74 King Street, Dudley, DY2
TO THE STARS!
Birmingham, generally lagging behind Manchester and Liverpool for games programming is now making a sterling effort to catch up. Brand new company Gargoyle Games, has launched its first game for the 48K Spectrum. It's called Ad Astra (to the stars), and is a 3D shoot em up like you've never seen before. The 3D perspective view is quite astonishing - see the review in this issue.
That's CRASH (May 1984 page 45) introducing readers to a new company called Gargoyle Games. Ad Astra immediately got the company a lot of positive attention and was generally regarded as a decent spin on the shoot em up formula.
"We were writing software for someone else and they were marketing it poorly," Greg Follis later told SINCLAIR USER (November 1985 page 112). He and programming partner Roy Carter each had something like 16 years programming experience on computers like the ICL 1901. Then, in 1983:
Press rumours that teenage 'programmers' were earning fortunes prodded their own feelings about getting on and prompted them to turn their attention to games outside daily business work.
(CRASH, Christmas Special 1985 page 89)
When it came to games, Roy Carter would do the programming and Greg Follis handled game design and graphics. Ted Heathcote, the third member of Gargoyle Games, did the sales and advertising. Ad Astra was written in their spare time and took nine months to complete. Greg Follis told CRASH this was, "an appallingly long time. We could put Ad Astra together in a few weeks nowadays."
Fit the First
4 North Western Arcade, Birmingham, B2
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| July 2024 |
The Great Western Arcade is an architectural gem. A stunning example of a Victorian arcade. It's packed with small independent shops and has bags of atmosphere and visual appeal and is well worth a visit. My photo shows the ornate and beautiful entrance off Temple Row. The only problem, in order to get to the old Gargoyle office I have to turn through 180 degrees.
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| July 2024 |
Hmm. Well. Yes. I'm sure everyone involved in designing the North Western Arcade tried their best. Let's go inside quickly. [1]
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| July 2024 |
CRASH noted that listening to Greg Follis and Roy Carter was "like watching two stand-up comedians" and looking at their old office you can see why they needed a good sense of humour. The pair generated the sort of wise-cracking copy that magazines love and as a result interviews with Gargoyle Games appeared on a semi regular basis; in addition to the interviews with SINCLAIR USER and CRASH, mentioned above, the pair also talked to POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (29 November-4 December 1984 page 12), MICRO ADVENTURER (March 1985 page 8), AMSTRAD ACTION (December 1985 page 74), YOUR SINCLAIR (July 1986 page 55), and separately Roy Carter was interviewed in POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (20 November-4 December 1984 page 31) and Greg Follis talked again to SINCLAIR USER (April 1987 page 61).
Meanwhile, following the release of Ad Astra, Gargoyle Games were working on their next game. An arcade adventure with the working title of Arabesque.
Fit the Second
The Land of Youth
It started when Roy Carter created an animation of a man walking. "Greg thought it 'looked nice'," according to CRASH and the search was on for a game:
It was obvious from the start that some sort of fantasy setting would be ideal for the walking man. "One we thought of first was Gilgamesh." That is Greg showing his high literary taste. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first known piece of written fiction, recorded on Sumerian tablets. It's thousands of years old.
"Unfortunately Gilgamesh is a little remote, and if you take the seamy bits out there's not much left. We cast around for something more interesting."
(SINCLAIR USER)
More interesting, was Celtic mythology. Robin of Sherwood was a big hit on television at the time and Sláine had become a popular character in 2000AD. The walking man became Cuchulainn, the Hound of Heaven. The instruction manual explained that the story of the game was:
Following his departure from the world of the Living and his entry into Tir Na Nog. His subsequent attempts to locate and re-unite the fragments of the Seal of Calum form the basis of a vast interactive Adventure, set in the magical landscapes of Celtic mythology.
What caught everyone's attention was the graphics. Cuchulainn stood 56 pixels high, a giant in 1984, and had 64 frames of animation. It's difficult to explain how relaxing the game could be to play. I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on but I had a lovely time strolling down the claimed 3000 miles of roads and watching the landscape roll past. What's next? POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY asked at the end of 1984, Gregg Follis replied:
"There's the Commodore 64 version of TNN; that should be coming out after Christmas; we're also considering an Amstrad conversion. Then there's the pre-quel to TNN, set in the land of the living — this time in a city. This will limit the size of the game, so we have more space for animations... which we think we are getting pretty good at:" After that? "We're trying to develop a game on The Hunting of the Snark, by Lewis Carrol, if we can get the rights[2]. It'll be a three times removed lateral thinking adventure," he added with relish.
