DONKEY KONG CLONE COVERS

It’s nice that Donkey Kong is still around, you know? Still starring in games all these many years since his 1981 debut, still a big part of Nintendo’s pantheon of videogame legends despite pretty much the only update to his character being that he put on a tie, still taking you through his monkey rap. Here in 2018 it’s difficult to imagine just how phenomenally successful the original Donkey Kong was, but a good indicator is that Donkey Kong is one of the most cloned and copied videogames of all time, and that’s what we’ll be looking at today – a collection of cover art from some of the many, many Donkey Kong rip-offs. If you’re a big fan of poorly-drawn cartoon gorillas – and let’s be honest, who isn’t? - then you’re in for a treat.

Donkey King, Dragon 32

First up is a release for the relatively obscure Welsh home computer, the Dragon 32, and yes, it is called Donkey King. The developer should have gone the whole hog and swapped out the gorilla for the Heehaw Rex, King of the Mules, because it would have given the game its own identity and diverted Nintendo’s lawyers from what is one of the least subtle Donkey Kong clones on this list. It’s got everything you associate with Donkey Kong proudly displayed on the cover: gorillas, damsels, barrels, and by the standards of these covers it’s quite competently drawn, even if Donkey King’s expression suggests that throwing barrels at people doesn’t fill him with the pure sense of joy that it used to. It’s always a shame when your hobby starts to feel like work.

King Kong, Atari 2600

A quick detour into the console market with King Kong, an interesting title because it’s a DK knock-off with an official King Kong license. Universal sued Nintendo after Donkey Kong’s original release, claiming that it infringed on their King Kong copyright by being about a large ape that takes a kidnapped woman to the top of a building. It sounds like a relatively solid legal base, but Nintendo won the case because Universal had previously (and successfully) argued that King Kong was public domain while they were trying to get their 1976 King Kong movie off the ground. Thus soundly hoisted by their own legal petard, Universal ended up putting their name on this King Kong game.
As the biplanes buzz around and a player character who looks a lot like Indiana Jones attempts to scale the Empire State Building, an enigmatic emotion flashes across Kong’s face. It’s not a pleasant emotion either. In fact, it’s the expression of someone watching their parents dance at a family wedding.

Kong, ZX Spectrum

Naturally King Kong is a popular theme for these DK clones, with a lot of them leaning more heavily on the themes of the classic ape-meets-girl tale than even Nintendo’s original does. This cover for Kong is no exception. It’s an okay piece of artwork, I suppose, and I like the perspective on Kong’s… paws? Wait, apes don’t have paws, they have hands, right? Yeah, it’s definitely hands. Any time I see a joke about people having their internet history exposed, I breathe a sigh of relief because I know that if anyone does go snooping through my search history they’re just going to find things like “do apes have paws” and “DK Rap video high quality.”

Kong Strikes Back, ZX Spectrum

Kong Strikes Back isn’t technically a Donkey Kong clone, because it’s actually a rip-off of Mr. Do’s Wild Ride. Still, it’s got platforms, ladder-climbing and a giant ape, so I think it warrants inclusion here. As you can see, it takes place in a theme park full of roller coasters, because even colossal gorillas can’t resist the lure of the Nemesis Inferno. This Kong has a more friendly look about him; something about the cast of his face suggests a more playful nature, although because he’s forty feet tall and weighs about as much as the Sheffield-to-Cleethorpes passenger train “playful” still equates to “terrifying.” Surprisingly small hands (not paws) for a giant ape, mind you.

Monkey Kong, TRS-80

That’s more like it. Those are some appropriately enormous hands, although when combined with the especially long arms and that face this Kong looks more like an orang-utan than a gorilla. That’s fine too, of course. You’ll get no monkey prejudice from me, and I’m sure this Kong can hurl barrels with the best of them.
The blurb’s trying to sell Monkey Kong as an accurate recreation of Nintendo’s original, but I’m not buying it. Just look at the way the characters are posed. All I can see it a gigantic orang-utan that is under Mario and Pauline’s control. I think it’s the blank, dead eyes. He has no style, he has no grace, this Kong also has no free will and his held under the thrall of his captors.

