Exolon
Cecco's best, twice at number one
Raffaele Cecco's 1987 Hewson shooter reached #1 twice in four months — and CRASH sold it on the programmer's name, not the game's.
Raffaele Cecco’s run-and-gun for Hewson, and one of the games that made the Spectrum look like better hardware than it was.
Fast facts
- CRASH: 90%, issue 43 — confirmed against the magazine’s own index (issue 43, p14), a later re-citation in CRASH itself and the rating panel in issue 43 (August 1987), p15.
- Author: Raffaele Cecco. Publisher: Hewson Consultants.
- CRASH billed it on the author: “Exolon author, Raffaele Cecco, produces his best game ever!”
- Followed by: Cybernoid — The Fighting Machine, also Cecco’s, also Hewson’s.
Chart performance
CRASH Hotline Top 20, 6 appearances:
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Dec 1987 | #5 |
| Feb 1988 | #1 |
| Mar 1988 | #3 |
| Apr 1988 | #1 |
| May 1988 | #3 |
| Jul 1988 | #6 |
⭐ Two separate spells at number one. Not a peak and a decline — a game that goes to the top, drops, and returns. Nothing in this library’s chart data does that except Exolon.
The likely mechanism is the one CRASH’s own billing points at. When a magazine advertises a game as “the Exolon author’s best ever”, the buying signal is a person, and that signal fires again every time the next issue mentions him. A game sold on its licence decays with the licence; a game sold on its programmer gets a second push when the programmer is next in the news.
Cecco at Hewson
Exolon and Cybernoid are the pair people cite, and the CRASH line that connects them — “Exolon author: Hewson’s Cybernoid” — is the magazine using one game to sell the next through the man who wrote both.
Hewson is the publisher this worked for. Its house identity was technically excellent action games by named programmers — Cecco, Steve Turner, Andrew Braybrook — at a moment when most publishers were selling licences instead.