Fit the Third
74 King Street, Dudley, DY2
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| December 2022 |
Observant observers will note there is a nearly two year gap between those two photos of Gargoyle's offices. To which I can only shrug and say Birmingham is for passing round, not visiting. Sorry Birmingham.
Adverts for Ad Astra carry the North Western Arcade address up to around September 1984. Those for Tir Na Nog list the new Dudley address from November. CRASH described Gargoyle's 74 King Street office as:
On the third floor of a modest, four-floor brick and concrete office block with an insurance company just below it and the smell of disinfectant haunting the cold stairways. The space consists of an office for Ted, who does the selling, a writing room for Greg and Roy, and a stock room with some games and boxes of toys.
I wouldn't describe 74 King Street as modest. It's like an iceberg, relatively small from the front but 9/10ths are concealed from view. The building seems to go back a long way. Presumably the Gargoyle offices overlooked King Street itself. I was passing through Dudley on an epic journey of my own, from Liverpool to London, and the chance for a break and time to stretch my legs appealed. The problem, I often have a nagging worry about parking. This is something my brain somehow manages to catastrophise into the idea that I won't be able to stop and, I don't know, I'll spend the rest of my life driving around crying because I can't park; like an automotive Flying Dutchman. This unlikely scenario kept ticking away at the back of my mind as I headed through the extensive assorted roadworks and temporary traffic lights around Dudley but I had the favour of the Gods of Parking and They gifted me a space opposite 74 King Street. All praise the Gods of Parking.
The copyright on Ad Astra was assigned to Gargoyle Games. The copyright for Tir Na Nog and subsequent titles went to Carter Follis Software Associates. This makes me suspect that Greg Follis and Roy Carter didn't cast off their old jobs until after the success of Ad Astra. Why hide the ownership of it behind the anonymity of Gargoyle Games unless the pair thought they might need to stay in regular employment. After they become full time developers they use the more professional sounding Carter Follis Software Associates because part of the original plan was to also develop serious software. As they told MICRO ADVENTURER:
"We wrote games first of all so we could afford to get a commercial development machine to write business programmes on - but we never brought the machine," muses Roy.
One final thing, I think 4 North Western Arcade might have been a holding address; a firm of accountants or solicitors who handled the business affairs needed for the release of Ad Astra. Gargoyle Games (in the sense of Roy Carter, Greg Follis, and Ted Heathcote sitting in an office) may not have been born until the release of Tir Na Nog and the move to Dudley.
The Commodore version of Tir Na Nog followed around April 1985; converted by Design Design. Gargoyle Games then turned their back on the C64 and didn't release another game on the format until 1987.
Fit the Fourth
The Secret City of Dun Darach
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| CRASH July 1985 |
Oliver Frey's Dun Darach cover got complaints. His artistic study of the evil sorceress Skar holding her prisoner Loeg, charioteer to Cuchulainn the Great, prompted a stern letter (September 1985 page 48):
Dear Sir,
My 12 year old son is an avid reader of your magazine, and finds much of the material interesting and useful. However, concerning the July issue. I feel obliged to return to you the front cover. I trust that, on reflection, you will agree that the illustration is vulgar, even perverted, Our continued support of your publication is conditional upon an improvement in the tone of your art work.
EA Jones, Yeovil
The offending cover was stapled to the letter. Letter's editor Lloyd Mangram didn't agree. The next letter was from a reader who couldn't find the magazine in the computer section of WH Smiths:
Dear Lloyd,
Please could someone have a quiet word with Oliver Frey about his cover designs? On going into my local WH Smith to buy the July edition of CRASH, I went straight to the computer magazines section but it was nowhere to be seen!
After some hunting around, I eventually found it in the euphemistically named 'General Interest 'section. In other words it was in with the Playboys and Mayfairs!
I am not objecting to the picture — I thought it was great — but to avoid further confusion for newsagents, I feel that such pictures should be hidden away on the inner pages.
Matthew Fletcher, Gloucester
Lloyd Mangram's reply:
Having to stretch up that high every month will make you grow up big and strong — and tall.
