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Joe Blade 2 – “Yer dead meat mate!” 1988’s chart-topping ...

2026-10-27T03:23:39Z

Joe Blade 2 – “Yer dead meat mate!”

1988’s chart-topping games in the UK included an unprecedented number of sequels, accounting for more than half of the games I’m writing about, and six of them in a row. Some of that was a coincidence of the timing of long-awaited games like Football Manager 2 and Starglider 2, with significant changes from their predecessors. Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge offered an early glimpse of the enhanced remake concept, to a timetable dictated by the Olympics. There was another trend, though, at a time when the industry continued to consolidate and things were getting trickier for many — companies turning around sequels in a much quicker and easier way. Joe Blade II was one of those. (Or Joe Blade 2 was – it’s maybe indicative that the game and its packaging are less than consistent there).
In 1987, Joe Blade’s formula of combining simple action, exploration and puzzle mini-games, all executed smoothly, had made it the biggest success so far for Interceptor Micros and their budget label Players. Its author Colin Swinbourne worked on a few other games for Players, including Thing! and Tanium, (as well as making Brat Attack for a Sinclair User cover tape) but those didn’t prove a success on anything the same level as Joe Blade. So less than a year after the first game, he started work on the sequel.
Thing! (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Thing! (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Tanium (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Tanium (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Brat Attack (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
News of Joe Blade II caught the interest of British games magazines. Crash wrote that “Colin Swinbourne is terribly busy at the moment finishing Joe Blade II — follow up to the superb Joe Blade”. “He’s back, back, back!” declared Your Sinclair, Smash Hits style. Meanwhile, Sinclair User provided “The shortest Preview in the World” (“Ths pc frm J. Bld 2 from Plyrs. Lds actn nd grt grfx. Strtdt:Jly. Prc: £2.99”) but it was still a preview. The shorthand, in its own way, showed the value of an established name.
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Amstrad CPC)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Commodore 64)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
The letter-swapping times code sequences were one of the elements which stood out most in the original game, so this time around, Colin Swinbourne developed that out further, with a looping sequence of four different varieties of timed mini-games involving picking numbers at the right moment and swapping them into the right place. The rest of the game, in turn, is rather simpler than its predecessor, with no ammo-limited shooting, and somewhat simplified navigation.
This comes with a change of setting, from an evil fortress to a London of the future (1995) which, per the game’s instructions, is “crawling with punks, thugs and muggers” leaving ordinary Londoners too scared to venture outside. Luckily for the residents of this no-go-zone, here comes Joe Blade to rescue them: “teenage pin-up and pop idol, media celebrity, hero of the people, defender of the flag”. Leaving aside the fascist undertones (as ACE magazine asked, “since when was being a punk a crime?”), Joe Blade II‘s story is distinct from the first game’s in that it leaves the equivalent of the bomb sequences as making no sense at all in-world. Unless it’s just left unmentioned that the terrified citizens have all been fitted with self-destruct sequences.
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Amstrad CPC)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Commodore 64)
Narrative quibbles did not prove any issue to things working out very well for Players with the combination of a familiar character, well-tuned gameplay and a little bit of novelty. Joe Blade II got some broadly positive reviews, with Amstrad Computer User hailing “more variety to the graphics” and Crash’s Phil King writing that “After an impressive debut, Joe’s second appearance is no disappointment”. His colleague Nick Roberts wrote that “There is enough playability in Joe Blade II to last a life time”. The game ended up spending 13 weeks in total at the top of Gallup’s combined formats budget chart, starting in October 1988 and only finally leaving the top for good in February 1989.
Not everyone saw Joe Blade II as having long-term appeal. Gordon Houghton in Zzap! wrote that “the game’s far too easy — and that’s not really on — not even at this price”. A reader wrote into Your Sinclair to say that “after three goes at Joe Blade II I had completed the game”, providing the end-game message as proof. Over in Sinclair User, Tony Dillon expressed disappointment with “our mate Colin Swinbourne” in much more colourful (not to mention psychotic) terms: “Joe Blade II is a bit like watching a ballet: it’s all very pretty and artistic, but you soon end up wishing someone would cut loose with a machine gun”.
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Amstrad CPC)
