLA is an animated graphics adventure whose undisguised intention is to steal the title of "best micro adventure game bar none" from THE HOBBIT.

The 48K program which will be released on July 15, uses a new operating system MOViESOFT and boasts a number of HOBBIT like features. There are 20 significant characters, each with their own aims and objectives.

You are a minor God set the task of recovering Odin's Golden Helmet. To complete this you will also have to master three lesser tasks, one of which is to rescue IDUN, a maiden responsible for the Golden Apples which keep the Gods youthful.

The games' designer, LEGEND, claims that the program involves a sophisticated degree of interaction. For example, should an enemy overhear you telling a friend seme important information, he will try to ruin your plans.

LEGEND stresses that the personality of each of the characters is genuinely independant "as opposed to pseudo independant behaviour like Thor in sitting down and singing about gold or Gandalf walking off with your door for no reason".

The moving graphics are reportedly of cartoon quality, with both background and foreground movement illustrating the events of the plot. Pretty impressive claims. HOBBIT fans will no doubt feel both intrigued and sceptical...

Watch this space." 

The text of this preview is then lifted in it's entirety and used as the basis for Valhalla's first advert.

PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS
May 27-June 2 1983 page 52

It's a striking advert. The blood-red colour of the page contrasting with the bold white block-text of the name and the drawing of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the key-shaped Legend logo. What I keep coming back to is the use of the PCW preview in the top right hand corner. It's not a tactic I've seen used by other companies. I can't put my finger on why it stands out. I think it's because the initial PCW preview reads to me as if it is based on a press release (to judge by the comments in quotation marks, the third person references to Legend, and the correct typing of the MOViSOFT* name), and the advert then serves this preview back to the consumer as if it is independent commentary. 

The same advert ran in the August 1983 issue of SINCLAR USER with a release date; August 15th. This was followed almost immediately by another advert in POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY with the PCW preview replaced by news.

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY
18-24 August 1983 page 8

I admire Legend's use of rolling adverts to build anticipation. Here comes Valhalla. Valhalla is coming soon. Valhalla is nearly nearly here. Valhalla is late. It reminds me of The Simpsons episode Krusty Gets Kancelled, and the advertising campaign for Gabbo. Valhalla arrived on 2nd October 1983 at the, then, wallet-busting price of £14.95 (about £50 today). The reviews were ecstatic.

"I recommend Valhalla without reservation. It makes some other programmes look Neanderthal," MICRO ADVENTURER, December 1983 page 21

"Valhalla is well worth the rather substantial cost," PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS, November 3- November 9 1983 page 48

"Valhalla isn't like anything else. Rather. I suspect, it's the first attempt at something different — liveable movies. Play it for yourself, I don't think you'll regret the £15," POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY, 13-19 October 1983 page 54
"Other adventures advertise "with graphics -this is graphics "with adventures"," HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY 31 January 1984 page 18
"Valhalla is perhaps the most ambitious games program yet released for the Spectrum," PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES, February 1984 page 42

You can watch a play though of Valhalla on Youtube. It doesn't look much in 2023. The game engine draws graphics at a glacial pace and Asgard is populated with barely animated stick figures. However, I'd recommend playing it on an emulator to experience it properly. Legend begged, and got, favourable comparisons with Melbourne House's The Hobbit during the preview and review process and you need to play the game to understand why. The Hobbit is an adventure game with lovely but static pictures. Type "get food" and you get the text response "you get the food." In Valhalla when you type "get food" your character walks across the screen to pick it up. Type "get sword" and your character picks up the sword and carries it around, and looks different. It's not a computer movie. Its too word focused for that. However the process of reading text descriptions, plus a picture, and then typing commands and seeing an animated response is definitely different to the standard computer game; maybe it should be described as interactive literature. Valhalla is also, like Microsphere's Skool Daze, the first baby steps towards sandbox games as characters wander off and do their own thing and follow their own agendas.

CRASH's reviewers were split. "The graphics of Valhalla are fabulous. It seems incredible that they have managed to pack so much detail into 48K." "My basic disappointment with Valhalla stems from its coldness. Despite all the things 'you' can do the life of the place seems to go on without you. Apart from dying of starvation I found I could stand still for ages and no one bothered with me." "A lot of program, no doubt about it but much less excitement than I thought there would be." They still scored the game at 81.5%. Issue 1 page 41.

Only COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES rained on Legend's parade. "Valhalla is from Legend, overpriced and overrated at £14.95." February 1984 page 57.

