Gargoyle Games did not look like the rest of the Spectrum industry. Its two programmers, Greg Follis and Roy Carter, were not teenagers: when CRASH visited at the end of 1985 they had worked together in the computer department of a large business for around fifteen years, and both had mortgages. They started writing games in their spare time because, as Follis put it, “it was a method to make money that we could afford.” Their office was on the third floor of a brick-and-concrete block in King Street, Dudley, above an insurance company. Out of it came Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach and Marsport, which CRASH scored 92%, 97% and 95%, and Heavy on the Magick, which its readers voted the best adventure of 1986.
Fast facts
- Founders: Greg Follis and Roy Carter, who wrote the games. Ted Heathcote, a long-standing friend of Follis, sold them and booked the advertising.
- Base: 74 King Street, Dudley, in the West Midlands. CRASH placed the new company in Birmingham in May 1984; Gargoyle’s own adverts gave the Dudley address from late 1984.
- First game: Ad Astra (1984), a 3D space shoot ’em up, £5.95.
- Second label: Faster Than Light (FTL), from autumn 1986.
- Work for others: Scooby Doo (1986) and Thundercats (1987), both published by Elite.
From business software to Ad Astra
The CRASH profile, in its Christmas 1985 issue, told the story in the founders’ own words, with the two of them interrupting each other “like two stand-up comedians”. Follis started as a programmer at a firm called Hewitts, moved into systems analysis because the money was better, and met Carter there. “When we started, we didn’t like each other very much,” Follis said. They found they worked well together, and invented a department, “New Products Research and Development”, to share an office. Before Gargoyle, the firm had sent them on artificial intelligence courses.
Stories of teenage programmers earning fortunes pushed them to try games. Ad Astra took nine months of evenings and weekends. CRASH reviewed it in May 1984: a 48K machine-code game at £5.95 with “very large graphics, all depicted in a very solid three dimensions with perspective”, in which planetoids hurtle out of the screen towards the player’s ship. “It’s quite a debut too,” the reviewer wrote, and the magazine gave it 80%.
The Cuchulainn games
Tir Na Nog began with a routine. “One day after releasing Ad Astra I wrote this routine which showed a character walking in a scrolling background,” Carter recalled. Follis thought it “looked nice”, and they went looking for a story that fitted the walker. They found the Irish hero Cuchulainn. Sinclair User later explained the figure’s realism: Follis and Carter based the frames of animation on sequential pictures of real walking. Gargoyle’s own advert for Tir Na Nog promised “state-of-the-art film animation” and “a true computer movie”.
The large, smoothly animated hero walked through a scrolling landscape, which the player could view from any of four directions by turning the “camera”. CRASH gave Tir Na Nog 92% in December 1984 and noted that “strategical thinking and forward planning” mattered as much as fighting. Dun Darach (1985) put Cuchulainn in a walled city of shops, banks and pickpockets, and took 97%, the highest score CRASH gave any Gargoyle game. Marsport (1985) moved the system to science fiction and took 95%. In CRASH‘s readers’ awards for 1985 it came third in a category won by The Edge’s Fairlight, two votes ahead of Hewson’s Dragontorc.
Follis described what they were aiming for. “We make stories that seem to be the tip of the iceberg, so you always have the impression that there was a lot more going on that you didn’t know about,” he said. “That is what we’re aiming for, a true computer movie.”
Sweevo’s World and Heavy on the Magick
Sweevo’s World (1985) was a deliberate change of pace, a comic isometric game about a clumsy robot. Follis wanted it to be “a bit of fun”: “The industry is far too serious now.” CRASH gave it 95%, and later wrote that it proved Gargoyle “had more in them than complex graphic adventures of the Dun Darach type”.
Heavy on the Magick (1986) combined a large animated sorcerer, Axil, with typed commands. CRASH’s Adventure Trail gave it 9 out of 10 and Sinclair User five stars. CRASH‘s readers voted it to number 1 in their Adventure chart in September 1986, and it held that place for ten of the next twelve months; in the Hotline, which took votes for every kind of game, it peaked at 13. Both charts counted readers’ votes, not sales (see Reading the charts). The same readers voted it the best adventure of 1986.
| Game | CRASH score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Ad Astra | 80% | 4, May 1984 |
| Tir Na Nog | 92% | 11, December 1984 |
| Dun Darach | 97% | 18, July 1985 |
| Marsport | 95% | 22, November 1985 |
| Sweevo’s World | 95% | 25, February 1986 |
| Heavy on the Magick | 9/10 | 29, June 1986 |
| Scooby Doo (for Elite) | 91% | 33, October 1986 |
| Lightforce (FTL) | 91% | 34, November 1986 |
| Shockway Rider (FTL) | 67% | 38, March 1987 |
CRASH scored games in its main review pages as percentages and adventures in its Adventure Trail column out of ten, so 9/10 is not the same as 90%.
