In the summer of 1984 a Spectrum game about a mole stealing coal made the national television news. Wanted: Monty Mole, written by Peter Harrap for Gremlin Graphics of Sheffield, had a caricature of the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in it, in the middle of the miners’ strike, and it went to number one. A year later Harrap brought the mole back. In Monty on the Run Monty has been jailed for the coal and has broken out, and the player has to get him to a boat bound for France before the law catches up.
CRASH gave the Spectrum game 94%. On the Commodore 64 it became something else as well: the game with the Rob Hubbard tune.
From coal thief to fugitive
Monty on the Run was the third Monty game, but Harrap had not written the second. Monty is Innocent, reviewed in CRASH in March 1985, was by another Gremlin programmer, Chris Kerry, and was not a platform game at all: the player guided Monty’s friend Sam Stoat around a prison drawn in false 3D, collecting keys to free him. CRASH gave it 78%. When the magazine looked back in 1987, it said Gremlin had put “Monty’s creator, Peter Harrap, back into the hot seat” after “a couple of disappointing Monty games”.
In July 1985 CRASH visited Gremlin’s offices, which its reporter called “the prison”. Four in-house programmers were writing for the Spectrum, Harrap among them, and a separate company, Micro Projects, wrote Gremlin’s Commodore games and conversions. Gremlin’s Ian Stewart was already planning Monty on the Run as the big pre-Christmas release for October. “We see it as a great improvement on Wanted: Monty Mole,” he said, and he blamed its meanness on “Pete Harrap’s sheer bloody-mindedness. If people thought the first Monty was bloody-minded, they’d better look at the next one!”
Playing it
Monty starts outside a safe house and works his way through tunnels, sewers and platforms towards the ship, collecting sovereigns and objects on the way. The first game’s crushers are back, and CRASH warned that “some of them have an ‘appalling’ sense of timing”. New hazards include lifts with doubtful cables and teleporters that fire beams of changing colours: only one colour lets Monty walk through without being sent somewhere else, and some change colour after use. Monty has been in the prison gym, so he now somersaults instead of jumping, which looked good but made it harder to squeeze between the enemies. ZZAP!64 listed some of those enemies: “floating mugs, wasps, Things on some Springs, hands, lobbies, amoeboids, jellyites”.
Before play starts comes the freedom kit. The player picks five items from a list (21 on the Spectrum, according to CRASH) to help Monty escape, and a wrong choice is not obvious straight away. As ZZAP! put it, the right objects “HAVE to be correct otherwise you won’t be able to complete certain screens and therefore the game”. Some of the objects found in the game are useless and some are deadly, and the only way to find out is to try them.
The reviews
CRASH reviewed the Spectrum version in September 1985 from a finished copy, a month before release, and made it a CRASH Smash with 94% overall and 95% for addictive qualities. “What a brilliant game,” one reviewer wrote. “I have never played Monty Mole and I am beginning to realise what I missed.” Another called it “one of the very best of multi-screen platform games, with loads of screens, many different situations, gags and double crosses”. Sinclair User thought the animation “a great improvement on the early Monty games” and predicted “a mole lot more of Monty games”.
The Commodore 64 conversion, by Micro Projects, scored 80% overall in ZZAP!64 in October 1985. Its reviewers found it hard (“it took me eons to get on to some of the meaty screens”) and funny (“What I like most of all about Monty is the humourously mean tricks played on the player constantly”). They spent most of their space on the music.
The music
The C64 version’s tune does not play while the game loads. It starts once the program has loaded and plays during the game. “The first thing that really impressed me about this game was the incredible piece of music that bursts forth once the program has loaded,” one ZZAP! reviewer wrote. “Full of ‘clapping’, violins, some nifty little twiddly bits and even a brilliant guitar solo, it’s certainly the best I’ve heard on the 64 yet … It’s almost worth buying for the music alone!” Another heard it too: “During the action an ace tune pounds away, complete with Eric Clapton guitar solos and violin bits.” The high-score table had its own tune.
In a box alongside the review, Julian Rignall talked to its composer, Rob Hubbard, then thirty. Hubbard had written his own music program for the C64 because he found the commercial ones “very limited with the sounds you can create”. He sketched tunes on a Casio keyboard, then worked them out on the computer. Some of the Monty sounds he had found by accident; the drums, which imitate a Simmons electronic drum kit, took two weeks. He already felt he was “getting near to the limits of the 64 sound chip”, the SID, and its three channels. According to Wikipedia, the main theme was inspired by “Devil’s Galop”, the theme tune of the radio serial Dick Barton.
When ZZAP!’s readers voted for the best music of 1985, Hubbard’s Monty tune won with 27% of the vote, well ahead of Ocean’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood and his own Thing on a Spring, joint second on 8%.
Other versions
An Amstrad CPC version was reviewed in Amstrad Action in June 1986, at £8.95 on cassette, and a Commodore 16 version was reviewed in the C16 & Plus/4 Handbook in September 1986. According to Wikipedia, a Famicom Disk System version followed in Japan in 1987.
Monty’s series
- Wanted: Monty Mole (1984), by Peter Harrap: Monty steals coal during the miners’ strike.
- Monty is Innocent (1985), by Chris Kerry: Sam Stoat rescues Monty from prison.
- Monty on the Run (1985), by Peter Harrap: the escape.
- Auf Wiedersehen Monty (1987): Monty on the loose in Europe. CRASH gave it 85% in May 1987.
Sources
- CRASH issue 10, November 1984: news of Wanted: Monty Mole reaching number one and appearing on the national news on 25 July 1984 because of its Scargill caricature; Gremlin advertisement crediting Peter Harrap.
- CRASH issue 14, March 1985: Monty is Innocent review (Chris Kerry; 74% value for money, 78% overall).
- CRASH issue 18, July 1985, pp. 29–30: visit to Gremlin Graphics; Ian Stewart on Monty on the Run; the in-house programmers and Micro Projects.
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, pp. 12–13: Spectrum review, “Author: Peter Harrap”, 94%.
- Sinclair User issue 43, October 1985: Spectrum review.
- ZZAP!64 issue 6, October 1985, pp. 16–17: C64 review (“Gremlin Graphics/Micro Projects”), 80% overall, and “Turn the Music Up”, Julian Rignall’s piece on Rob Hubbard; p. 106, competition for the game’s launch.
- ZZAP!64 issue 12, April 1986: readers’ awards for 1985, best music.
- Amstrad Action issue 9, June 1986: Amstrad CPC review.
- C16 & Plus/4 Handbook issue 5, September 1986: Commodore 16 review.
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987: Auf Wiedersehen Monty review (85%).
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987, p. 26: “The CRASH History”, on Harrap’s return and the somersaulting mole.
- Wikipedia, “Monty on the Run” (web, secondary): “Devil’s Galop” as the inspiration for the C64 theme; the Famicom Disk System version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_on_the_Run