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY ran the first profile of Legend in December 1983 and described Valhalla as the game "that depending on which chart you believe, has occupied one of the top five positions since the day of its release and looks set to remain there all Christmas and beyond." John Peel then goes on to give some background to the game and the company: 

Valhalla is the end result of nearly nine months of coding by a team of seven, the majority of whom are very experienced programmers.

The almost military operation was masterminded by managing director John Peel. "The idea that we should do an animated graphics adventure goes back nearly two years. It really is the first logical step on the way to an interactive movie —something indistinguishable from a real film, except that you are one of the characters.

"The idea of interactive movies is pretty dramatic. We wanted a name for the company that would imply something romantic and grandiose — the name Legend was no accident, we spent days ploughing through dictionaries."

The profile talks about the MOViSOFT system and Legend's hopes it would be licenced to other companies and become a standard way of constructing adventure games. There was talk about Valhalla's rival games, "l was amazed at the lack of professionalism -most of them were full of spelling mistakes and obvious bugs- the only exception was The Hobbit," Jan Ostler said, to which John agreed, "l was sufficiently impressed to have a technical analysis done on it -the gist of that was 'well yes, but we can do better'." And there was a startling amount of, what can most politely be described as, blue-sky thinking about graphics and speech synthesis and speech recognition. None of it is completely unreasonable but it's far beyond anything achievable on 8-bit home computers. The article wraps up with a perceptive sentence. "Legend seems a peculiar mixture of daydreamers, who've proved their dreams are at least partly possible, and fairly hard-bitten realists playing close attention to the market and its requirements. It may be that this mixture was a vital part of the success of the project."

BIG K magazine (April 1984 page 5) reported that Valhalla had grossed £2m in sales. "The most profitable single game of Christmas 1983" and this was only on the Spectrum, the Commodore 64 version wasn't on sale yet. BIG K asked John to provide more blue-sky thinking, and he obliged: "1985 and 1986 will, without a doubt, be the most exciting years in computer gaming... with broadcasting-quality graphics, massive amounts of memory through video discs and the coming of Artificial Intelligence, there will be some incredible games around."

MICRO ADVENTURER took Valhalla apart in a May 1984 article which looked under the bonnet at the engine of the game. "Valhalla (the program that is) comprises 20K of BASIC, 7¹/₂K of variables... and about 12K of machine code. Initially I was quite surprised to find so much BASIC involved, but I think that Legend were quite justified in using it." The machine code handled the graphics and animation and the BASIC ran the game, which accounts for the lag between typing commands and something happening. "The BASIC part of the program is easy enough to examine, for the program is not protected -rather surprising, considering the price of it — though this doesn't seem to have done Legend's profits any harm". Surprisingly the same month saw YOUR SPECTRUM (May 1984 page 24) swim against the critical tide and label Valhalla as one of the Misfires of the Year. The magazine asked "So, why were all the reviews so good?" The answer, "every magazine wants to have the first review published and the trouble is that checkouts on adventures just cannot be rushed. Reviewers were pushed to write their reviews in time and hence never really got their hands dirty. A certain reviewer for a well-known weekly computing magazine confided that "I only just had enough time to load Valhalla -let alone review it"."

PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES
June 1984 page 21

However, the good news outnumbered the bad. June 1984 saw Valhalla  win the PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES game-of-the-year award for 1983: 

"The game... was selected by a panel of four independent judges from a short-list which included Manic Miner, The Hobbit and Ultimate's Pssst... After being presented with the award during a glittering ceremony in London, Legend's John Peel said the game had already sold well over 100,000 copies.
It's the only game Legend has released, and was produced by a team of seven, none of whom had written a computer game before.
'We set out to produce something that could credibly be called a computer movie,' said Peel. ' It's astounding that Valhalla has been popular with the mainstream games market.'
The game is now being released on the Commodore 64, and Legend are pressing ahead with a new mega-game about which Peel will say little except: 'It'll be released during 1984'.

The PCG report ended modestly by noting that The PCG Game-of-the-Year award was one of a night of prestigious awards, sponsored by the SUNDAY TIMES and publishers VNU, "being described as the Oscars of the micro industry."

June 2023

1 Milton Road is gone. There's a Co-op and the front entrance of a site called the Student Castle, which is secured and gated; you can just make out the front gate behind the van to the left of the photo. If you point Streetview to 2008 you can see the old site. A single story factory shop and at the back of the car park a two story flat roofed building. Nipping round the corner, in 2010, gives a better view of the grey block. It's called Alexander House and has a sign giving the address as 1 Milton Road. The building is still there in 2014 and gone by 2015.  

