Heavy on the Magick
Number one and number sixteen, at once
Gargoyle Games' 1986 adventure held #1 in the Adventure chart three separate times while sitting at #16 in the general one — the sharpest genre split in this library's data.
Gargoyle Games’ adventure, in which you play the sorcerer Axil and negotiate with demons who have opinions about you — and the clearest single illustration of what a “chart position” leaves out.
Chart performance
CRASH charts, 5 appearances:
| Date | Position | Chart |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 1986 | #1 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Dec 1986 | #1 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Jan 1987 | #16 | Hotline Top 30 |
| Feb 1987 | #1 | Adventure Top 30 |
| Oct 1988 | #7 | Adventure Top 10 |
⭐ Number one three times, and never near the top of the chart that counted everything. In the general Hotline chart the same game sits at #16.
Spellbound shows the identical split — #3 in the Adventure chart, #21 in the general one, in the same month. Two games, two publishers, two price points, one pattern.
How it was received
The reviews do not show the split at all — only the sales chart does.
| Magazine | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Sinclair User | 5/5 | June 1986 |
| Your Computer | 5/5 | July 1986 |
| CRASH | 9/10 | June 1986 |
| Your Sinclair | 9/10 | July 1986 |
CRASH’s review gives Gargoyle, £9.95, and the authors as Carter and Follis. Axil carries Stamina, Luck and Skill in a central status window, with available exits listed beside it. The re-release three years later took 85% from CRASH in May 1989 and 7/10 from Your Sinclair in March — softer, but the game was by then competing against 1989.
That is the point worth holding onto: a game can be reviewed almost perfectly and still sit at #16 on the shelf. Critical reception and commercial reach are different measurements, and Heavy on the Magick has a clear reading of both.
What the split measures
A genre chart ranks a game against the other things its buyers considered. A general chart ranks it against everything on the shelf. Where those two disagree by fifteen places, the game has a devoted audience and a small one.
That was the adventure’s position in 1986–87. It was still the form with the most committed players — the ones writing to Mike Gerrard and Derek Brewster every month, mapping on graph paper, arguing in print — and it was losing the shop shelf to arcade conversions like Enduro Racer.
The 1988 reappearance says the same thing from the other end. A general chart has no memory; an adventure chart still had this game in it two years later, because its audience was not replacing it monthly.
Gargoyle
Gargoyle Games were Roy Carter and Greg Follis, working out of Birmingham. CRASH introduced them in May 1984 as a new company whose first game, Ad Astra, was “quite a debut” at £5.95.
Heavy on the Magick and Dun Darach were both Gargoyle’s, and both hold the pattern — Dun Darach peaks at #5 in the Hotline chart in 1985 and is still in the Adventure Top 30 in early 1987.
A small Midlands house making dense, slow, literate games for the people who wanted them, charting exactly where you would expect and nowhere else.