That's Roger Kean writing an obituary for Fantasy Software in the July 1985 issue of CRASH. It was part of an editorial lament called This Tormented Business which covered the collapse of distributer Tiger Software, and Bug-Byte, Micromania and Fantasy Software. Fantasy disappeared owing CRASH £4190 which works out to around £13,223 today, so I can see why they were less than sympathetic about the failure of the company. Especially the magazine played a big part in making one of their games a success.
119 The Promenade, Cheltenham
Fantasy first appeared as a different company called Quest, advertising a game called The Black Hole in the 19 April 1983 issue of HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY. The company's gimmick to stand out from the competition was a monthly high score contest. The top ten scorers each month would win a t-shirt and the chance to enter a championship at the end of the year, with prizes worth up to £500 on offer. HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY then profiled the company in the May 10-16 issue and gave them some early publicity.
Quest Micro Software, as HCW call them, was a two man company based in Cheltenham. The two men being Bob Hamilton and Paul Dyer who both previously worked for a defence contractor; where Bob Hamilton wrote software and Paul Dyer dealt with hardware. The Black Hole was written by Bob in an eight week period after buying a ZX Spectrum for his younger brothers for Christmas 1982. A story that makes me suspect the game was inspired by ITV's big Christmas Day film that year, The Black Hole:
Bob said: "I bought some software and I wasn't very impressed so I started writing some myself. We decided to go into it ourselves. And we've got a very enthusiastic bank manager,"
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| HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY May 10-16 page 6 |
The Black Hole was quickly followed in June 1983 by a game called Violent Universe. Game one was named after a Disney film. It looks like game two was named after a 1969 BBC2 documentary of the same name. There was also a tie-in book by Nigel Calder so maybe either Bob Hamilton or Paul Dyer had a copy on their shelf.
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| May 2026 |
The Promenade is a high class address. A regency end of terrace building facing on to Imperial Gardens where visitors to the spa town can walk and admire the floral displays. It was an intermittently showery morning when I was there and not quite promenading weather.
Quest diligently updated the Black Hole high score contest through the summer. The first update came in the May 17-23 issue of HCW; a score of 963 by Darren Gerald of Christchurch, Dorset. He was dethroned by the end of May. The top three scores were; 2530, Russel Capel, Swindon Village, Gloucs; 2019, K. Burnett, Fraserburgh, Aberdeen; and 1594 David Baxter, Carluke, Lanarks. No one had beaten Rusel Capel's score by the end of June. Now the top six scores looked like this; 2530, Russel Capel; 2019, Mrs K. Burnett; 1998, David Baxter; 1847, Ian Garlinge; 1670, Steve Edwards; and 1513, T. Swift. Then details of the competition disappear because Quest Microsoftware had something else on their minds.
Quest started advertising a new game in August 1983. The Pyramid, a game which as far as I can tell isn't named after a film, TV programme or book. And then, Quest Microsoftware disappeared.
Fauconberg Lodge, 27A St George's Road, Cheltenham, Gloucester, GL50 3DT
Left, the advert from the September 1983 issue of SINCLAIR USER and right, October 1983. Quest have regenerated (and moved, but I'll come back to that later). ZX COMPUTING carried a very short news story in their December 1983 issue noting the name change to Fantasy would come into effect from 19 September 1983. The full story behind the rebranding wasn't revealed until an interview in the April 1985 issue of SINCLAIR PROGRAMS:
“Our first company was called Quest Software,” continued Paul “the two games we produced, Black Hole and Violent Universe received a marvellous response from the public and distributors alike. However, after six months of trading and establishing ourselves we received a severe letter from solicitors of another firm trading under that name.” Bob sat glumly recalling the event. Paul continued, “It was apparent from our solicitors that we must change our name.”
Quest not only changed their name, they also changed their address and moved all of four minutes round the corner to another Regency end of terrace building. Fauconberg Lodge is named after Lord Fauconberg, one of the big nobs who hung out in Cheltenham. He's notable for sucking up to George III beyond the call of duty. When adverts were booked by phone, Fauconberg Lodge was frequently misheard as Falconberg Lodge, so you will see that address sometimes listed on Fantasy adverts.
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| May 2026 |
SINCLAIR USER talked to Bob Hamilton and Paul Dyer for a profile printed in the April 1984 issue. This included a couple of photos and, as you might expect, the building hasn't changed much [1].
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| SINCLAIR USER April 1984 page 46 |
In case you are wondering, Bob Hamilton is wearing running gear in that photo. He ran, a lot. It almost became Fantasy's gimmick to talk about how much he ran and thought up game ideas while running:
[Hamilton] likes to run anything between three or 50 miles a day over the local hills in training for various crosscountry events. He also once ran a 24-hour race, in which contestants run for a day and a night to see who covers the greatest distance, but so far has never taken part in a marathon. "Too short," he says. "They scarcely give you time to get started.