Crazy Kong, Commodore 64

Yep, he looks pretty crazy, and absolutely furious that some idiot is running across his freshly-polished metal walkway in dark-soled shoes. The real craziness comes from this cover’s Mario stand-in, however. What the hell is going on with his skin? The red blotchiness implies that either he’s got a monkey allergy or this metal floor is actually one big cheesegrater and he keeps falling over. Then there’s nose and look, someone has to say it so I guess it’ll be me – it’s kinda phallic. Maybe that’s why this Kong is so crazy; you would be too if some dick-nosed weirdo with a suppurating rash and an ear growing out of his temple started causing you grief.

Killer Gorilla, BBC Micro

Or M.C. Escher’s Donkey Kong, if you like. I’ve spend ten minutes trying to figure out the perspective in this image and all I’ve gotten out of it is a headache, so let’s instead focus on the fact that this game’s Mario analogue realised he had to fight a giant ape and turned to his trusty battle-axe to get the job done. Oh, and his very tight shorts. I’m choosing to read this image as the damsel reaching down towards the hero and saying “Jesus Christ, Terry, give me the axe and I’ll sort this out.”

Killer Gorilla, BBC Micro

This alternate Killer Gorilla cover may lack the raw drama of a modern-day barbarian in yellow socks, but at least it takes place in a world where the laws of physical space aren’t complete absent and the hero has swapped his axe for a more DK-appropriate hammer. Also, hey, that gorilla is actually shaped like a gorilla! Just a shame about it’s unnerving face, really. I didn’t know gorillas could dislocate their jaws.

Kongo Kong, Commodore 64

Kongo Kong is intense. The mad, staring eyes of a killer, those are. That fact that he seems to have been partially consumed by a fur-lined parka only increases the power of the piece. The mid-eighties really were a boom time for artists who specialised in nightmarish monkey faces.

Kong’s Revenge, ZX Spectrum

A real bump up in artistic proficiency for this cover, where a very Tom of Finland-esque construction worker who made the embarrassing error of shrinking all his clothes in the wash shoots a gorilla right in the nostril.  That’s his revenge for Kong’s revenge, you see. Obviously the artist has gone for an injection of sex appeal with the scantily-clad damsel, but who chained her up? Surely not Kong, with those hands he doesn’t have the manual dexterity to operate those shackles. So it must be like King Kong, where Fay Wray was chained up to attract Kong in the first place… but they placed the bait at the top of a partially-constructed skyscraper populated by construction workers so buff they’d make He-Man feel self-conscious about walking around without a shirt on? There’s no logic to this giant gorilla story, I tell you.

Krazy Kong, ZX Spectrum

A more cartoonish Kong for this cover, with an ape who’s figured out that climbing up things just makes it easier for the planes to shoot you so he’s sticking to ground level. There’s not much else to say about this cover, except that it’s definitely the one on this list that most looks like an illustration for a kid’s bedtime story.

Krazy Kong 64, Commodore 64

That’s… not a gorilla. I don’t know what that is. A sasquatch, possibly. There’s a thought – I’m surprised there weren’t more Donkey Kong rip-offs that replaced the ape with a yeti or something. Perhaps it was just accepted that the true appeal of Donkey Kong isn’t the charming graphics or fun, precise gameplay but simply that it’s got a big monkey. Whatever this thing is supposed to be, the guy in the red shirt isn’t getting out of this alive.

Wally Kong, ZX Spectrum

“Wally” is a word used to describe a foolish person in British slang, by the way – see also the pioneering computer game Everyone’s a Wally. Of course, that's not to say that this particular ape isn’t called Wally. He might well be. He might have even been bullied at Giant Ape High School for his unusual name, causing him to try to forge a new identity by installing a prosthetic mouth that does not blend at all well with the rest of his features. His gob looks like a pair of ninety-nine pence plastic Halloween fangs made from no-doubt toxic materials in a Chinese tat factory. No wonder the damsel is turning away from Wally with such a disdainful air. “Ai ‘ont ‘oo ‘ook at ee?” says Wally, but she can’t understand him. Because of the mouth thing. Oh well, at least this Kong bothered to comb his hair.

