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10 TIE-IN GAMES WHICH NOBODY EVER NEEDED

9/8/2017

23 Comments

 
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Back in the 80s and 90s, when games were still finding their way, many publishers chose to focus on well-known licenses from the worlds of film, TV, music and publishing, rather than create their own IP.

However, while some of the games that resulted from this scattershot approach to licensing were well regarded - Ocean's Batman, for example - there were plenty that should never have been released.

Here are ten such properties that should never have become games.
EASTENDERS
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It's fair to say that EastEnders - while remaining popular - doesn't quite have the same cultural cachet it once boasted. When it first hit TV screens in the mid-80s, its blend of miserable drama and over-the-top Cockneys made it must-watch TV. It was wearily inevitable that it would collide sooner or later with the world of computer gaming. 

This thoroughly unwanted game required you - as an anonymous resident of Albert Square (the ghost of Reg Cox, perhaps?) - to help out your neighbours by successfully completing a series of mini games. Thrilling tasks included doing the laundry in Dot's launderette, managing Arthur Fowler's allotment, ordering stock on Pete Beale's fruit and veg stall, and pulling pints in the Queen Vic.
CORONATION STREET: THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING HOTPOT RECIPE
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A more recent effort, this dreadful, cheap-and-cheerful CD-ROM-type waste of space couldn't even be bothered to get the actors in - the story, such as it was, was told via promotional photos of the cast, and limp, humourless, text which failed in its attempts to evoke Northern bonhomie by mentioning biscuits and kettles.

​As is traditional in such epic adventures, Betty's famous hotpot recipe had been torn into pieces and hidden around The Street. Your task was to interrogate the residents, and find the missing pieces, while trying not to break your ankle on the cobbles.
NEIGHBOURS
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Neighbours was a racing game set on Ramsey Street, in which various characters compete to make it to the end of the course, while avoiding obstacles such as a demented Mrs Mangle, an out-of-control Bouncer the dog, and - of course - a kangaroo (which could be avoided by putting a blanket over it).

​You know: because there were always kangaroos in Neighbours.

​It's hard to know whether their inclusion constitutes racism. At least the characters weren't wearing those hats with corks hanging from them, and singing a song about being descended from criminals.
GRANGE HILL
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I've covered this before on Digi, and declared it the most depressing game of all time. Loosely inspired by the show's famous anti-drugs storyline, its most remarkable feature was the number of grisly ways in which your character could die.

The show had moved on from the drug years by the time the game was released, which was why you played as the unlovable character Gonch, rather than that iconic heroin-gobbling goblin Zammo.
MINDER
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Evidently, with the exception of Coronation street, all British drama prior to 1989 (when Byker Grove came out) featured loveable Cockneys. 

Minder was a show that I never watched, but was always somehow tangentially aware of. Whether they'd seen it or not, everyone knew more or less what it was about, was familiar with the theme tune, and knew the catchphrases: "'Er indoors'", "The world is my lobster", and "Luvverly jubbly, Rodneyplonker, I've just fallen through the bar".

The game had you assuming role of conman Arthur Daley, where the aim was to make as much money as possible selling dodgy goods, without being caught by Sergeant Chisholme. Tasks could be assigned to your minder, Terry, who - if you were really lucky - might have sung you a snippet of the theme tune.
DALLAS QUEST
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In this adventure game based upon the popular 80s soap, you played a private detective hired by JR Ewing's wife Sue Ellen, tasked with finding the map to a lucrative oil field. If you could find the map, Sue Ellen would finally be able to achieve financial independence from her husband.

​Unlike all the other games on this list, Dallas Quest was created with the assistance of the show's makers - and was based upon a script written by two of its writers. Hence having a plot that could've come straight from the series, sort of.

Unfortunately, there was no Easter egg whereby you get to the end and find out it was all a dream you had while Bobby Ewing was pooing in the shower.
BULLSEYE
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A mix of darts simulation and trivia game, Bullseye was a reasonable representation of the famously bleak Sunday night game show. Sadly, for most players it would've been associated with that heavy feeling you got knowing you had school in the morning. 
THE THOMPSON TWINS ADVENTURE
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Best known for a brief run of hits between 1983 and 1984, of all the musical acts to be deserving of a video game, The Thompson Twins might have been the least deserving.

A graphic adventure given away on a flexidisc by Computer & Video Games magazine, The Thompson Twins Adventure was based upon the musical trio's 1984 hit Doctor! Doctor! For some reason, the group had become stranded on a desert island, and were tasked with finding the ingredients of a magic potion. 