Dun Darach was released simultaneously on the Spectrum and Amstrad. Now AMSTRAD ACTION visited Dudley and they described the offices thusly:
The suite of unusually tidy rooms contains just three hard-working professionals. No secretaries, no receptionists, no spotty whizzkids lounging around in jeans. Just Greg Follis, Ted Heathcote and Roy Carter. Together they constitute Gargoyle Games.
The Amstrad held more appeal for Gargoyle Games than the C64. Roy Carter had already spoken fondly of the computer to AMSTRAD ACTION for a feature in issue one:
The conversion of Dun Darach on to the Amstrad took about ten days - that was the first time I'd used the machine properly, but it was an easy machine to get used to. It was pleasing to see the technical documentation being accurate I only came across one discrepancy and that was sorted our for me very efficiently by the people at Amstrad.
When people start writing for it solely there could be some very interesting products brought out. But the way it stands at the moment people are mostly going to write programs with other machines in mind.
Basically its a very good machine and I enjoyed using it It's a computer that does the job it's supposed to do and does it well.
AMSTRAD ACTION expanded on the conversion process during the issue three interview:
It’s
at this point that Amstrad owners come in, their rapidly increasing
numbers persuading Gargoyle to seek a wider market for their wares.
Because of Amstrad’s strange policy of normally refusing to loan
equipment to software houses, in summer this year they eventually bought
a 464, and within two weeks Carter had Dun Darach converted.
‘It’s a
very nice machine,’ he told me.'I like the fact it’s so well
documented. You can find out very quickly what you need to know. It’s
also proved very reliable. We’ve had trouble with the Spectrums we’ve
got here, but not with the Amstrad'.
The primary purpose of the AMSTRAD ACTION interview was to promote Marsport, Gargoyle's new game; once again available on the Amstrad and Spectrum. Gargoyle Games was going back into space.
Fit the Fifth
Earth-Mars-Knutz Folly-Fornax-Gath
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| AMSTRAD ACTION October 1985 page 65 |
A one-off advert ran in the October 1985 issues of CRASH, AMSTRAD ACTION, and AMTIX to promote the launch of the Siege of Earth Trilogy. Its a classy full page colour picture of the Earth, viewed from a distance and looking isolated and very alone. This was just the promotion for the trilogy, Marsport got its own adverts. I really like it. It's an idea that's very ahead of its time and reminds me of how film franchises are promoted now. When the advert was printed, Marsport had just arrived. Part two, Fornax was due in January 1986 and Gath, part three, in April 1986.
Those dates are very close together but Gargoyle often talked about how quickly they could produce games. Remember Greg Follis' embarrassed comment about Ad Astra taking nine months. Well the considerably more complicated Tir Na Nog seems to have taken about six months. Greg Follis told SINCLAIR USER that Dun Darach:
...was begun on February 10, 1985. "We were very lazy in December and January,"
That's for a game which came out in June 1985 and was:...completely different, with only the central character and the scroll routines the same.
It's clear Roy Carter was an amazingly fast programmer. He converted Dun Darach to the Amstrad in two weeks and in the AMSTRAD ACTION interview the lesser heard Ted Heathcote said of Roy:
He’s superb. His output is tremendous. He’ll wrap up in days what would take most people weeks or months.
I don't think Gargoyle Games would commit to their ambitious schedule if there was any question of not achieving it. As if to demonstrate how quickly they could turn software around, a second game followed hot on the heels of Marsport for Christmas 1985. Lloyd Mangram wrote about Sweevo's World in the September 1985 issue of CRASH:
Not content with three mammoth adventures, Gargoyle are also releasing what they call A Gargoyle Special Edition 'Just For Fun' — not so much an adventure as an arcader, the game is called Sweevo's World. A Sweevo is a Self Willed Extreme Environment Vocational Organism, in other words, a robot- He's supposed to be highly intelligent, capable and dedicated to specific aims — unfortunately things didn't turn out too well and the result is a bumbling, none too bright great big idiobot that keeps bumping into things.
The game was an isometric 3D arcade game, like Knight Lore and Alien 8 by Ultimate Play the Game. "Roy developed the techniques for it inside ten days," Greg Folis told AMSTRAD ACTION, once again highlighting the amazing programming speed of his colleague. He went on to explain that Sweevo's World was an interlude, not a change of direction:
Overall, Gargoyle see the game offering people an entertaining contrast to the considerable intellectual demands of their Siege of Earth titles. Due out by the end of November, it could prove just what Santa ordered.