Freepost, PO BOX 435, London, E4

Legend falls off the map when the Commodore 64 version of Valhalla is released. Suddenly the company address is anonymised behind an east London PO BOX number. Except...

Purley

Purley? Not long after Legend begin using the PO BOX 435 address a twin pair of articles appear in YOUR SPECTRUM  (issue 5) and YOUR 64 (issue 2), both written by Phil Manchester. Against expectation he doesn't go north to Cambridge he goes south the Purley. The YS article doesn't really explain why, Phil is just meeting John and Jan Peel in a Purley Italian restaurant. The Y64 piece gives a little more context. "...our correspondent arrived on their patch. The patch in question was Purley. a bastion of south London suburbia. Since then, Legend has moved to Chingford- a bastion of north east London suburbia." YS issue five is dated July 1984 and Y64 issue two (with a little detective work) was (probably) published in September 1984. It's not a stretch to guess the YS article was written around May/June 1984 when Legend were still in Purley and the Y64 piece was written from the same notes and updated with a note that the company had moved to Chingford. This is something I'm genuinely a little surprised to learn. I'd always assumed Legend were Cambridge based at first, given their previous connection with Tempus, via MiCROL.

I tried a generic search of the computer magazine archive for Purley. I didn't expect to find anything but to my surprise I did. A review of a graphics package (PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD June 1983 page 146) which gives an address for MiCROL at 12 Pheasant Close Purley, Surrey. Now, massive assumptions ahead. John Peel in a later interview (SINCLAIR USER August 1985 page 98) describes Valhalla as being "masterminded from a one-bedroom flat in Purley... starting in March '83, and was ready in October." The dates match up, and Streetview confirms that 12 Pheasant Close is part of a seventies looking block of flats. So, was this where Legend were based? Unless anyone knows differently I'm going to say yes. Legend must have contracted mail order and customer service out to a Cambridge company based at Milton Road and, following the success of Valhalla, become big enough to take that in house when they moved to Chingford. Neither article gives any substantial detail about Legend's address in Chingford but they do both include a different photo of the Peels and their car.

Left, YOUR SPECTRUM. Right, YOUR 64

PO BOX 435, Station Road, Chingford, London, E4

John Peel had been teasing Valhalla 2 as far back as the December 1983 interview with POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY: "Timing for Val II is less a matter of coding and more a question of market timing. Once demand for Valhalla has calmed down a bit and is ticking over we'll issue it - I think we're looking at next spring." August 1984 was when both HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY and POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY broke the news. HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY allows me to add Station Road to the Chingford address, although the actual street number remains hidden behind that PO BOX number. PCW got the news first with a lengthy report that did some serious teasing about the forthcoming megagame:

...described as a 'spectacular futuristic romp' by Legend will be released for the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 simultaneously... It's a bit like an arcade game in that you are up against a clock and under continuous pressure but it has a richness of structure hardly found in even the best adventure and strategy games." says Legend's John Peel. 

The game is seen as a further development towards the computer 'movie'  concept...Not only are the graphic displays in true solid 3D but what you see depends on a complex logic controlled by the computer," continued John.

Unlike Valhalla which understands a range of typed-in instructions The Great Space Race uses a form Of single-key press input. "What happens is that for any given situation a number of logical alternatives

from which you may choose are displayed in the top of the screen -it is perfectly possible you may never get the same combination of alternatives twice in the game."

The game uses a special operating system Movisoft 2 as its basis -a development of the original Movisoft system used in Valhalla. By the time of its release Legend expects to have spent over £0.25m on its development believed to be the largest amount ever spent on the development of a single computer game.

The monthly magazines quickly followed up. PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES and CRASH both printed stories in their September issues. PCG, after noting the price would be around £15, gave more mouth-watering details about those 3D graphics: 

"It's closer to Star Wars than anything that's been seen so far,' claim the company. A 'camera director module' in the software selects viewing angles and the image is displayed on a cinemascope' window spread across the screen.

In addition to 3D space scenes, other characters will appear in head and shoulder shots, with full facial animation including moving eyes and Lips. Characters' facial expressions will reflect their feelings.

...

'We wanted to get the best elements of both arcade and adventure games," said John Peel, "and we decided to go for a shorter game cycle so you can get the "must-have-another-go syndrome," plus all the richness of adventures. Once again, we intend to get the Game of the Year Award in 1985.'