Joe Blade II (Players, 1988, Commodore 64)
For Joe Blade III, which followed a year later, Joe Blade did get his gun back. He also got much of the structure and narrative of the first game back, except this time he was rescuing hostages from baddie Crax Bloodfinger’s new lair, a tower called Crax Plaza. Crash’s reaction to this was much the same as mine: “If you’ve ever seen the film Die Hard starring Bruce Willis you will know the sort of story line (I wonder where Players got the idea from?)”.
This sequel got more universally positive reviews but didn’t make it to any chart on record, and the series ended there. This time it didn’t even get a Commodore 64 release; C64 artist Robert Browne completed work on Joe Blade III and handed everything over to series programmer Kevin Parker, but it seems we won’t ever see it in the light of day. Cause and effect on the format omission and the game’s lack of success could go either way round.
Joe Blade III (Players, 1989, ZX Spectrum)
Joe Blade III (Players, 1989, ZX Spectrum)
Joe Blade III (Players, 1989, ZX Spectrum)
Although there were no more Joe Blade games to come for Colin Swinbourne, his career in games continued for more than a decade more, with a long stint working on art for virtual life sim Creatures and its sequels. Joe Blade II, meanwhile, did end up with a different kind of longevity after all. In 2023, Lazslo Rajcsanyi newly created a Game Boy port of it, with an impressive amount of the original game intact.
Joe Blade II (WLS, 2023, Game Boy)
Joe Blade II (WLS, 2023, Game Boy)
Joe Blade II (WLS, 2023, Game Boy)
The series’s 1980s end with Joe Blade III seems to have come through the exact opposite issue to near-contemporary Renegade III, similarly a flop compared to predecessor Target: Renegade. Where that game went too different, Joe Blade III instead proved so over-familiar that it removed anyone’s reason to buy it. Perhaps it didn’t help that Joe Blade’s niche as squat cartoon action hero with a ridiculous name was being usurped by Core Design’s Rick Dangerous.
Renegade III: The Final Chapter (Imagine, 1989, ZZ Spectrum)
Renegade III: The Final Chapter (Imagine, 1989, ZZ Spectrum)
Rick Dangerous (Firebird, 1989, ZX Spectrum)
Rick Dangerous (Firebird, 1989, ZX Spectrum)
The extent to which Joe Blade III couldn’t match its competition was perhaps better typified by another game that shared its budget status. It’s one that went unrecognised in an interesting note in Sinclair User’s review of Joe Blade III, celebrating that the Joe Blade series had reached a third game. “How many successful budget-only series of games can you name?” it asks. “Well, there are CodeMasters’ ‘Simulator’ games, but they are less of a genuine series than a load of different games with the word ‘Simulator’ tacked onto the end.” Around the time that was written, Code Masters also released their own third game in a genuine series of budget games that combined action, exploration and puzzles. The second game in that series had eventually knocked Joe Blade II off the budget chart top spot. Much more than Players, Code Masters had cracked how to make such a series work. I’ll be getting to Dizzy soon.
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 29 October 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 05 November 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 12 November 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 19 November 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 10 December 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 17 December 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 24 December 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 31 December 1988, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 14 January 1989, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 21 January 1989, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 28 January 1989, New Computer Express
Gallup combined budget chart for week ending 04 February 1989, New Computer Express
Sources:
Zeppelin Lands, Crash No. 52, May 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
Future Shocks – Joe Blade II, Your Sinclair No. 30, June 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Preview 4 – Joe Blade, Sinclair User No. 76, July 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Snippets – Joe Blade 2, ACE No. 11, August 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
Review – Joe Blade 2, Amstrad Computer User No. 49, December 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
Reviews – Joe Blade II, Crash No. 57, October 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
Zzap! Budget Test – Joe Blade II, Zzap! No. 44, December 1988, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
Letters – Finished…, Your Sinclair No. 38, February 1989, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Games review – Joe Blade II, Tony Dillon, Sinclair User No.80, November 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Joe Blade 3 (C64), Frank Gasking, Games That Weren’t 64, 2012/2020
Colin Swinbourne credits, MobyGames
Budget – Joe Blade III, Crash No. 73, February 1990, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Bargain Basement – Joe Blade III, Your Sinclair No. 51, March 1990, accessed via Spectrum Computing