The message at the end of Marsport was unambiguous "the siege continues forward to fornax". However January 1986 came and went and Fornax did not appear. What happened? I have theories and I may or may not expand on them at a later date[3]. The last sighting of the game comes on an A1 leaflet packaged with the UK 128K Spectrum on its launch in February 1986; ZX SPECTRUM 128 SOFTWARE AND PERIPHERALS. So somewhere between that leaflet being written[4] and February 1986, Fornax ceases to exist. And once Fornax is cancelled, so is Gath. The remarkable thing about Fornax is not that it was cancelled, it's that Gargoyle were able to be pragmatic about a game that clearly wasn't working for them. They looked past the sunk costs of advertising and development and, where another company might have pressed on, they started again.
Fit the Sixth
Graumerphy and return to the Land of Youth
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| AMTIX October 1986 page 4 |
Although Fornax was gone, the design must have been carried over to Heavy On The Magick, Gargoyle's next game after the detour of Sweevo's World/Sweevo's Whirled. Look at how Fornax was described in those three interviews with AMSTRAD ACTION, CRASH, and SINCLAIR USER:
SINCLAIR USER:
Fornax,
the second part of the Marsport series, will be back to serious stuff
again, and Greg swears there will be a completely different graphics
system, but he won't say what. "We're thinking of black ink on black
paper," he says. "There's one thing about being someone who likes
fantasies — it has to be be as good for you as it is for everyone else. I
admire Level 9 because they obviously enjoy the games themselves — I
thought Return to Eden was particularly gleeful."
CRASH:
The
format for this will be totally different from anything that Gargoyle
have done before. Although there will be still be various problems which
have to be overcome to complete the game, the presentation will be
radically different. Greg suggests that Fornax will probably end up as a
mixed media game, perhaps using icons and /or sentence input using
semantic analysis or sentences rather than syntactic — this will be
quite new... But whatever turns up in Fornax you can be sure that it
will have plenty of animation and beautiful graphics along with
intricate puzzles. Fornax should turn out to be innovative while still
being fun, the ingredients Gargoyle feel are necessary to make a hit
game.
AMSTRAD ACTION:
Fornax
is planned as a "mixed media' game. Instead of just controlling the
physical movements of an onscreen character, you'll also be able to make
much more complex decisions using a system of 'icons' (picture
symbols)- Although this has been done before, notably in the Beyond game
Shadowfire (sadly not yet available for the Amstrad). Gargoyle believe
they can add a whole new dimension To the genre by mixing in animation
as well.
All those comments can be applied to Heavy On The Magick. It is "a mixed media game" with " plenty of animation and beautiful graphics along with intricate puzzles". "Instead of just controlling the physical movements of an onscreen character", Axil, the star of the game, is controlled using "sentence input" and the players instructions were subject to "semantic analysis". As the instruction manual explained:
...to examine a bottle it is not necessary to first position Axil next to a bottle – when he receives the command, he will go to and examine the bottle nearest to him in that room – if there is one.
The graphics system was "completely different." Not as Greg jokingly suggested black ink on black paper (ie, a black screen) but an ingenious compression system which CRASH described in their review:
The picture is formed by a method Gargoyle have made their own; the screen is formed in memory and blown up onto the screen as a way to conserve memory and so allow a longer and more detailed adventure.
The result, a game which looked like earlier Gargoyle games, with a huge animated character, but whose graphics were generated in a completely different way.
Level 9, referenced in the SINCLAIR USER extract, was a company who made adventure games. Return to Eden was the first of their games to include graphics, as static pictures, and Heavy on the Magick is basically as close as anyone got to a properly animated Level 9 adventure game. In other words, Heavy on the Magick was "innovative while still being fun, the ingredients Gargoyle feel are necessary to make a hit game."