Just like the song, then.

I saw you there, just standing there
And I thought I was only dreaming yeah
I kissed you then, then once again
You said you would come and dance with me
Dance with me across the sea
And we could feel the motion of a thousand dreams 

Oh, Doctor, doctor, can't you see I'm burning, burning
Oh, Doctor, doctor, is this love I'm feeling? 

Ships at night give such delight
We all leave before the morning light
Please don't go no please don't go
Cause I don't want to stay here on my own
HOW TO BE A COMPLETE BASTARD
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Though there had already been a game inspired by the classic BBC2 comedy series The Young Ones - a show that every British teenager loved, because they knew their parents would disapprove of its references to losing your virginity, unwanted erections, and diarrhoea - How To Be A Complete Bastard was the next best thing.

Based upon Adrian Edmondson's cheap and cheerful cash-in book of the same name, the game required you to crash a yuppie party, and convince the guests that you were - yes - a bastard. Cutting off someone's hair, setting fire to the furniture, and stabbing a guest with a pen were all socially acceptable forms of bastardy, while slicing them to death with a razor blade would get you arrested. You could also fill your fartometer by eating curry. 

It caused something of a minor controversy when it was later released as a cover tape on Amstrad Action and Your Sinclair.
SPITTING IMAGE
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It's difficult to downplay how huge Spitting Image was in the 80s. It had that unique thing of being well written and funny in its own right, while also being interesting on a technical/artistic level due to its famous rubber puppets; something which alleged spiritual successors like 2DTV failed to get.

The tie-in game took the form of a beat 'em up featuring six world leaders; Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II, Ayatollah Khomeini, and South Africa's PW Botha. Each had a special move - Khomeini could whip his opponents with his beard of course - while one level took place entirely in the dark at one of Prince Philip's famous "mud-wrestling parties".

Satire, kids. Satire.
FROM THE ARCHIVE:
​GRANGE HILL: THE MOST DEPRESSING GAME EVER
​EVERYTHING I KNEW ABOUT GRAPHIC DESIGN I LEARNED FROM ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME
5 FORGOTTEN VIDEO GAME MAGS
23 Comments
Kelvin Green link
9/8/2017 10:20:50 am

I'm sort of surprised that these aren't all published by Ocean.

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Topscore
9/8/2017 11:09:35 am

I presume Clumsy Colin's Action Biker (with KP Skips) isn't on the list cos it actually wasn't too bad?

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Dan Whitehead
9/8/2017 11:22:38 am

Action Biker was AWFUL! Terrible controls, and the gameplay basically consisted of ricocheting around a crap maze, trying to guess which handful of the hundreds of houses contained the items you were looking for. And it had bog all to do with claggy prawn cocktail snacks.

The Minder game was genuinely great though - a weird choice for a game, definitely, but it was a solid and often surreal management game that managed to adapt the show's cheeky tone if not the actual characters. Auf Wiedersehn Pet - now THERE'S a game that should never have existed.

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RG
9/8/2017 11:25:03 am

I got How To Be A Complete Bastard as a cover tape on Amstrad Action. All I remember of it is that you find a computer in a cupboard - if you choose reset it it, it reset your computer back to the desktop. Really annoying when it takes 5 minutes to load a game!

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Jopijedd
9/8/2017 11:49:36 am

As an impressionable teenager (or thereabours) at the time, i was highly amused by the gushing and unreserved apologies in AA the next month as they accepted they had misjudged it and were now responsible for hordes of six and seven year olds wanting to know what a "bastard" was. How society changes. I heard Mr Tumble calling a disabled child a stupid bastard earlier on. Or did i dream that....?

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RG
9/8/2017 01:57:12 pm

Haha, yeah I remember the apologies. I remember you could kill people and drink "monster get pissed fast lager". I don't think there was an overall aim to the game...

Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
9/8/2017 12:29:07 pm

Wot no Roy of the Rovers? Endlessly wandering the streets of Melchester to the (chip)tune of "A Hard Day's Night" and maybe playing football at some point, maybe.

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Goonerreed
9/8/2017 12:42:29 pm

I quite enjoyed playing the bonkers, surreal effort that was Frankie Goes to Hollywood. If memory serves me, the game had nothing to do with the oft-saucy goings-on in their songs.