Panic Kong, MSX

Speaking of apes that made an effort, the star of Panic Kong has slapped on a bit of nail polish. Unfortunately, he looks a lot more like a beaver than a gorilla thanks to his big buck teeth and the dots below his nose that imply whiskers. Maybe that’s why he’s holding a tree, he picked it up as a snack. He also looks like someone set a coffee cup down on each of his nipples. You’re a weird one, Panic Kong.

King Cuthbert, TRS-80

Here’s King Cuthbert, which I think is the same game as Donkey King but ported to the TRS-80 and given a makeover to star Cuthbert, a character who appeared in several other home computer games of the time. This is definitely my least favourite cover on this list, because although it’s well-drawn I find these weird, chipmunk-faced homunculi difficult to look at. Like, are they children?  I can’t tell. They’ve got child-like proportions, but Cuthbert’s face is a Cabbage Patch doll of an accountant and if they are supposed to be kids then the girl has a disturbingly ample bosom. No, it’s all wrong and I sincerely hope that gorilla is going to rise up and reclaim his crown from King Cuthbert the Freakish.

Congo, MSX

Of course there were some DK clones that replace the gorilla on a building site with other animals and settings, like the circus-themed Congo. It’s still the same barrel-dodging, girder-climbing action, except the animal is a bear and you play as a circus ringmaster, so you get an additional soupçon of animal cruelty thrown in. At least the cover’s good, clean cartoon fun, a refreshing palate cleanser after King Cuthbert. The only real issue is that the ringmaster doesn’t appear to be wearing any trousers.

Fast Eddie, Commodore 64

Or how about Fast Eddie, which is, well, it’s… this. Victorian beachgoer leaps over googly-eyed blue domes. There are ladders which look very specifically like the climbing frames you’d sometimes get to use in PE class, when it was raining out and the teacher decided you were doing "gymnastics." Eddie holds a heart above his head. It’s his heart, and you can’t take it from him. Not even the dome that’s managed to grow extra-long legs has any chance of catching Fast Eddie. At the bottom of the cover it says “A product of Sirius” and I would not be surprised to learn it mean that this game came down from the stars.

Killer Kong, ZX Spectrum

Moving into the final stretch now with Killer Kong, a cover that has gained some notoriety for being pretty goddamn weird. I appreciate the stark simplicity of the piece – nothing more than a picture of a gorilla who’s just farted and is waiting for the smell to reach you. However, I have seen this cover multiple times in the past and I am only just now realising that the gorilla is wearing a monocle. This pushes the Killer Kong cover to the realms of true art.

Krazy Kong, ZX Spectrum

“Okay, so I drew the cover for our new Kong game...”
“Oh, cool. How’s it looking?”
“Not great. The gorilla looks… weird.”
“Weird?”
“And very pink.”
“Well, just throw in a random drawing of a pyramid, that’s what I always do.”
“Do you think that’ll help?”
“Oh yeah, as long as you don’t make the pyramid too detailed.”
“Okay, got it, very simple pyramid. Thanks.”
“No problem.”

Kong, Commodore 64

For their addition to the world of DK clones, Anirog software decided to make their new game unforgettable by giving it a cover that must surely have caused nightmares in any child who saw it. Less a gorilla and more low-ranking demon who torments sinners who over-indulged in life by forever beating them with barrels of booze, Anirog’s Kong is has the unmistakeable air of a Ghanaian horror movie poster and honestly? I love it. I might have to watch Shakma again after this.
However, if you thought Anirog’s Kong offered the pinnacle of bonkers ape-game covers, you’d be… absolutely right. Not with this cover, mind you.

Kong, Commodore 64

That honour goes to this cover for Anirog’s Kong, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a masterpiece of absurdist art. My god, where can you start with this one? There’s Kong himself, with a face that’s just as terrifying as the last cover but in a completely different way – rather than “this monkey will eat my face” it’s an “I’ll wake up and this white-faced ape will be sitting at the end of my bed, silent but for the sound of its drool dripping on the floor” kind of horror. Especially unnerving is the contrast between the overall bulk of Kong and his minute physical features: a minuscule ear, a navel the size of a penny and the merest hint of a tiny, tiny nipple.
And then there’s the “hero,” who equally defies description. A Peppa Pig character dressed as Hugh Hefner is my best guess. What is with that nose? Is he a pig? A pig who gained a commission in the Royal Navy and ended up on an island of hideous mutant apes? And here’s another thing: I realise that those yellow shapes are supposed to be the staves of a barrel the hero has just smashed with him hammer. I know this. However, I can only see them as bananas, as though Kong is nothing but a colossal, banana-packed piñata and our hero has just bashed him open. This version of Pauline nonchalantly inspects her nails, impatient for this debacle to be over and done with.

