The Edge
Fairlight, 95 per cent, and a tool it meant to sell
The publisher of Fairlight — Bo Jangeborg's isometric adventure, which CRASH scored 95% in November 1985 and which was built on tools The Edge intended to sell separately. A small Covent Garden label with a taste for the technically ambitious, distributed by EMI's lorries.
The Edge published for about four years and is remembered for one game above all others. CRASH reviewed Fairlight in issue 22, November 1985, and gave it 95% overall — with 97% for graphics, the highest single figure in the panel.
⚠ Fairlight is widely quoted at 96%. The review says 95; the 97 for graphics is the likeliest origin of the error.
Fast facts
- Based: 31 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London. Distributed through EMI Distribution.
- In the press: CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amstrad Action, 1984 to 1988, at £7.95–£9.95 cassette, £12.95 disk.
- Published: Fairlight and Fairlight II, Brian Bloodaxe (86%), Bobby Bearing, Starbike, Psytraxx, Inside Outing, Skimmer.
- Fairlight’s author: Bo Jangeborg, Swedish, working from The Edge’s London office and then from home.
- Its engine: Worldmaker and Grax, which The Edge planned to sell as a utility in its own right.
Fairlight
Fairlight (1985) is an isometric adventure in the family that Ultimate’s Knight Lore had opened the year before, and it took the idea somewhere different: objects with weight and physical behaviour, stackable and pushable, in rooms where a puzzle might be solved by piling one thing on another instead of by finding the right key.
Getting that onto a 48K Spectrum meant an engine that could describe a room as geometry and objects as things with properties, not as pictures. It also meant drawing filled, overlapping, correctly ordered solids fast enough to be playable in an attribute-constrained display — which is a rendering problem, and one that whole later industries went on to solve with hardware.
That it was written by a programmer in Sweden, published in London and reviewed as a British game is worth stating plainly. The 8-bit scene is often narrated as a national story, and it was not one. The machines were the same everywhere, the magazines travelled, and the work crossed borders long before the industry noticed.
The rest of the catalogue
Brian Bloodaxe (£7.95, credited by CRASH to Charles Bystram) is a wilfully strange platform game with a Viking loose in a Britain of national stereotypes; it took 86%. Bobby Bearing is another isometric game, this one about momentum: you steer a ball bearing that keeps going after you stop pushing, which is a physics puzzle before that phrase existed. Inside Outing and Skimmer carried the label into 1987 and 1988.
The pattern is a publisher with a taste for the technically ambitious and the slightly odd, at a scale of a few games a year.
The Edge’s own advertising fills in the unglamorous half. The company sat at 31 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, and told shops that “authorised dealers can order directly from EMI Distribution”. A small London label with a handful of clever games still needed a record company’s lorries to reach Sheffield — the same arrangement, from the other end, that Ariolasoft was built on.
Why it mattered
The Edge belongs to isometric 3D as a British speciality. Between Knight Lore, Fairlight, Bobby Bearing, Head Over Heels and Batman, a particular way of drawing a solid world with no 3D hardware was worked out on the Spectrum and the C64 in the space of about three years, and Fairlight is one of the places it went furthest.
It is also the reminder that a 95% score in 1985 was a technical verdict as much as a critical one. What reviewers were reacting to was a machine doing something it manifestly should not have been able to do.