https://superchartisland.com/joe-blade-2/

#joeblade #players #spectrum #colinswinbourne #yer #sinclairuser #bratattack #tanium #footballmanager #olympicchallenge

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Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge – “Select your Adidas ...

2026-10-20T03:18:05Z

Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge – “Select your Adidas trainers”

So far in 2026, out of sixteen games released this year which have reached #1 in UK sales charts, five have been some form of remake, remaster or repackage, from Star Fox to Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2. The games of the ‘90s and ‘00s are a regular source of material for new releases, with marketing strategies combining nostalgia and long-established approaches to promoting technological advances and technically improved graphics. While remakes may have become more frequent in recent times, though, they were already around even when computer games as a widely experienced artform were in their infancy.
Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, with its tie-in to Britain’s twice Olympic gold winning decathlete, was a huge hit for Ocean in 1984. They gave it a sequel the following year, Daley Thompson’s Supertest. In a crowded field, including their own conversion of Konami’s Hyper Sports, Supertest didn’t take off in quite the same way. After that, Ocean came to exactly the same decision as Konami did with Hyper Olympic — give the series a rest for a few years until the timing was right for its return. And that, of course, meant the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
Konami ’88 (Konami, 1988, Arcade)
Konami ’88 (Konami, 1988, Arcade)
In making Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge in 1988, Ocean didn’t directly copy its Konami counterpart, Konami ‘88, in the same way as in 1984. They didn’t need to, because they had already established how to make an Olympic decathlon game. The task was just to make Daley Thompson’s Decathlon again, but with upgraded graphics and a few new features. There were now more advanced computers available, but the biggest sales were always likely to come from the same ones as last time: the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum. The 128k Spectrum now at least offered improved memory and musical capabilities, but enough players still had 48k machines that Ocean couldn’t afford to make the game 128k only.
Still, techniques and knowledge had improved enough since Daley Thompson’s Decathlon that Ocean were well able to improve on its appearance. For the Commodore 64 version, Dave Collier, who had worked on the original game, shared programming duties with 17-year-old Richard Palmer, who had just joined Ocean. In doing so he followed his older brother John, who ended up taking on Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge’s C64 graphics. The originally assigned artist, Haydn Dalton, had become “pissed off at the working conditions in the dungeon of Ocean” and left for Binary Designs.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Commodore 64)
The equivalent roles for the Spectrum version were both taken by newcomers, with Dave Thompson programming and Bill Harbison on graphics. Talking to Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean for their history of Ocean, Harbison explained that he had initially rejected his friends’ suggestion to apply for Ocean “because I thought the company was rubbish”. This opinion was informed by the same outsourced Knight Rider game that had been central to inspiring Ocean’s push to take on more in-house developers. After some rejections from other companies, Harbison reconsidered and successfully applied. Ocean colleague Paul Hughes later described him as “a hoot” and both “a very talented pixel artist” and a “brilliant caricature artist and creator of the Ocean Naff Mag”, whatever that was.
Harbison’s tasks for making Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge started with Daley Thompson himself. “It was important to me to make Daley black”, he recalled, as opposed to the unrecognisable white sprite in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. That meant improving the Daley Thompson you control in the decathlon events, but there was also a chance to present a better likeness still in the game’s most significant addition. Training was crucial to Daley Thompson (he reportedly once said that he always trained twice on Christmas Day to outdo his rivals) and before starting the decathlon you can complete a training programme, waggling your joystick faster to make Thompson carry out more curls, sit-ups and squats.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
For the training sections, as well as Bill Harbison doing his best to make a recognisable Daley Thompson to take up much of the screen, he put his caricature skills to good use. He added a little bald man in the background, based on a friend of his called Colin, who comedically fails to pick up weights. He initially did this to amuse himself, but development head Gary Bracey liked it enough for it to stay in. The exact mechanics of the training section give pointers to another reason Ocean included it. As you complete the exercises, a bottle of Lucozade gets filled up. As reviews and the instructions explained, the more this is filled the more it aids your powers.
As I’ve written many times, Ocean’s vision for putting together different licences (and unlicensed inspirations) was a repeated theme throughout their years on the charts. A Crash preview for Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge reported Gary Bracey saying that a licensed game was almost a guaranteed success: “you only have to look at Out Run to see what I mean… it never got the great reviews but it sold very well”. One new attraction of 1988’s Daley Thompson return was that Ocean could put the word ‘Olympic’ in the title this time, but they didn’t stop there. Back in their early days in 1983, Ocean had made a sponsored Burger Time clone called Mr. Wimpy, and Daley Thompson’s own sponsorships and endorsements gave a chance to return to that well.