(SINCLAIR USER April 1984 page 47)
(SINCLAIR USER April 1984 page 47)
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| SINCLAIR USER April 1984 page 47 |
Inevitably I wanted to see if I could find the location of this picture. I was working on the assumption the SINCLAIR USER hacks would be lazy and not want to venture three to 50 miles from Fauconberg Lodge. They didn't. The photo was taken all of 55 metres from the front door of the Fantasy office,
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| May 2026 |
Bob Hamilton was Fantasy's secret weapon. A good machine code programmer at a time when these were a rarity. The Black Hole and Violent Universe don't look like much but in 1983 they compared well to the slow flickering games on offer. The arrival of Jet Pac from Ultimate in the early summer of 1983 changed everything:
The quality and smoothness of its graphics convinced Hamilton that he would have to produce something more complex, with more sophisticated graphics techniques, if he was to make a real impact on the market.
(SINCLAIR USER, April 1984)
The need to change the company name provided an opportunity for a complete relaunch. A new name, a new address, full page colour adverts in the style of Imagine, and a new hero called Ziggy. The instructions for The Pyramid lean heavily on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The original answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the universe and everything was 42 but many aeons have now passed since Deep Thought produced that magical number. Ever greater and greater mega-computers have come and gone since then with no further advances being made - that is, until Ziggy came along.
Ziggy was both very inquisitive and very ambitious from birth. At the age of three months he decided that his life's quest would be to solve the puzzle once and for all. Instead of turning to the much tried computer, Ziggy decided to search for clues back in history and spent his 200 years of adolescence plugged into the memory banks at the offices of the Encyclopaedia Galactica.
The glossy influence of Jet Pac and Arcadia, by Imagine, are easy to see on The Pyramid. The game lifts Fantasy to a new level of professionalism. At this point it would have been easy for Fantasy to follow the same route as other companies and start releasing games written by other people but they bucked the trend:
"We'd rather produce three or four really good games in a year and keep down our overheads than produce 30 or 40 games of which only one of two will really sell," says Dyer.
(SINCLAIR USER, April 1984)
Fantasy Software was Bob and Paul, and secretary Ann Coates, and John White; a programmer taken on to convert games to the Commodore 64. He ended up writing versions of The Pyramid and a 1984 game called Beaky And The Egg Snatchers. Other people pick up occasional credits. Darren Hamilton and Ian Hamilton are named as designing a lot of the rooms in The Pyramid. Later, Fantasy's second game, Doomsday Castle, released for Christmas 1983 gave additional thanks to:
Darren Hamilton, Ian Hamilton, Jane Claricoates and Marion Butler for help with graphics and to Ann Scott for supplying much essential tea and testing.
They could have done with crediting Douglas Adams as well. Another of his ideas is used in the Doomsday Castle advert [2].
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 22 December 1983-4 January 1984 page 33 |
Ziggy was back for Doomsday Castle along with a baddie called Scarthax. Fantasy was slowly growing a cast of characters for fans to follow from game to game, They begin to remind me of a more business focused version of Automata. Keeping themselves deliberately small and cultivating a niche audience with games slightly outside the mainstream.
Everything went quiet until 1984 when Fantasy's third game appeared, called Beaky and the Egg Snatchers. This was a copy of the arcade game Joust which started out as Kondore, a game with bird graphics inspired by Bob Hamilton's Christmas 1983 visit to Kenya. This was planned as a lighter arcade game because, as Hamilton and Dyer told SINCLAIR USER most of their focus was on:
The next game, which they plan to release in September, It will be a "true adventure" starring Ziggy and possibly some friends, but no other details are being offered. "We cannot reveal more, in case anyone else beats us to it," says Dyer,
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| CRASH October 1984 |
Backpacker's Guide to the Universe Part 1 was Fantasy's magnum opus. An arcade-adventure spread across three separate games which saw Ziggy once again take on Scarthax. The trilogy was given a novel twist because Ziggy literally had a day to defeat Scarthax across all three games. The instructions for Part 1 say the game needed to be completed in 12 hours [3]; with parts two and three presumably taking up the remaining 12 hours between them. The total playing time of parts one and two could be saved and loaded into part three. Spend too long playing any one game in the series and Scarthax would pull The Great Plug and win.
CRASH gave Backpacker's Guide to the Universe a big colour preview and one of their first covers which could be tied to a specific game. When Lloyd Mangram wrote the CRASH history he recalled:
That kind of coverage was eagerly sought by companies desperate to convince shops that their game was about to sell in its tens of thousands, and since it seemed that Fantasy got a cover with apparently no trouble, Roger found himself inundated with calls suggesting ideas that would have kept CRASH in covers until the 1990s! As a consequence, for the remainder of the year Oliver avoided game-linked cover paintings
I like to write about Oliver Frey's artwork whenever I can but on this occasion I find myself with little to say. It's an excellent piece of dynamic science fiction artwork but it's lacking the little quirks and character that Frey brought to his best covers. It feels like a bit of a contractual obligation cover, done because there was nothing else that leant itself to cover artwork that month. The CRASH preview is notable because the game is said to contain a lot of features which don't make it through to the final version.