CRASH gave us some background and told us Valhalla had won another award; Leisure Program of the Year from the Computer Trade Association. Launch orders for the C64 version of Valhalla were worth around a quarter of a million pounds. Of The Great Space Race, the magazine mentioned how: 

"the stick figures of Valhalla have now become fully animated beings. Legend are particularity proud of their routine with the dubious title of FRIG (which stands for Facial Region Interpreted Graphics). There was also more teasing talk about the space graphics: "true solid 3D, not wire frame, and the program has a Camera Director Module which can present literally billions of possible views of space."

There's also a lovely moment where John Peel has a sudden attack of modesty and describes Legend as "not, by nature, a high profile company." The CRASH article is illustrated with a piece of artwork not used by another other magazine. It could be something the magazine made itself but I think it's more likely to have come from a press release.

CRASH
September 1984 page 32

CTW issue 1
3rd September 1984

Also from September 1984, at the website Magazines from the Past, someone has uploaded the front cover of issue one of the software trade industry magazine CTW. Down in the bottom left corner of the front page is a caricature with a caption "Who is this man?" Why it's John Peel of Legend. You know, the software company that's not, by nature, a high profile company. This is presumably related to the article teased in the top-right "Star Spot: A Legend Speaks." Sadly all we have of this article is the Magazines from the Past summary: "Feature: "The Great Space Race will be the sexiest game of the year" - page(s) 4 John Peel is the man behind Valhalla, voted 'Game of the Year' for 1983. Mike Scialom finds out how 'the legend' intends to do it again." If you have a copy of the article please upload it. I think we all want to know how The Great Space Race will be "the sexiest game of the year."

In the middle of this concert of positivity BIG K had the indecency to sound a bum note. In October 1984, they listed Valhalla  as a "Lame Game" describing it as:

This highly hyped. over-rated, over-priced turkey is clearly a classic example of the Emperor's new clothes. Despite being hugely uninteresting and AGONISINGLY SLOW to play it's managed to gross

over 2 million pounds! It's enough to make you weep. We're told it's a 'computer movie'. That characters do pretty much what they like. What we're not told is that the graphics are so poor these figures are nigh on unrecognisable. They just shuffle back and forth across the screen like minuscule roaches. The quests are equally naff being both pointless and boring. What on earth (or in Asgard) is the attraction? Game of the year? Pshaw! If you ask me it should be placed in a chest and left in Hell"

It's odd to read this against the backdrop of praise for Valhalla and anticipation for The Great Space Race but it was a hint of what was to come. The Great Space was a disaster.  I became obsessed with discovering the last good piece of coverage given to the game and spent far too long looking back through old magazines. The boring answer is, of course, that there isn't a straight cut-off. The bad news takes time to spread. The Great Space Race was expected to be released in October 1984 but like Valhalla it was late, late, late. It seems fair to assume it was in the shops in time for Christmas 1984. CRASH gets the first review in February 1985; in an issue which was on sale from 24th January and was probably being written from mid-December 1984. CRASH scored the game at 44% "a great disappointment." The review is given a lovely double-page spread, reflecting the level of interest in the game. It must be one of the few times a game scoring less than 50% got the much coverage. POPULAR COMPUTER WEEKLY followed, 31 January-6 February 1985 page 22, and the rest of the computing press reviewed the game over the next couple of months. 

PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES put The Great Space

on the cover of the February 1985 issue, along with a contest to win the original cover painting by science fiction artist Chris Foss. The cover would have been organised months in advance but appeared right at the point when the computer industry knew The Great Space Race was a lemon. Six years later, in ACE (March 1991 page 71) for an article on gaming turkeys someone, probably ACE consultant editor Steve Cooke who had been deputy editor on PCG, recalled the game as an:

"Eagerly awaited second title from the company that produced Valhalla, TGSR burst onto the market as a specially commissioned Bob Foss* cover competition on Personal Computer Games and a game that was written almost entirely in BASIC, boasting animation that would have shamed a ZX80. Astonished phone calls to the Legend office by the PCG staff were greeted by floods of tears and threats of legal action against anyone and anybody. Barely weeks later the £15.99 game was selling for 50p as retailers desperately tried to shift stock and Legend vanished from the face of the earth."

VNU closed PCG before it could review the game or announce the competition winner. February 1985 also marks the point at which Legend's hope dies. The page for The Great Space Race at the Spectrumcomputing.co.uk archive has links to magazine adverts which show the advertising campaign for The Great Space Race begins in September 1984 at the beginning of the wave of positive coverage and ends in February 1985 at the crest of the wave of negative reviews and player feedback. Legend must have block booked adverts around August 1984 for a six month period on the expectation the game would be the new Valhalla. When the first round of advertising ended, well there just wasn't any point in booking more. The Commodore 64 version never appeared. The Great Space Race became a ghastly memory, or warning, or punchline depending on who was telling the story. 