It was at some point around this time that Chris, who posts on the Spectrum Computing
Forum as Vampyre, briefly met Greg Follis and Roy Carter after he knocked
on their office door during a school lunch hour:
There was about 4 of us and we'd read the address in Crash and realised
it was literally up the road from our school. We had no problems getting
into the building, we went through the front door (it was a properly
dingy old place) and made our way up to their floor. Knocked on the door
and Greg and Roy answered along with another bloke. I can't recall what
we asked them but they told us to "wait here", they went back inside,
returned with a big pile of posters each and thanked us for being a fan
of their games. I do remember that when we first got on their floor we
could hear some music playing that sounded like Speccy music, that
stopped just after we knocked. I've often wondered if this was for
Sweevo's World as it was a few months before that was released. May even
have been Heavy on the Magick.
The Heavy on the Magick manual teased expansion sets and sequels but they never happened. Gargoyle Games was about to disappear but before they did, they went back to their roots.
The Amstrad version of Tir Na Nog made use of the Amstrad's four colour mode to replicate the high resolution graphics of the Spectrum original and colour in Cuchulainn so that he stood out from the background. It looks better than the original Spectrum version. Gargoyle didn't make the game available in the shops, it could only be brought through AMTIX, the Amstrad stablemate of CRASH. When AMTIX closed down in April 1987 the offer was transferred across to Future Publishing's AMSTRAD ACTION.
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| AMSTRAD ACTION May 1987 page 87 |
Fit the Seventh
Sedgley Road East, Tipton, West Midlands, DY4
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 28 August-3 September 1986 page 2 |
Gargoyle teased a new direction for the company in their July 1986 interview with YOUR SINCLAIR:
You’re going into arcade games?
Greg: Yes, we’re going to produce a new label devoted to arcade games. And they’ll be somewhere around the £7.95 mark. Which obviously won’t work ’cos all the budget games will be out then, selling for around 22p a copy..
Roy: ...with money back on the cassette.
So you’ve got some really brilliant ideas?
Greg: We’ve got some ideas which we don’t think have ever been done in arcade games...
Roy: ...which we won’t talk about...
Greg: ...which we won’t talk about... ’cos we don’t want to bring this out till September and somebody might nick’em.
Roy: We’d certainly nick anybody else’s idea.
Greg: The name of the new label...
Roy: ...once again...
Greg: ...we won’t tell you that either. But it’ll be something really flash like “Good Software”, or “Fab Software”.
Roy: We wanted to call it Imagine, but somebody said that it’d already been done.
Greg: Yeah, John Lennon did it.
FTL, Faster than Light, debuted at the 1986 PCW Show in September with two new games, Lightforce and Shockway Rider [5]. When previewing Lightforce to POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (4-10 September 1986 page 24) Greg Follis gave a little more insight into the thinking behind the name change:
"Gargoyle is thoroughly associated with adventures. When we produced Sweevo's World under the Gargoyle name - even though we called it a Special Edition, I think many people didn't buy it because they were expecting an adventure. There's a strong brand identification."
"Faster than Light was going to be the name of the game - but I thought it was too good to waste."
Lightforce attracted the most attention. On the Spectrum it was a programming miracle. A fast-moving multi-coloured shoot em up that looked technically impossible but clearly wasn't. Both games were immediately available on the 8-bit trio of Spectrum, C64, and Amstrad; this was not something Gargoyle had previously managed.
Gargoyle actually had another game out at the same time. Elite contracted them to write Scooby Doo in the Castle Mystery. Scooby Doo was Elite's folly. A magnificent animated cartoon in the style of the Dragon's Lair arcade game. On the Spectrum. The tape-loading home computer with 48K of memory. The original brief was a wee bit overambitious. Scooby Doo was never released. However, Elite still had the licence and they'd spent a lot of money, so the logical thing to do was recoup their costs with another, simpler, game.
POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY noted as early as March 1986 that a new version of Scooby Doo was in production although Gargoyle wouldn't be associated with the new game until July when the news was broken by YOUR SINCLAIR the magazine followed up the next month with a little more information and more affirmation of Roy Carter's programming speed:
In fact, this version of Scooby Doo... was written by Gargoyle Games for Elite in just eight weeks.
The idea of Gargoyle Games becoming a developer for hire was first publicly floated during the Christmas 1985 interview with CRASH when the magazine quoted Greg Follis:
There is also the possibility of us stopping the manufacturing side and becoming a development house similar to Denton Designs, ' he says looking wistfully at Roy and Ted. 'That isn't a bad idea, it would take out the task of PR straight away.'
