Gargoyle Games
Two men in Birmingham, making dense games slowly
Roy Carter and Greg Follis built a small Midlands house on literate, unhurried Spectrum adventures — Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, Marsport — scoring 92, 97 and 95 in CRASH. Then, in 1986, they diagnosed their own commercial problem and launched a second label, Faster Than Light, to make the opposite kind of game. Its first release won Amtix's Best Shoot 'Em Up.
Gargoyle Games were Roy Carter and Greg Follis, working out of Birmingham — and, on the period evidence, a third man. Amstrad Action described the Dudley operation as a triumvirate in December 1985, and Amtix! named all three the following month: Follis, Carter and Ted Heathcote. The pair is how the company is remembered, and how CRASH’s review boxes credited it from 1984 onwards; the trio is what two Amstrad magazines saw.
CRASH introduced them in May 1984 as a new company whose first game, Ad Astra, was a £5.95 space combat game written in machine code — and called it “quite a debut”.
What followed was a run of arcade adventures with a common temperament: large, slow, literate, and built around a rotoscoped walking animation that gave their characters a distinctive gait. They reviewed at the top of the market and sold to a narrower audience than the scores deserved — and in 1986 they did something about it.
Fast facts
- Founders: Roy Carter and Greg Follis, credited together in CRASH review boxes from 1984 onwards.
- Third name in the period press: Ted Heathcote, named alongside Follis and Carter by Amstrad Action and Amtix! in 1985–86.
- Base: Birmingham.
- First game: Ad Astra (1984), £5.95, 48K, machine code — 80% (CRASH issue 4).
- Second label: Faster Than Light (FTL), launched 1986.
- Typical price: £9.95 — full price, not budget.
Confirmed CRASH scores, from the issue 48 index:
| Game | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Dun Darach | 97% | 18 |
| Marsport | 95% | 22 |
| Sweevo’s World | 95% | 25 |
| Tir Na Nog | 92% | 11 |
| Heavy on the Magick | 9/10 — Adventure Trail scale, not a percentage | 29 |
| Ad Astra | 80% | 4 |
| Lightforce (as FTL) | 91% | 34 |
CRASH rated main-review games as percentages and adventures out of ten in its Adventure Trail column. The two scales are not comparable, and 9/10 is not 90%.
The catalogue
Tir Na Nog (1984) established the house style: an Irish-mythological landscape explored by a large, smoothly animated Cuchulainn, with an inventory system that expected forward planning across some 150 objects. CRASH’s review credits Follis and Carter jointly and dwells on the strategic thinking the object limit forces. It took 92%.
Dun Darach (1985) refined it into a city, and took 97% — the highest score attached to any company in this Vault’s working set. Marsport (1985) moved the same engine to science fiction at 95% and, by CRASH’s account, beat Hewson’s Dragontorc in that year’s reader voting. Sweevo’s World (1985) took 95% for a comic isometric game unlike anything else they made. Heavy on the Magick (1986) gave the formula a sorcerer, Axil, and demons who bargain rather than attack.
Where they charted
Gargoyle’s games did well, and did well in a particular place. Heavy on the Magick held #1 in CRASH’s Adventure chart three separate times while sitting at #16 in the general Hotline chart. Dun Darach peaked at #5 in the general chart in 1985 and was still in the Adventure Top 30 in early 1987.
That is the signature of a house with a devoted audience rather than a broad one. The reviews were not the constraint — Heavy on the Magick took 5/5 from Sinclair User and Your Computer and 9/10 from CRASH and Your Sinclair — the shelf was.
CRASH thought them interesting enough to profile the crew in its 1985/6 Christmas Special, which is not something that happened to every two-person company.
Faster Than Light
In the autumn of 1986 Follis and Carter launched a second label, and the reasoning is legible from the outside: they made the other kind of game.
CRASH, reviewing its first release in November 1986:
Lightforce is also the first game from the Faster Than Light label. This is an off-shoot of GARGOYLE GAMES, the people responsible for the acclaimed scrolling graphic adventure quests Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach and Heavy on the Magick. The new label allows programmers Greg Follis and Roy Carter [to work in a different form].
Lightforce is a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up — no inventory, no mythology, no planning, nothing to read. CRASH’s reviewers were unguarded about it: “The graphics are THE BEST that I have seen on a Spectrum shoot ’em up”, and, from another, “usually any game I wait for with such anticipation is bound to disappoint me, but this game really is the exception to the rule”. It took 91%.
Then Amtix’s readers voted it Best Shoot ’Em Up of 1986, with 24% of the vote — ahead of Mirrorsoft’s Strike Force Harrier and Ocean’s Top Gun, and, in another category, pipping Elite’s Ikari Warriors.
Shockway Rider followed on the same label.
This is the part of the Gargoyle story usually left out, and it is the part that shows the two of them understood their own position. A studio celebrated for slow, dense, literate games — and charting in the Adventure Top 30 rather than the shelf everyone walks past — did not keep making the same thing and hoping. It opened a second front, under a different name, and won the arcade category at the first attempt.
See also
- Heavy on the Magick
- Dun Darach
- Durell Software — the other small house that reviewed far above its fame.
- Arcade adventure
- CRASH