See those colourful aliens. They don't exist in the game. The only enemies present are disappointing circle-shaped things called ring-wraiths (the Tolkien estate call their solicitor only to find the line engaged). Many screens are just empty. The lack of sound doesn't help. The CRASH preview talks about the Backpackers Guide, loaded separately from side 2 of the cassette because of the limited memory of the Spectrum. The preview says the game itself will include a cut-down version of the guide. It doesn't. Backpackers looks lovely but feels incomplete, as if compromises have been made to get it to the shops on time.
Fantasy would go on to claim Backpackers sold 23,000 copies in its first month on sale (CRASH February 1985 page 58) and then the game attracted interest from solicitors acting on behalf of Douglas Adams.
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 17-23 January 1985 page 19 |
“We got into a legal squabble with the author of Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy because of the title we had intended to use. We managed to resolve this and in fact we may be doing a project sometime with the publishing house."
In 1983 there had been a flap over Hitch-Hiker's Guide when someone associated with Douglas Adams' management realised Pan Books had given away the rights to produce an adventure game to Supersoft (see the Digital Village article for more). By 1984, Infocom had released an official adaption of the book in America and the European release was due in January 1985. A competing game called Backpackers Guide to the Universe was probably regarded as stepping too far across the line between parody and passing off, and trading on the copyright of Douglas Adams. The publication of the fourth book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy So Long And Thanks For All The Fish on 9 November 1984 might also have made people more sensitive to anyone seen to be muscling in on Douglas Adams' intellectual property.
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 21-27 April 1983 page 1 |
It doesn't look like the legal threat was very serious. I would be surprised if it went much beyond a solicitor's letter and a warning of possible further action. The bulk of Backpackers' sales would have been done by Christmas 1984 and there's no sign the game was withdrawn from the shops. The advertising was never changed and continued into 1985. Despite what the small advert says, I don't think the game was ever sold under the name Back Packers. The two small adverts and the promise of a name change give the impression of being done more as a gesture of goodwill and a promise to tread more carefully in future. I guess the greater impact would fall on the two sequels. These would probably have been called Back Packers for safety but we'll never know for sure.
C&VG previewed Backpackers in their October 1984 issue and gave a little more information about the game, the proposed sequels, and the next Fantasy game:
Ziggy, the star of several Fantasy's games, including the Pyramid, has come out of retirement to star in a series of three games which the company is heralding as the first, true graphical Adventure games.
Caverns of Exile is the first of a new series of games entitled The Backpacker's Guide to the Universe...
Caverns of Exile is scheduled to be launched for Christmas, the second early in the early New Year and the last of the trio — The Final Conflict — later in the year.
Nearer the present. Fantasy is releasing a new game for the Spectrum called Time Warp. In the game, you take on the character of Dezzi, the pilot of a deep space cargo.
I've only ever seen Backpackers referred to as Backpackers Guide to the Universe Part 1. If Caverns of Exile was a proposed title it was never used. The next month, in blurb for a competition, C&VG revealed the title of Part 2; Enigma Zone.
Time Warp, mentioned above, became The Drive-In. The first Fantasy game not written by Bob Hamilton. It was squeezed out towards the end of 1984 and written by David W. Harper whose other games included Armageddon for Ocean, Riddler's Den for Electric Dreams, and Toadrunner for Ariolasoft.
After Christmas, February 1985, a CRASH news story described how Backpackers was "the game that nearly didn't make it:
'We have built our reputation on producing only a small number of very good games. But to maintain that reputation we have to deliver on time.
'We are well aware of the Christmas market in the home computer software industry, and to miss it could have set us back months Everything conspired against us with Backpackers. Technical problems with writing the game, meant that Bob quite literally worked flat out for days on end, going without food or sleep to get it finished, even though he was ill at the time. At the last minute, the supplier of the vinyl cases let us down, which meant switching to different packaging and all changes to artwork and printing which that entailed.'
C&VG, in March 1985, revealed details of an Amstrad version of Backpackers due for release towards the end of March. No Commodore 64 version was planned. The same month, SINCLAIR PROGRAMS said:
Fantasy software are planning to launch two new games for Easter, one of which involves some hush, hush talks with a well known company.
A name has yet to be decided, but it is being referred to as Reflex at this stage. Without giving too much away, Paul having discussions with one of the leading electrical-type firms in this country.” The only information he was able to give was that "It will be a definite arcade game, involving a piece of equipment which will cause people to react with surprise!"