The comment about PR refers back to an earlier comment from Roy Carter that Gargoyle was probably losing 50% of their potential sales not to piracy by not having good enough publicity. The problem was that even a three person company like Gargoyle was feeling the effects of the change that was blowing through the software industry:
'There's a lot of new ideas about at the moment,' says Greg. 'It's very difficult, but you have to constantly learn from previous hits released by other software houses. I would be quite happy to turn out Dun Darachs but there's a market out there and say 50% of it is buying Daley Thompson's Decathlon so you've got to go with the market trend. We have plenty of ideas which we know we could develop but time isn't on our side. We've got to release a game every few months in order to live. If we had six months to develop a game we could turn out something at the end of that that would demolish the competition but we've all got mortgages to pay...
'Before we can develop true mega games we have to expand, to employ a few people to take away the things that take up so much of our time — a person to answer the phones would be a real boon as would someone to write some of the less complex but time-consuming routines in our games.'
The seeds of Gargoyle's regeneration into FTL are right there. Arcade games were more popular and took less time to write. In September 1986 CRASH promised:
Fast and original arcade games are planned for FTL, at the rate of five a year.
FTL never even got to five releases, full stop. They had one more game in them before becoming a full-time development house. Hydrofool was a sequel to Sweevo's World and shortly before it came out Greg Follis gave a short, final, interview to SINCLAIR USER in April 1987. There's one paragraph worth highlighting:
We have a lot of commercial work to do this year but we will do some games later on this year.
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| EXPRESS AND STAR Thursday October 22 1987 page 28 |
Gargoyle Games were still based in Dudley when Heavy on the Magick was released but by September the company had a new Tipton address and preferred to operate as the Carter Follis Group. That Tipton address is elusive. Sedgley Road East is about two miles northeast of Gargoyle's King Street address (and about one and a half miles from the Tipton Trading Estate where US Gold stationed themselves in 1984). The Vaughn Estate is still there, rebranded as Vaughn Park and massively redeveloped which means their final address can't be tracked down.
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| DUDLEY & DISTRICT CHRONICLE Friday May 5 1989 page 30 |
What became of them? Well there's a very small advert at the back of a 1989 edition of the DUDLEY & DISTRICT CHRONICLE. It mentions hardware and software, and says they produce Point Of Sale systems for small businesses. Then, two years after that, there are two Notices of Appointment of Administrative Receiver listed in classified adverts of THE CHRONICLE (SANDWELL) Friday October 11 1991, page 29. The first is for Gargoyle Games and the second is for Carter Follis Limited.
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| THE CHRONICLE (SANDWELL) Friday October 11 1991, page 29 |
I'm too sentimental to end on such a gloomy note so lets rewind to 1987 and a report in the 13 March 1987 edition of the BLACK COUNTRY EVENING MAIL. There's nothing new in the report to help locate the firm but there is a little information on the company in its new form:
Gargoyle Games is based on Tipton's Vaughan Industrial Estate and employs five computer programmers and a receptionist.
Greg Follis got his wish."A person to answer the phones."
Fit the Eighth
Boojumed!
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| PC GAMER March 1995 page 8 |
One of the very unusual things about Gargoyle Games is that we know a lot about their unreleased games. There are a few 8-bit cause celebre titles like Mike Singleton's Eye of the Moon, Ultimate's Mire Mare, and Elite's original version of Scooby Doo but companies generally held details of games close to their chest until they were nearly ready. Gargoyle didn't do this and so we know of 12 titles which didn't see the light of day; only slightly less than the 13 they actually released. Here's a brief overview, presented in order of nebulosity.
Tir Na Nog (1995). Yes indeed. Psygnosis planned a remake to be released on PC CD-ROM in May 1995 and written by the original team of Roy Carter and Greg Follis. The remake got a lot of publicity with articles in PC GAMER, NEXT GENERATION, and PC ZONE. The PC ZONE coverage includes an interview with Greg Follis:
What we are achieving is all done via lots of hard work, without the use of many of the latest tools and packages. I originally placed lots of icons in the game to use when interacting, but I didn’t like that, so it is now word-based.
There are no arcade action sequences but you will see action sequences being executed by the computer to fill in the scenes pertaining to what you do. In all there are 150 commands The gameplay is best described as 'surreal’. The game presents a lot of dialogue and even more Interaction between the characters. I try to keep away from the point-and-click approach (a system I believe I invented). At present. the point-and-click system is now becoming rather dated.
