1 Atari and Apple were starting to enter the home-computer market in the States, but in the UK it was pretty much a straight fight between Commodore and Sinclair. Largely ignored pretenders to the throne included Oric, Dragon and Jupiter. They were right ones for making their products sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings, these computer manufacturers, eh?
2 We could come over all technical now and go on about attribute clashes and scrolling, but our workable knowledge of C64 BASIC begins and ends with the PEEK and POKE commands. To be honest, we don’t really know what they’re for either, but they sound funny.
3 In fact, rumour has it that the C64 was initially developed to serve as a simple reusable arcade cabinet engine–i.e. an upgradeable games machine–and not intended for the home market at all.
4 And in the real world. A ‘plug and play’ joystick-sized version of the C64, with thirty games included, will set you back less than £15 at Amazon. Age 5+. Bah.
Find-the-square military tactics game
Milton Bradley (which we’re still not sure wasn’t the name of that comedy alien bloke off Fast Forward) had tried before with a plastic push-peg version of the pen-and-paper grid-based classic. But it was with the addition of flashing LEDs and whistle-boom! sound effects that they hit upon the deluxe, truly sought-after edition.
For some reason as rare as hen’s teeth in your actual Christmas stocking (maybe it was overpriced–we can’t remember), Computer Battleship was memorably marketed (although we suspect that whoever it was that came up with the ‘You’ve sunk my battleship!’ dialogue for those Oxbridgean navy-ponce-themed telly ads wasn’t exactly bordering on genius), seemingly during every commercial break of our childhood.
The set-up? A plastic grid–a Siamese variation on the original analogue cases with flip-top lids–split vertically and separated into two playing areas (grid-squared maps of an unnamed ocean manufactured in the regulation James-Bond-film transparent plastic) plus assorted miniature gunships, boats, aircraft carriers, etc. Batteries, natch, were not included and at any rate would have lasted only until Boxing Day.
There were drawbacks, though. The limitations of the titular computer meant that, far from containing the imagined intricate sensors to automatically locate the position of your fleet, every single occupied square on the board had to be laboriously ‘programmed’ in before a game could start. For both players! The slide-rule-like apparatus had a tendency to be a bit glitchy, too, so unless every input coordinate was millimetre-perfect, your guess at C6 could easily register as D7, throwing your whole strategy out of whack. Plus, the reversal of the board meant that player one’s A1 position was actually player two’s K1 position, and so on, and so complicatedly forth.
See also Up Periscope, Chutes Away, Tank Command
But, for sheer literal bells and whistles, Computer Battleship couldn’t be matched. MB later rechristened the game Electronic Battleship and, later still, it was joined by the less successful refurbished version, Talking Battleship.1 Nevertheless, the original remained a popular staple of end-of-term games days–often, its owner would have to instruct potential opponents to form a queue. The enduring playability did not go unnoticed by BBC bosses, either, who adapted the game for a Richard Stilgoe-fronted children’s programme, Finders Keepers.
1 In the late 1980s, there was another variant called Blow Up Battleship. Instead of calling your guess out loud, you would use a small set of bellows to send a jet of air to your opponent’s fleet and blast away a section of ship.
Tic-tac-toe, four in a row
Traditionally the arena of combat wherein eldest son would beat Dad (as depicted on the front of the box) in some gaming rite of passage (‘Look Dad, diagonally!’), Connect Four was the insanely addictive board game destined to split families asunder across the globe. Originally marketed as The Captain’s Mistress on account of a rumour traditionally linking it with Captain Cook (he was playing it, not shagging it, so the story goes), the definitive 70s edition is part-owned by–and why are we not surprised by this?–David Bowie.
A fiendishly simple premise–it’s basically noughts and crosses1-you’d drop coloured counters into a vertically positioned seven by six-holed board and compete to see who would be first to get four colours in a row.2 Launched in the early 1970s by MB Games, ‘the vertical strategy’ game had an ace climax wherein upon winning the victor could shout ‘Connect Four!’ and then pull a flap out from under the board causing the stacked counters to clatter out all over the melamine surface of the kitchen table.3 Although there were other ‘vertical strategy’ games available (cf. the safe-cracking style of Downfall), Connect Four had an alluring purity to it that made it seem all the more desirable. This was a thinker’s game, frill-free.
See also Downfall, Pocketeers, Othello
Rather as in poker, you could judge the ability and personality of your opponent by the way in which they played with the ‘chips’. One who stacked their counters into a tower would most likely be loath to commit, worried that making a move might cut off other opportunities. Whereas your counter-fiddler would be more liable to drop ’em into the grid like lightning, hoping to set the pace of the game and win by forcing an error in their opponent. The Apprentice would’ve been a much shorter TV series if they’d just got all the wannabe business tycoons to play a quick game of Connect Four on day one.
Like a family-friendly bright-blue plastic backgammon or Go, Connect Four was for your chin-rubbers and that boy genius about to take Dad out diagonally. And David Bowie. It’s still heavily marketed by MB, but we’re advised that current editions are rather smaller than the mid 70s definitive set (with the exception of those annoying gigantic pub versions), taking a good few inches off all aspects of the game–and a couple of decibels off that all-important victory clatter too.
1 Some people are just never happy with three, are they eh? Although why let your ambition stop at four? Why not Connect Five or Six? Because that would be for madmen, that’s why.
2 It’s way beyond the scope of this book to calculate the statistical probability of a stalemate result within all the Connect Four