Code Like It's 198x

Head Over Heels

Two spies, one engine, and a 97% from CRASH

Classic GamesSource-checked

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's follow-up to Batman, published by Ocean in spring 1987, gave the player two heroes with different abilities who could split up or travel one on top of the other. CRASH gave it 97% and its readers voted it the best arcade adventure of 1987. It reached the Atari ST and Amiga in 1991, was remade for modern computers in 2003, and got a sequel in 2026.

When Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond wrote Batman, they meant Robin to be in it, and dropped him because they could not see how one player would control two heroes at once. Their next game made that problem the point. In Head Over Heels the player guides two small spies from the planet Freedom, each able to do what the other cannot, through more than 300 rooms of the Blacktooth Empire. For much of the game they are apart; once they meet, one can ride on the other’s shoulders. CRASH gave it 97%, and a reviewer’s first words were “Wow! this is the ultimate game!”

Fast facts

Head and Heels

The two heroes come from Freedom, a planet where, in CRASH’s March 1987 preview, “members of one race” live “on the shoulders of a member of the opposite race”. Head is descended from flying reptiles. He can jump twice his own height and steer himself in mid-air, and once he finds a hooter he can fire doughnuts, which stun anything they hit. Heels has “legs like pistons”, in CRASH’s words: he runs fast but can only jump his own height. He carries the bag, and ZZAP!64 pointed out that this makes him “the only one who can pick up and carry the items necessary for solving a number of puzzles”. Your Sinclair later summed them up: “Head can fly but is slow, Heels can’t but shifts like a sprinter”.

Joined together, Head sits on Heels “like a lady’s Sunday bonnet”, as CRASH put it, and the pair can run fast, jump high and carry things at once. A swap key moves control from one to the other, or separates them when they are joined. Some rooms can only be solved by the combined creature and some only by one of them alone. The sleeping Hush Puppy dogs that make bridges vanish whenever Head comes into the room. Stuffed white bunnies give extra lives, speed, higher jumps or a spell of invulnerability, and ZZAP! warned that a speed bunny is wasted on Head and a jump bunny on Heels.

Ritman later recalled that he put off writing the code that joined them for months: “It was a lot easier than I thought and I got it sorted in a few hours, which was a hell of a relief.”

Escaping Blacktooth

The game begins with the spies captured and locked in separate cells in the Emperor’s castle on Blacktooth. The first task is to get out and reunite. Beyond the castle lie a market and Moonbase Headquarters, and from there the player can either escape home to Freedom or go on to the four enslaved worlds: Egyptus, whose capital the Emperor rebuilt with pyramid tombs after hearing of a primitive planet that buried its dead in them; Penitentiary, a prison planet; Safari, a jungle of traps; and Book World, a planet-sized library of cowboy novels. The aim is to recover the stolen crowns and bring down the Emperor. CRASH noted that beginners could aim simply to escape the castle, while “real experts” could try to finish the whole mission.

The dangers are Drummond’s, and they are odd. CRASH listed “poisonous Marmite jars” and electrified floors, and ZZAP! described robots disguised as elephants, chimpanzees, fruit machines and “even Prince Charles”. Teleports link rooms and worlds, some of them in one direction only. In place of Batman’s save stones, the game has Reincarnation Fish: eat one and, after losing all the lives, the game can restart from that point. The fish must be alive and wriggling, since “dead fish are poisonous”.

Making it

Drummond told CRASH’s Lee Paddon in early 1987 that he never rubbed anything out on paper, but on the Spectrum spent hours placing a pixel and then removing it. His characters keep strict proportions of one-third legs, one-third body and one-third head. For Head Over Heels, CRASH reported, the two heroes shared 13 frames of animation, there were 130 different objects, and the graphics took up 17K. The same article reported that the advance royalties from Ocean alone would bring Drummond more than £14,000, “not bad for someone who managed to fail his art CSE”.

The game was nearly called something else. Sinclair User’s review mentioned that it was “previously titled Foot & Mouth”, and Your Sinclair was still remarking in 1993 that it “only narrowly avoided being called Foot and Mouth”. Ritman recalled that it was meant for Christmas 1986 but missed it, and that Ocean did not mind: “It was released just before the Easter period and sold very well.”

What the magazines said

CRASH reviewed the Spectrum version in April 1987 and gave it 97%: presentation 90%, graphics 97%, playability 96%, addictive qualities 95% and value for money 91%. One reviewer called it “the cutest arcade adventure yet” and another wrote that it proved “there is still something left in the forced perspective 3D world”. The 128K version added a tune that played throughout, which one reviewer thought “tends to get on your nerves after a couple of hours”, though the sound could be turned down or off. Sinclair User called it “quite brilliant” and praised how precisely the jumps could be judged, “with far more precision than in previous games of this ilk”. Your Sinclair made it a Megagame in June 1987.

Not every reader was convinced: a letter to CRASH in May 1987 complained that it was “almost a complete replica of Batman”, as the isometric projection entry records.

Amstrad Action made the CPC version its Mastergame in May 1987, with 96% for graphics, 95% for “grab factor” and 96% for staying power, and wrote that “Head Over Heels is set to become a classic”. ZZAP!64 gave the Commodore 64 version a Gold Medal in August 1987. Ocean’s advertisements that autumn offered it for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad on cassette and disk, and for MSX on cassette.