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The Fitcher
9/8/2017 02:26:52 pm

That game was somewhat of an artistic masterpiece in it's own way. Not exactly accessible or even "fun", it was certainly not something the programmers knocked together without giving it some serious thought. I wouldn't even say it deserves to be more well known, it's just one of those surprisingly intellectual, atmospheric but bizarre little gems that inhabited a small corner of the home computing market back then.

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FancyPants
9/8/2017 01:32:02 pm

Never watched Minder!

You are dead to me.

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Mr Biffo
9/8/2017 02:26:20 pm

I saw the Orient Express one. Well, a bit of it.

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John
9/8/2017 02:40:33 pm

What was the TV show that got some kids to design a crappy game? They came up with something where you pushed a trolley round a shop...

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David W
9/8/2017 03:09:23 pm

The game was called Super Trolley. It is a stunningly bleak experience of drawn-out drudgery, punctuated by cleaning up after dirty dogs.

The only thing bleaker, in retrospect, is that the TV show responsible was hosted by Sir Jimmy "Top of the Pervs" Savile.

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John
9/8/2017 03:19:44 pm

Oh good grief, yeah it was Jim'll Fix It. We actually had the game as my sister insisted we get it. She also loved Action Biker (the Skips game). And I seem to remember us playing Bullseye. Seems that we were suckers for this tie-in crap!

CaptainWacky
9/8/2017 02:44:11 pm

That Neighbours game sounds unironically awesome though.

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Jol
9/8/2017 03:11:12 pm

The Neighbours screenshot looks like Paperboy on a skateboard, which in theory is fine (with racing in place of smashing windows with newspapers). Presumably it too makes players question what their character has done to warrant such aggression from the locals.

A friend of mine when I was growing up had the Neighbours board game. It was surprisingly good fun; you had to make up story lines using character and plot cards to make your way round the board. Most of the stories seemed to involve characters (including Bouncer) either having affairs or running away to join the Foreign Legion.

Another tie-in - I owned the Viz game on one of those C64 cover tapes that somehow crammed in about 100 games. It was your typically rubbish joystick waggling athletics game. It's pretty much responsible for seven year old me asking my mum what a slag is.

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Darren link
9/8/2017 04:00:57 pm

I spent hours recording and re-recording that poxy Thompson Twins flex-disc onto tape only for it to glitch out when loading it into my Speccy. As you can see, these scars have never healed and I don't think I'll ever recover from it...

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Starbuck
9/8/2017 09:31:44 pm

Oh blimey, I'd forgotten what a hassle the flexidisc transfer was. I was so buoyed up by getting it as a freebie though. What innocence! Didn't get very far in the game - too tough for thickie me - but enjoyed somehow getting access to the character set for use within Speccie BASIC.

Dallas - responsible for one of the most surreal JR-and-soap bubbles C&VG covers that I can remember.

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Hergé
9/8/2017 04:56:31 pm

Did you know that Allanah Currie from the Thompson Twins later changed her name to Miss Pokeno and now makes chairs out of knickers and animals? True story, bro.

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Starbuck
9/8/2017 09:39:52 pm

By the way, thanks for linking back to your original Grange Hill article. The Comments on that one are a thing to behold!

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@DancesWithYaks
9/8/2017 11:31:12 pm

Not needed? Okay. But Minder was not terrible. It pushed the boundaries of what 16 bit machines could do and was hugely influential, like most Don Priestly games. And you got to go up to people in pubs and ask, 'Want Some Gludge?'



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SIR JAMES BOWEN link
15/8/2017 07:06:07 pm

I THINK YOU'LL FIND THE GAME 'BULLSEYE', INCLUDED WITH THE ZX ZPECTRUM 'MAGNUM LIGHT PHASER' (A FEAT OF OUTSTANDING TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT IN ITS OWN RIGHT), WAS ACTUALLY A RUDDY MARVELOUS GAME AND WERE IT GIVEN A SUITABLE RE-RELEASE IN TODAY'S MARKET, WOULD NO DOUBT BE CORRECTLY RE-EVALUATED AS THE ESSENTIAL AFTER DINNER FAMILY ACTIVITY IT TRULY IS.

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Nikolay Yeriomin link
21/8/2017 10:29:03 pm

Wow. Some of these games look like "what if" scenarios. And yet, they are real.

"Alf has nothing" seems as existential as Vinnie Vole's problem. It is actually such a deep combination of three words which works on many levels. Alf is an alien, whose planet blown up, he is one of the fewer survivors stranded on a distant planet with no real hope. He has nothing really important to him spiritually.

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