I have no idea what any of this means. SINCLAIR PROGRAMS followed this up the April 1985 interview with Paul Dyer and Bob Hamilton. It's odd, Colette McDermott has decided to use a strange authorial voice:
FANTASY Software appears to have broken up. Programming brain Bob Hamilton, according to the news on the street, has decided to leave the company. Does this mean we are experiencing the first case of popgroup-split-up syndrome in the computer industry?
Realising my duty to you, and being of a curious nature, I went in search of the truth. Lunch was arranged. Would the atmosphere be tense?
Paul Dyer and Bob Hamilton are the joint directors of Fantasy. They appeared relaxed and on good terms, was this to fool their public? Using my close questioning technique I established that underneath this humorous and outwardly friendly facade the old friendship really was intact and that their personalities are still in perfect harmony.
See what I mean about the odd style the writer has chosen to use? That said, the interview is fascinating. It is the only article to give any information on the dispute with Douglas Adams, or the reason why the company changed its name. The interview goes on to reveal that Bob Hamilton is not leaving but is taking a break from programming:
“I need a break from writing programs for the Spectrum and similar machines. I've gone as far as I can, for the moment, and fear that my work might become stale."
Did Fantasy release David W. Harper's The Drive-In because Bob Hamilton was on a break? The article also goes on to talk about the next game. A sequel to the Pyramid called Super Pyramid, and due for release in "the summer". It looks like Super Pyramid might be a renamed Backpackers Part 2. The Games That Time Forgot has a rough draft of artwork by Steinar Lund which includes a handwritten note[4] :
"Steinar, This is great. We’ve decided to place more emphasis on the Pyramid structure (the game may be called SUPER-PYRAMID!). I thought of the idea of the objective being to discover in the Pyramid a cosmic rosetta stone with which Ziggy can translate the runes on the stones giving the name of the planet and its (???) where the Great Plug lies. "
The mention of the Great Plug is a dead giveaway. Also, the figure on the concept art looks virtually identical to the way Ziggy is drawn on the cover of Backpackers which suggests it's artwork for Backpackers 2.
SINCLAIR PROGRAMS is one of those annoying magazines which doesn't print an on sale date for the next issue. However, because of the way newsagents handled magazines, a cover date of April 1985 suggests the magazine was on shelves in March so the interview itself probably took place in January or February 1985. The reason I'm fussing about the date of the interview is because the next thing that happened was this news item in the June issue of SINCLAIR USER:
Strange things are happening at Fantasy Software. Telephones are 'temporarily out of service' and Bob Hamilton, who owns (he company with Paul Dyer, admits, "We have gone into dormancy for a while".
This report was probably written around the start of April because further up the Births, marriages and deaths column is a note that Quicksilva's boss Rob Cousins has resigned followed the forced move of the company to owner Argus' offices in London. I know that move took place on 1 April 1985. The next news on the fate of Fantasy came in CRASH, in Roger Kean's editorial:
For several weeks managing director Paul Dyer was unavailable because he was 'moving house', according to the female voice answering the phone. Then the voice was unavailable — then the phone was disconnected Paul Dyer and Fantasy had vanished, leaving huge unpaid debts behind According to one programmer who is still owed his last salary, it was a real moonlight flit. Like many others, he has no idea where Paul Dyer has gone to ground.
There are rumours that a new 'Fantasy' aims to rise from the ashes, probably with the near completed Super Pyramid game.
I hope not, Paul, I really hope not . . .
There are rumours that a new 'Fantasy' aims to rise from the ashes, probably with the near completed Super Pyramid game.
I hope not, Paul, I really hope not . . .
Were you a high scorer in the Black Hole contest? What did you win? Were you the unpaid programmer, or part of the legal team acting for Douglas Adams? Please leave a comment or send an email to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. I am also on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social
[1] I'm fascinated by what appear to be bars across the window behind Bob Hamilton. Could the girls from Cheltenham Ladies' College get rowdy?
[2] Tolkien too, the baddie in Doomsday Castle was called an Urk which seems suspiciously close to Uruk. If you think that's a stretch, the baddies in Backpackers Guide to the Universe were called Ring Wraiths.
[3] You didn't need to actually spend 12 hours playing Backpackers Guide. The idea was that if your your high-tech backpack lost too much energy from encounters with aliens, or took too much damage, you would automatically be beamed back to the start of the game for recharge and repair; this took time which was added to the real time you spent playing the game. The end of the game came when the total of both came to 12 hours.
[4] The note might be from Bob Hamilton as it's from someone involved who writes as if they are producing graphics for the game. "I had to use straight lines to make the computer representation be easier."
[4] The note might be from Bob Hamilton as it's from someone involved who writes as if they are producing graphics for the game. "I had to use straight lines to make the computer representation be easier."
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