Renegade
Four months at number two
Mike Lamb's conversion of Technos' beat-em-up sat at #2 for four consecutive months without ever reaching #1 — and brought street fighting to the British charts.
Technos’ arcade brawler, converted to the Spectrum by Mike Lamb and published under the Imagine label — one of the four games a CRASH reader listed when ranking him first among Ocean and Imagine’s programmers.
Fast facts
- CRASH: 89%, issue 44 — confirmed against the magazine’s own index (issue 44, p34) and 3 later re-citations in CRASH itself.
- Programmer: Mike Lamb. Publisher: Imagine (Ocean).
- Sequel: Target Renegade, also Lamb’s.
- Shares its name with Renegade, the Amiga publisher founded by Sensible Software’s people. No connection.
Chart performance
CRASH Hotline Top 20, 6 appearances:
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Feb 1988 | #5 |
| Mar 1988 | #2 |
| Apr 1988 | #2 |
| May 1988 | #2 |
| Sep 1988 | #4 |
| Oct 1988 | #4 |
⭐ Three consecutive months at #2, then two at #4. A remarkably level run — no spike, no collapse. Compare Cobra’s slide (3, 4, 10, 7, 14) and Exolon’s bouncing (5, 1, 3, 1, 3, 6).
Renegade’s flatness is what a game looks like when it has neither a launch spike to burn off nor a hit single to bounce back on: steady demand, met steadily, for most of a year.
What arrived with it
Renegade is where the beat-em-up reaches the British home charts in force — not a martial-arts tournament like International Karate, but street fighting, on a scrolling city street, against a gang.
The conversion problem is the one Andrew Deakin’s Operation Wolf entry describes: arcade hardware throwing many large animated sprites at once, reproduced on a machine with no sprites at all and one colour pair per character cell. Lamb’s answer was the one Ocean’s Spectrum team generally took — keep the pace, accept the palette, and make sure the thing feels right under the hands.