Adverts with Daley Thompson had helped to raise Lucozade’s popularity as a sports drink, and all involved could now build on that further. “Lucozade is a registered trademark of Beecham Group PLC”, various screens in Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge remind you. Each of the decathlon’s events also starts with the task of selecting the right Adidas footwear to improve your performance. Getting a success message is just a matter of writing down the right answer to re-use once you’ve found it out, like the submarine recognition check from Silent Service without even the copy-protection purpose. But it does put Adidas’s name and products in front of you, for which Ocean presumably got paid.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)
Many reviews of the game came replete with early mentions of Lucozade, though I get the sense that as well as its presence in the game, this was partly just because it had been most people’s recent exposure to Daley Thompson. Reviewers were also mostly quite aligned on the merits of the game, and how exhausting it was thanks to its familiar rapid left-right control scheme. “Rather than coordination or timing the key to this game is sheer brute force and endurance” wrote Crash, while Matthew Evans in Zzap! warned of “the most exhausting joystick waggling game I’ve ever played” and the potential for players to suffer “Serious Arm Lock-Up”.
Bob Wade in ACE wrote that the Commodore 64 version’s training sessions “aren’t as sadistic as the Amiga version” and concluded that “waggling games aren’t exactly new, but this one is nicely put together. It’s certainly better than the original DT’s Decathlon”. Matt Bielby in Computer & Video Games described some of the training stage flourishes as “totally unnecessary to the game but they are a nice touch”, before concluding that Daley Thompson’s Decathlon was unlikely to be an award winner like its predecessor because “we’ve just seen too much of this sort of thing since then”.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, ZX Spectrum)
Others zoomed in further on the game’s exact nature. “Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge is a very old-fashioned game” wrote The Games Machine. “It is, in fact, merely a souped-up version of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.” Likewise Tony Dillon in Sinclair User: “under the enhanced graphics and nice visual techniques, it’s still DTD hiding under there”. He continued with a lament that sounds all too relevant nearly forty years later: “I do think it’s a shame really that a megabuck company like Ocean can’t come up with new ideas instead of lugging old horses around”.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Remake, as it could have been called, proved less successful than its predecessor. That may, however, have been as much down to the fortunes of the man himself as to reducing appetite for the style of game. At the Seoul Olympics, an injury-affected Daley Thompson narrowly missed out on a medal altogether. As Mike Pattenden wrote in Commodore User when reviewing the later Amiga version (a rush job, according to programmer Peter Johnson): “Ocean must be more gutted about Daley’s demise than most: had he succeeded DTOC would probably have fared much better chartwise than it has”.
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)
Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, 1988, Amiga)
There is another post-script on the theme of living up to expectations. The biggest new additions to the game, the training sessions to boost your Lucozade power and the Adidas shoe selection? For the Spectrum version at minimum, the supposed power-boosts did absolutely nothing. Bill Harbison recently revealed as much, saying that “we never actually told Gary [Bracey]”, and none of the game’s reviewers noticed. So, the recap, way back in 1988, Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge hit #1 as a remake whose advances were cosmetic at best, and mainly in the service of additional commercial considerations. Plus ça change.
Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 08 October 1988, Computer & Video Games
Top of the charts for week ending 08 October 1988
UK games: Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (Ocean, Various)
Japan games: Konamic Sports in Seoul (Konami, Famicom)
UK films: Good Morning Vietnam
UK singles: Whitney Houston – One Moment in Time
UK albums: Chris de Burgh – Flying Colours
Sources:
Ocean: The History, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Retro Fusion Books, 2013
Why This ZX Spectrum Game Almost Caused a POLICE Incident, Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge – VHS to Pixel Art on ZX Spectrum, Ocean LIED To You! Exposing THAT joystick destroyer, Harbonaut (Bill Harbison) on YouTube, 2026 [warning: contains AI-generated images]
A Tribute to Ocean Software, Graeme Mason, Retro Gamer No. 246, May 2023
Paul Hughes, C64.com, 2009
Haydn Dalton, C64.com, 2002
An interview with Peter Johnson, Codetapper’s Amiga Site, 2011
1980s television adverts, That 1980s Sports Blog, 2016
Preview – Ocean making waves, Crash No. 54, July 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Screen Test – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Bob Wade, ACE No. 15, December 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
Reviews – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Matt Bielby, Computer & Video Games No. 83, September 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Reviews – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Crash No. 58, November 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Zzap! Test – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Zzap! 64 No. 47, October 1988, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
Games review – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Tony Dillon, Sinclair User No. 79, October 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
And Daley Came Forth, The Games Machine No. 13, December 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
Amiga Screen Scene – Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 62, November 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive

https://superchartisland.com/daley-thompsons-olympic-challenge/

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