Awards and reputation

CRASH‘s readers voted Head Over Heels the best arcade adventure of 1987 with 26% of the vote. It came second as best game, with 16% behind Incentive’s Driller, second for best graphics and third as most imaginative game. CRASH added that Bernie Drummond “must still be regarded as the Number One Spectrum artist”. Your Sinclair later recalled that in its own readers’ awards for 1987 “everybody agreed that Head Over Heels was absolutely the bee’s knees”. By 1993 Your Sinclair described it as “fiercely defended as one of the three best ever Speccy games”.

Budget, 16-bit and later versions

At the end of 1987 Ocean put the game on The Magnificent 7, a compilation with The Great Escape, Wizball and others. In 1990 Ocean’s budget label The Hit Squad re-released it on the Spectrum at £2.99, and CRASH scored the re-release 89%, calling it “one of the classic Spectrum games of all time”.

The Atari ST and Amiga versions took longer. Ritman recalled that Colin Porch at Ocean handled the conversions for the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga, and that for the C64 Porch “did a line-for-line conversion of my Z80 code”, checked over the phone instruction by instruction. The 16-bit versions did not appear until The Hit Squad released them in 1991. The One said it “hasn’t lost any of its appeal despite the delay in reaching 16-bit”. Amiga Power’s Stuart Campbell admitted that the graphics “haven’t changed visibly from the original 8-bit versions” and told readers who doubted that old games were better: “play Head Over Heels and eat your words.”

After the 8-bit era

In September 2003 the remake group Retrospec released a free remake for Windows, Mac OS, BeOS and Linux, programmed by Tomaz Kac with new graphics by Graham Goring. It follows the Spectrum game and adds a save option. In August 2019 it went on sale on Steam, where it is now listed with Atari as publisher.

Colin Porch began a sequel after finishing the 16-bit conversions in 1989 and worked on it, on and off, for more than 30 years. Thalamus Digital published it as Return to Blacktooth: A Head Over Heels Adventure for the Amiga and Atari ST on 4 May 2026.

The original source code has not been published. Programmers have reconstructed it instead: Simon Frankau’s reverse-engineered disassembly of the Spectrum version reassembles to the original memory image.

Sources

  • Wikipedia, “Head over Heels (video game)” (web, secondary): the Sinclair User 5/5 and Your Sinclair 9/10 scores, which are not legible in the scans of the issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_over_Heels_(video_game)
  • CRASH, issue 38, March 1987, pp. 116–118: Lee Paddon’s profile of Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond, and the Head Over Heels preview (the planet of paired species, 300 rooms, 13 frames of animation, 130 objects, 17K of graphics, Guy Stevens’s 128K music, the £14,000 advance, release by Easter).
  • CRASH, issue 39, April 1987, pp. 20–21: review, 97% (the characters, the worlds, Marmite jars, Reincarnation Fish, the 128K version).
  • CRASH, issue 40, May 1987: readers’ letters on Head Over Heels.
  • Sinclair User, issue 62, May 1987: review (“previously titled Foot & Mouth”, “quite brilliant”).
  • Your Sinclair, issue 17, May 1987: announcement of the review; issue 18, June 1987: Megagame (as recalled in Your Sinclair, June 1992).
  • Amstrad Action, issue 20, May 1987, pp. 43 and 46–47: review, Mastergame.
  • ZZAP!64, issue 28, August 1987, pp. 14–15: review, Gold Medal (the bag, the bunnies, the robots, the five worlds).
  • Ocean advertisement, ZZAP!64, issue 29, September 1987, and Computer & Video Games, issue 70, August 1987: formats.
  • CRASH, issue 48, January 1988: The Magnificent 7 compilation.
  • CRASH, issue 51, April 1988, pp. 56–57: the 1987 CRASH Readers’ Awards.
  • Your Sinclair, April 1991: look back at April 1988 and the readers’ awards for 1987.
  • CRASH, issue 79, August 1990: Nick Roberts on The Hit Squad re-release, 89%.
  • Amiga Power, issue 1, May 1991: news of the Amiga version; issue 5, September 1991: review by Stuart Campbell.
  • The One, October 1991, p. 17: review summary of the 16-bit version; November 1991: listed as a Hit Squad release.
  • Your Sinclair, June 1993, p. 33: “Every 3D game ever” (the characters, “Foot and Mouth”, “one of the three best ever Speccy games”).
  • Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), p. 211: Jon Ritman’s recollections of writing the game, the missed Christmas and Colin Porch’s conversions. Recollections, told decades later.
  • The King of Grabs, “Head Over Heels, PC”, 2018 (web, secondary): the Retrospec remake, its credits and platforms, and its move to Steam. https://thekingofgrabs.com/2018/04/07/head-over-heels-pc/
  • Steam store page for Head Over Heels (web, secondary): developer Retrospec, released August 2019. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134050/
  • Damien McFerran, “For over 35 years, a sequel to Head Over Heels has been developed by one man in secret”, Time Extension, May 2026 (web, secondary): Colin Porch and Return to Blacktooth. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/04/for-over-35-years-a-sequel-to-head-over-heels-has-been-developed-by-one-man-in-secret-and-its-coming-to-amiga-and-st-next-month
  • Simon Frankau, head-over-heels (web, secondary): reverse-engineered disassembly of the Spectrum version. https://github.com/simon-frankau/head-over-heels

See also

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