Christian Urquhart
Hunchback, Decathlon, Robot Messiah
Author of Hunchback and co-author of Daley Thompson's Decathlon — two of Ocean's defining early hits — who then went to a tiny Brighton label to make a 152-screen arcade adventure.
An advertisement for Robot Messiah states his credits in one line:
“ROBOT MESSIAH” written by Christian Urquhart and Mike Smith. Christian Urquhart is also the author of “Hunchback” & co-author of “Daley Thompson’s Decathlon”.
Those two earlier games are among the most commercially important British titles of the early eighties — an arcade conversion and a licence that between them defined what Ocean was.
Fast facts
- Credited in publishers’ advertising, not in review boxes — author of Hunchback; co-author of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon.
- Then: Robot Messiah with Mike Smith, for Alphabatim of Brighton — “152 screens and 3 levels”.
Two games that taught the industry two lessons
Hunchback is a single-screen arcade conversion, and it did what conversions were for: it took something people had already paid to play in an arcade and put it in the house. Straightforward, and enormously effective.
Daley Thompson’s Decathlon did something with longer consequences. It is the joystick-waggler — a game whose central mechanic is physically destroying your input device as fast as you can — and it fused two ideas the British industry then used for a decade: a real person’s name on the box, and a competitive score that made the game a thing you did in a room with friends.
Between them those are two of the three commercial engines of British 8-bit software. The third, the film licence, Ocean got to shortly afterwards.
Leaving the big one for the small one
The interesting turn is what came next. Having written hits for the biggest publisher in the country, Urquhart’s next credited game came out through Alphabatim, of 2 Wellingtons Court, Varndean Park, Brighton — an address in an advert, offering the game direct by post.
That move looks strange now and was ordinary then. A programmer with two hits had a reputation, and a reputation was portable in a market where the publisher supplied money and boxes and the programmer supplied the game. Going somewhere small meant worse distribution and better terms, and Robot Messiah’s advert reads accordingly — it sells the programmer’s track record because that is the strongest asset the small label has.
The trade did not always come off. Hunchback is remembered; Robot Messiah, with its 152 screens and its giant bears and evil gnomes, is not.
Why he matters
Urquhart was the early Ocean hit-maker, and his run shows how quickly the industry’s foundational games were made — Hunchback and Decathlon are 1983 and 1984, by a programmer who was then free to go elsewhere.
He is also another case where the only surviving statement of a person’s work is an advertisement. As with Steve Crow, the best line about him was written to sell something, which is a reason to record the claim and its source together.