“We’ve got to go with the market”
Behind the scores, the founders were frank about the business. Carter reckoned they lost half their potential sales “not through piracy but by not having adequate PR”. Follis explained why they could not simply keep making games like Dun Darach: “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.” They had to release a game every few months to live, and talked of taking on staff or becoming a development house like Denton Designs. Heathcote told Amstrad Action: “We can’t be as big as they are, but we do have to compete.”
Their plans were ambitious. Marsport was announced as the first part of a “Siege of Earth” trilogy, and the second part, Fornax, was to take commands through icons or typed sentences, with characters Gargoyle hoped to make “genuinely intelligent”. Amstrad Action expected it in January 1986. It was never released.
Faster Than Light
In autumn 1986 Gargoyle opened a second label. CRASH reviewed its first game, Lightforce, in November:
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 depart from a game style which they have made their own, and to take on mainstream arcade entertainment.
Lightforce was a vertically scrolling shoot ’em up with large, brightly coloured sprites. “The graphics are THE BEST that I have seen on a Spectrum shoot ’em up, if not in any game,” one reviewer wrote; another, who had waited for it since the PCW Show, said “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% and a Smash. Looking back a year later, CRASH pointed out that this was not new territory: Gargoyle “had started out three years earlier, with the 3-D shoot-’em-up Ad Astra”, and Lightforce’s graphics “strongly resembled” it.
Readers agreed with the reviewers. Amtix!’s readers voted the Amstrad version the best shoot ‘em up of 1986, with 24% of the vote, ahead of Elite’s Ikari Warriors and Electric Dreams’ Tempest. CRASH’s readers put it second in their State of the Art award, behind Starglider and ahead of Heavy on the Magick.
FTL followed it with Shockway Rider (1987), which CRASH gave 67%, and Hydrofool (1987), a sequel to Sweevo’s World set under water.
Work for Elite, and after
Gargoyle also programmed licensed games for Elite. Scooby Doo reached the Spectrum in 1986 after, as CRASH put it, “a long wait and several scrapped versions”, and scored 91%. Sinclair User reported that Thundercats (1987) was designed by Follis and programmed by Carter, and that new staff had joined to draw graphics and help Carter with the programming. Elite’s adverts quoted CRASH’s 91% and Smash.
In 1988 Hewson’s budget label, Rebound, reissued Gargoyle’s three scrolling adventures, and Sinclair User said their animation had “not been bettered to this day”. Public sources say little about Gargoyle or its founders after the late 1980s.
Sources
- CRASH issue 4, May 1984: editorial and news on the new company; Ad Astra review (48K, £5.95, machine code, authors Roy Carter and Greg Follis; “quite a debut”).
- CRASH issue 10, November 1984: Gargoyle advert for Tir Na Nog (“film animation”, “a true computer movie”; 74 King Street, Dudley).
- CRASH issue 11, December 1984: Tir Na Nog review (Greg Follis and Roy Carter, £9.95).
- CRASH issue 22, November 1985: Marsport review (95%).
- Amstrad Action issue 3, December 1985: Gargoyle feature (Fornax, due January 1986; Ted Heathcote’s comments).
- Robin Candy and Roger Kean, “Playing with Grandfather’s Abacus” (contents page: “Going Ga-Gargoyle”), CRASH issue 24, Christmas Special 1985, from p. 88: profile of Follis, Carter and Heathcote (Hewitts; Ad Astra’s nine months; the Tir Na Nog walking routine; the stories; PR and piracy; Daley Thompson’s Decathlon; Sweevo’s World; Fornax; Denton Designs). Reprinted in Amtix! issue 3, January 1986.
- CRASH issue 27, April 1986: CRASH Readers’ Awards for 1985 (Marsport third, two votes ahead of Dragontorc).
- CRASH issue 34, November 1986, pp. 16–17: Lightforce review (FTL, £7.95, Greg Follis and Roy Carter, 91%).
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987: CRASH Readers’ Awards for 1986 (State of the Art).
- Amtix! issue 18, April 1987: The 1986 Amtix! Readers’ Awards (Best Shoot ’em Up, Lightforce, 24%).
- Sinclair User issue 69, December 1987: Thundercats review and programmer credits.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (scores and issues in the table); “The CRASH History” (FTL, Scooby Doo, Lightforce and Ad Astra; Sweevo’s World; Hydrofool); Elite advert for Thundercats (CRASH Smash, 91%).
- Sinclair User issue 73, April 1988: Rebound re-release of the three adventures (the animation based on sequential pictures of walking; the four camera directions).
- CRASH issues 29–47: Hotline and Adventure charts and 1986 Readers’ Awards for Heavy on the Magick, as set out in the Heavy on the Magick entry.