It's not really clear why Tir Na Nog was never released. It just vanished. For a more detailed version, including the involvement of Graham Stafford, ex of Design Design,visit gamesthatwerent.com
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| PC ZONE May 1995 page 46 |
Fornax and Gath are the two big obvious missing games. It's possible to infer quite a bit about Fornax but next to nothing is known about Gath, although presumably it would have been similar to Fornax and thus similar to Heavy on the Magick. Whoever wrote the Fornax listing for the 128K Spectrum leaflet had a good stab at outlining the storyline:
Fornax
is the second part of the epic Siege of Earth trilogy, an animated and
mixed media adventure presenting the next phase in mankind's struggle
against the alien Sept.
Fornax, the fire planet, is a world populated
by Sept of the scientific caste, who are studying the ancient Star Lord
civilisation with the help of mutated humans. The Terran Resistance
must outwit the Sept brains and solve the enigma of the Star Lords in
order to uncover the greatest secret of all - the location of the Sept
imperial planet, Gath.
The instruction manual for Heavy On The Magick teased add on modules; Collodon's Pile, The Tombs of Taro, and Paradise Reglossed. There was also mention of a sequel called The Trials of Therlon:
Somewhere in the Future
It is the intention that. Somewhere in the Not-Too-Distant Future, new adventures for Axil will appear. These, will take two forms:
– Heavy on the Magick modules, which will interlace with the current adventures directly; i.e. they will be the continuation of the adventure from each of the three exits from the current game.
– new Graumerphy adventures, featuring other locations and characters of the enchanted and whimsical land of Graumerphy.
Both adventures and modules will be capable of accepting saved Axils, together with any terrifically useful objects, from other adventures.
It is anticipated that new modules will only be available direct from Gargoyle, while complete new adventures will be available from honest retailers everywhere.
In addition, it is also hoped that a small book will be produced giving more information on Graumerphy and its inhabitants
Future Productions
Heavy on the Magick Modules: Collodon's Pile - the castle above the Dungeons.
The Tombs of Taro – a strange and terrifying catacomb adjacent to the dungeons.
Paradise Reglossed – in which things are not as heavenly as they seem.
Complete Adventures
The Trials of Therlon–what happened when Axil returned
Booklet: The Magicians Guide to Graumerphy!
Note! Send no money until you see announcements in the press
A C64 version of Heavy on the Magick was advertised by never appeared.
 |
| SINCLAIR USER September 1986 page 31 |
Samurai Dawn was to be the third FTL game. CRASH reported (July 1986):
GARGOYLE GAMES are going strong... and are working on a set of arcade games for an autumn launch under the FTL— Faster than Light label. Priced around the £7.95 mark, the new Gargoyle label promises thrills and spills galore, with the first game set to include Heavy on the Magick size figures in a fast space shoot em up! Samurai Dawn and a "family entertainment' with the current working title of George are scheduled for Christmas
By September Christmas had slipped to January:
Next January should see the release of Samurai Dawn, an arcade adventure set in the mysterious East. Lots of animated gore and the odd decapitation or fifty is scheduled for this one, which should please the more blood-thirsty amongst you.
Gargoyle/FTL got as far as designing a poster for the game. The picture is up the page and in case you can't read the tiny text, it says:
When the Eastern Sky turns the colour of blood, it's the start of a SAMURAI DAWN.
When the sparkling blade of a vengeful warrior flashes red, it's the start of a SAMURAI DAWN.
If a thousand bodies are silhouetted in flame by the rising sun, it must be a SAMURAI DAWN.
A tale of Eastern mystery and decapitation - at the speed of light from FTL.
Greg Follis told PCW (4-10 September 1986 )
...of Samurai Dawn, Greg says, "It's going to be terribly bloodthirsty — decapitations, heads falling off in fountains of blood — Someone will probably want to ban it.”
The end of Hydrofool teased a sequel called Wunderland, in the best Ultimate Play the Game style,
Wolf was a Gargoyle/FTL title which became the basis for Thundercats. It was identified via an invoice from musician Rod Hubbard's meticulous records but for the full story you should check out gamesthatwerent.com
George was based on artificial intelligence techniques. It was obliquely referred to in the CRASH Christmas 1985 interview:
Before starting Gargoyle they had been sent on artificial intelligence courses where they learned certain elements of AI which Greg and Roy now hope to incorporate into later games to form what Greg calls a sort of cross between Dun Darach and 'Crossroads'.
