In September 1986 Philip and Andrew Oliver drove to London for the Personal Computer World Show with a handwritten design for a game they had not started. They were living with their parents in Wiltshire and taking a year out instead of going to university. They had noticed that Ghostbusters sold on its name, but they could not afford a licence, so they chose a hero nobody owned: Robin Hood. At a tiny stand they met two brothers their own age, David and Richard Darling, who were starting a budget label called Code Masters. The twins asked what Code Masters would pay for it, and David Darling said £10,000. “Hopefully, the shock didn’t show too much in our expressions!” Philip said later. The game became Super Robin Hood, the twins’ first for Code Masters, and the start of a partnership that produced Dizzy.
Fast facts
- Authors: Philip and Andrew Oliver, on the Amstrad CPC.
- Publisher: Code Masters, £1.99 on cassette.
- Released: late 1986 on the Amstrad CPC; Spectrum and Commodore 64 versions in 1987.
- Spectrum version: converted by Mark Baldock, with a title tune by David Whittaker.
- Reviews: a Rave in Amstrad Action; 69% in AMTIX!; 52% in CRASH.
- Later: on Code Masters’ Quattro Adventure compilation (1990); remade by the twins for the NES; reworked as Robin Hood: Legend Quest (1993).
A month on one Amstrad
The twins’ account of writing it is told in Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean’s The Story of the Oliver Twins. They had promised the game in a month, in time for Christmas, and they had a single Amstrad CPC between them. They worked in shifts of 18 hours a day, seven days a week; while one of them used the computer, the other wrote code on paper. To save time they built a map editor into the game itself. They did not know how big the castle would be, so they fitted in as many rooms as the memory would hold, and each day they loaded the game, placed sprites around the rooms and saved the map data again.
The money changed before the game came out. Instead of £10,000, the Darlings offered a royalty of 13.5p a copy on a first run of 20,000, about £2,700, and the twins signed. The royalties did pass £10,000 in the end. Code Masters had the game converted to the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 and paid the twins 5p for each of those copies too; Philip estimated that Super Robin Hood earned them about £20,000 in all. By April 1987 Computer Gamer was reporting that it had sold more than 11,000 copies, and that the twins were 19, running a company called Complex Computer Software with the help of the government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which paid them £40 a week.
Playing it
Maid Marian is locked in the East Tower of the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle. Robin runs, jumps, ducks and climbs through a castle of flick-screen rooms joined by ladders, lifts and sliding platforms, shooting the Sheriff’s guards with his bow. Spiders, fireballs and crossbow bolts wear down his health, which starts at 99; tablets top it up. Spinning keys start the lifts and platforms that lead to new parts of the castle, and red hearts are scattered through the rooms. Only when Robin has collected all of them can he reach Marian. If his health runs out, “Robin fires an arrow Heavenward and dies”, as CRASH put it; Amstrad Action pointed out that this was “true to the legend”, in which he is buried where the arrow lands.
The Amstrad version talks. Marian calls “Help me, Robin!” or “Save me, Robin!” when a heart is collected, and the book says the voice was the twins’ mother, Jenny. Their friend Jon Paul wrote the music.
What the magazines said
Amstrad Action reviewed it in March 1987 and gave it a Rave. The reviewer admitted that “super” was one of their least favourite adjectives, then called it a super game, with “great animation, some tough problems and excellent speech synthesis”: “tremendous speech and in a budget game too”. The review named the programmers, “Philip and Andrew Oliver”, and welcomed an option that switched off the background scenery. In the same issue’s round-up, Super Robin Hood was one of three budget games that “make the grade”.
Not everyone agreed. AMTIX! found the speech “extremely annoying” and the scenery “just plain garish”, but still called it “a pleasant platform puzzle game that is worth two quid of anyone’s money”, and gave it 69%. Computer Gamer’s reviewer started from the other end: the ladders-and-platforms game “has been done to death”, he wrote, and “Code Masters has been grave robbing again”.
The Spectrum version, converted by Mark Baldock, was reviewed in mid-1987. CRASH split. One reviewer saw “yet another platform game which falls into the deepening void of trashable Spectrum games”; another praised a “superbly presented Code Master game” with a title tune by David Whittaker. It scored 52%. In Sinclair User, Tony Dillon thought it “technically … all well up to Codemasters standard”: “Terrific graphics, good sound FX, smooth animation and well planned screen layout.” But, he added, “It’s so boorrring!”
The Commodore 64 version followed in the summer of 1987. Your Commodore called it “my favourite Code Masters game”, with action that was “fast and furious and so smooth”. By January 1988 Code Masters was advertising it in ACE as a “Top Ten best selling platform game”.
Later lives
In 1990 Code Masters put Super Robin Hood on Quattro Adventure, a £2.99 compilation with Vampire, Ghost Hunters and Dizzy.
The twins came back to it for the NES. They worked on a new version from September 1991 to April 1992, expecting the code they had written for The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy to make it quick (it took longer than they hoped), and Camerica put it on its own Quattro Adventure cartridge alongside Linus Spacehead, Boomerang Kid and Treasure Island Dizzy. Game Informer previewed that cartridge in March 1992, and N-Force reviewed it in August 1993, when it found the Robin Hood game suffered from sprite flicker and slowdown. The twins then had their staff convert the NES game back to the Spectrum, Amstrad, Atari ST and Amiga. They did not want to call it Super Robin Hood 2; it was Amazing Robin Hood during development and came out early in 1993 as Robin Hood: Legend Quest, at £3.99.
Sources
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Oliver Twins (Fusion Retro Books, 2016), pp. 52–58 (the Robin Hood idea, the PCW Show, the £10,000 offer, the month’s work, the map editor, Jon Paul’s music, the royalty deal, the Spectrum and C64 royalties, Jenny Oliver as Marian, Mark Baldock’s Spectrum version), pp. 128–129 (the NES version and Quattro Adventure), pp. 132–133 (Robin Hood: Legend Quest) and p. 170 (profile of the game).
- Computer Gamer issue 25, April 1987, p. 8: news, “Double debut” (the twins at 19, Complex Computer Software, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, sales of more than 11,000).
- Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987: news (Code Masters’ Vampire and Super Robin Hood, £1.99).
- Amstrad Action issue 18, March 1987, p. 39 (Action Test round-up) and p. 54 (review, Rave; the arrow “true to the legend”).
- AMTIX! issue 17, March 1987, p. 96: review (69%).
- Computer Gamer issue 24, March 1987, p. 68: Amstrad review; issue 27, June 1987, p. 62: Spectrum review.
- CRASH issue 41, June 1987, pp. 24–25: Spectrum review (“Author: Mark Baldock”; the David Whittaker title tune). The 52% is in CRASH issue 48, January 1988, index of reviews.
- Sinclair User issue 66, September 1987: Spectrum review by Tony Dillon (“Author: Mark Baldock”).
- Your Commodore, May 1987 (news: the C64 version announced) and September 1987, pp. 27–28 (news and budget round-up).
- ACE issue 4, January 1988: Code Masters advertisement.
- ZZAP!64 issue 67, November 1990, p. 29: Code Masters’ Quattro compilations.
- Game Informer issue 4, March 1992: Camerica’s Quattro Adventure preview.
- N-Force vol. 2 issue 2, August 1993: Quattro Adventure review.
- Amstrad Action issue 85, October 1992: Robin Hood: Legend Quest (Code Masters, £3.99) in the release schedule; issue 89, February 1993: listed among February’s budget titles.