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 
10-16 January 1985 page 43

Surprisingly, The Great Space Race didn't do for Legend. In April 1985 CRASH seemed surprised to be reporting on details of Legend's next game. 

After the disappointment of Legend's The Great Space Race, you might expect Legend to have developed a bit of a complex, especially about hype/ John Peel, Legend's svenghali, is unworried about such things -except that he wants no one to think that Legend only sells games through hype. But it turns out that they have developed a complex. It's a new game called Komplex and it should be on sale by the time this edition of CRASH hits the streets.

To konfound the kritics Komplex isn't being hyped at all (yet, anyway), in fact John Peel refused to say very much about the game beyond telling me that it is Legend's first ever arcade game... Maybe Legend haven't lost their bottle after all... Anyway, there it is Valhalla, The Great Space Race and now Komplex. Could John just squeeze out one more word on it before giving up non-hype for Lent? 'It is a fast action arcade game, but there is a long term mission/quest element where you, the player, are the hero. I'm not making any claims for the graphics until people have had a chance to judge for themselves.'

He was persuaded to pass on one comment from someone who had a chance to see the game, and that was that they really liked it because it isn't a clone of anything— it's original. At which point John Peel, fearing a bout of uncontrollable hype coming on, signed off. 

Komplex appeared to reviews which covered the waterfront from poor to positive. The game did well enough for a sequel to be announced; Komplex City, part two of a trilogy. John Peel did a couple of Mea culpa interviews for the publicity drive. CRASH sent Software Editor Jeremy Spencer to Chingford and SINCLAIR USER dispatched Editor Bill Scolding. Both interviews appeared in their respective August 1985 issues. Of the two, the SINCLAIR USER one is the most interesting; it's the one that references the "one-bedroom flat in Purley". It also talks about The Great Space Race: 

We didn't set out to con or hype anyone with TGSR." TGSR — The Great Space Race, a game you didn't so much play as sit back while it played with itself. Launched just before Christmas, it got a thumbs down from the press, bombed in the shops and left distributors howling.

"The programming team ran for cover. We brought in a new team which spent three weeks of sleepless nights trying to get the shambles working for the deadline," Peel explains, "But we let our main distributors see it. giving them the chance to cancel or reduce their orders. They were greedy and thought the game would sell anyway.

"Now we're offering Komplex at reduced price to all those kids who bought TGSR and weren't happy with it. And we've done deals to bail out distributors of all unsold copies. We didn't have to, but we wanted to regain credibility. We lost over £200,000 on the game." On the office wall a TGSR poster Looks down, the curse which might have brought about the fall of the House of Legend.

There's also some light dissing of Amstrad and Amsoft:

We're not bothering with them," says Peel "It is mostly second league software houses which are jumping for the Amstrad because they can't compete with the first leaguers on the Commodore and Spectrum. We've had Amstrad around here pestering us to do things. We'd license products to them for conversion but for us it's not economic."

What there isn't, frustratingly, is any additional information to help track down the precise location of PO BOX 435. The SINCLAIR USER article mentions reaching Legend's office by drawing up "outside the innocent looking offices of a suburban building society... Through a shabby unmarked door, down an unlit alleyway and up the creaky staircase." But that's not enough to go on. There are some pictures of the inside of Legend's office but the blinds are down, so I can't even have a go at identifying the view out of the window. It's an anticlimactic end. Which is appropriate because that's also what happened to Legend. Did Komplex City get released? Probably not, although the game was reviewed by SINCLAIR USER in October 1985, and another copy was archived for posterity. You can see it being played on Youtube.

Legend themselves closed down at some point before the end of 1985. The last sighting of them came in SINCLAIR USER's intermittently reliable Gremlin column in January 1986:

End of a Legend?

What's happened to Legend? For the last couple of months we've heard nothing but boss John Peels famous imitation of an answering machine.

Ace reporter 'Ligger' Edgeley managed to track the shy publisher of Valhalla and Komplex to his ex-directory lair after 45 minutes of hard bargaining with the telephone operators.

"No comment" revealed Peel, exclusively to Sinclair User.

Gremlin, on the other hand, can say with some authority that Peel has been touting his latest game, Komplex City, in the direction of any software house — budget or otherwise — willing to take it...

* And look at the typography of MiCROL and MOViSOFT. John Peel liked his lower case i's.

* Yes, ACE credits the PCG cover to Bob Foss not Chris Foss. Passage of time had blurred the painful memory.

If you know where Legend were based on Station Road, Chingford then please leave a comment or tell me on Twitter @ShamMountebank.