The mind boggles. AI clearly interested Roy Carter. When he spoke to PCW in 1985 he told them:
My greatest programming challenge involves artificial intelligence and expert systems. It's a subject that has interested me for ages and I've been to a number of seminars on the subject of Al.
I'd like to create program so realistic it would be like talking to a real person.
And as late as 1987 the game came up in Greg Follis last interview with SINCLAIR USER:
Programming ambition To create an intelligent program. It's an idea we've been working on for four or five years — and the ultimate objective is to simulate human thought processes- We have a thing called the George project which is underway being developed on a PCW that might bear some fruit this year and there might be some sort of Spectrum version next year.
The closest anyone ever got to an explanation of George was this paragraph from the CRASH September 1986 FTL preview:
And of course, there’s George , an executive type game involving lots of artificial intelligence techniques, aimed primarily at data-processing professionals (a whole new games market!) Although there might be a demo of this at the show, the 48k Spectrum can only give some flavour of what the game’s about, as it is better suited to larger micro-computers.
And finally, there was The Hunting of the Snark. This was mentioned as early as the 1985 MICRO ADVENTURER interview about Tir Na Nog. It was going to be Gargoyle's second game:
The Hunting of the Snark was going to be our next project," says Greg, "but it's been pointed out that it's good business sense to bring out a follow up to Tir Na Nog...
The poem is hypnotic," [Greg] enthuses. I love the idea of a nonsense game, as opposed to a nonsensical game -Carroll takes lateral thinking to its limits, but he is absolutely logical, and it's the nonsense behind the logic that appeals to me."
Greg Follis was still thinking about the game when he spoke to SINCLAIR USER in 1987:
Another idea is to do a new Gargoyle Games project based on The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Caroll. It would be a completely new style of game and not look like any of the previous ones. That would be intended for about October.
It's appropriate that the one game which eluded Gargoyle, no matter how much they sought it, was based on this Lewis Carroll poem.
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
Bibliography
And that's still not all! Gargoyle Games were a most literate company and offered bibliographies for Dun Darach, Marsport, and Heavy on the Magick.
Dun Darach
If you enjoy the atmosphere of Dun Darach, you may wish to read the following books:
The Green Magician by L. Sprague de Camp.
Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Lieber.
Lyonesse by Jack Vance.
The Corum Books by Michael Moorcock.
The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander.
In addition, the following books have proved useful in gathering source material:
Celtic Mythology by Proinsias MacCana.
The Golden Bough by J.C. Fraser.
Marsport
If you have enjoyed Marsport, you may wish to read the following books, which also exploit the idea of a Future history:
The Known Space Series by Larry Niven.
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.
The Cities in Flight series by James Blish.
The Dorsai stories by Cordon Dickson
Heavy On The Magick
The
Systems of Magiek described in this game is derived from the Western
Occult Tradition: those who wish to read further on the Matter, might
study the following:
The Golden Dawn by Israel Regardie.
Magick in Theory and Practise by A. Crowley.
The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra Melin the Mage.
For
those who relished the flavour of the Land of Graumerphy, the Dying
Earth series bv Jack Vance, and the Myth books by Robert Aspirin will
afford enjoyment.
[1] This joke doesn't properly work because my photo shows the Corporation
Street end of the North Western Arcade not the view from Temple Row
opposite the Great Western Arcade. First rule of comedy, Spike. You must
have geographical consistency.
[2] The comment about seeking the rights to The Hunting of the Snark
is interesting because the Lewis Carroll poem would have been out of
copyright around 1948. Possibly Gregg Follis thought the 1984 Mike Batt
musical complicated things.
[3] Not. I was toying with the idea of writing another article but my theory can be boiled down to the idea that the release of the 128K Spectrum introduced enough of a pause into the development of Fornax that someone looked at it and decided it wasn't worth continuing.
[4] How
long does it take to prepare a computer for release? I find it
difficult to believe that Sinclair did all the design and packaging work
for the 128K Spectrum in January and February 1986.
[5] The name of the game clearly inspired by John Brunner's 1975 book The Shockwave Rider.
I'm on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social and emails can be sent to whereweretheynow@gmail.com.
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