And it is done. I can bear no more Kongs. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at some of the many Donkey Kong clones out there, although I’m aware that “enjoyed” might not be the right word. Good night, and may your dreams be free of Anirog’s Kong.

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FACEMAKER (BBC MICRO)

After writing about Granny’s Garden a few weeks ago, I’ve been drawn to the nostalgic charms of the BBC Micro and its raft of wholesome educational content. It was a computer with noble ambitions, and today I am in no way going to honour those ambitions with a quick article about Gloria Callaway and ASK’s 1982 photofit-from-Hell-em-up Facemaker!

Let’s begin with the cover, because it’s a wonderful example of early-eighties tech-art: the grid, the glowing neon effect, the implication that Facemaker is such a powerful program that it can barely be restrained by your computer monitor. The actual face on the cover is… less appealing. “What is his name?” asks the cover, and I have no idea but if that moustache is anything to go by he’s related to Wario somehow. The face on the cover might look the villain from horror movie about murderous cyber-clowns, but this game is called Facemaker so surely I can make my own faces. Bigger, stronger faces, with eyes that can see in total darkness and mouths that can utter the secret names of the most ancient evils!

You might have expected Facemaker to be an art program where you use a mouse to draw faces, or perhaps to pick different facial features from a graphic interface. It’s neither of those things but it’s a lot more like the latter, because it’s a text-based system where the game asks you questions and generates a face from your responses. That really is the entirety of the game. It asks you to describe a face, then shows the face on the screen. Facemaker might be the flimsiest “game” I’ve ever covered, but back in 1982 the idea of making a picture appear on a screen by typing in words would have blown my mind and not just because that was two years before I was even born.

For my first attempt at face-making, I decided to try to recreate a famous person’s face, although I immediately fell into trouble when the first “famous” person I thought of was Steven Seagal. I’m not sure why. I must have seen a picture of him just before loading up Facemaker, or perhaps it’s because when you look at Seagal you think “my, that bloke has a lot of face” and that makes him a good candidate for Facemaker. Sadly, the instructions on-screen are telling me to think about Steven Seagal’s features as one might try to recall the features of a long-lost lover, so this has backfired terribly.

You don’t get to see the facial features while you’re selecting them. Instead, they’re described by either their size or their emotional state, and you type in the choice that best matches your artistic vision. Of course, having not played Facemaker before I don’t have any idea what these choices will look like so I’m mostly working on guesswork but I think describing Steven Seagal’s eyes as “small and mean” is fair enough, right?

Yes, those are definitely the eyes of the Putin-shilling star of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Relatedly, there was a Steven Seagal SNES game in the works that was never released with the hilariously appropriate title Steven Seagal is The Final Option, a name that was surely chosen when every other action movie start refused to participate.

And so it goes, with the player / artistic visionary (delete as appropriate) answering a facial questionnaire on such topics as mouth emotion and hair waviness. Being asked “is it fine or bulbous” is an exciting new brainteaser for me to ponder, but then that’s computer games for you, always providing new experiences.

The hair is where this digital Seagal falls apart. There simply aren’t enough hair options, and while the pure black of Facemaker’s colour palette is a fair approximation of Steven Seagal’s unconvincing dye-job there are no options for ponytails or any different hairstyles – it’s really only the length and curliness you can change. That’s why this face looks more like Sid the Sexist from Viz rather than Steven Seagal.
But wait! There are some facial hair options, and how could you possibly recreate Seagal without including his trademark fuzzy-felt goatee?

Oh, and don’t forget the glasses, although the main reason I’m including this screenshot is to show you the confused question mark creature that appears if you enter a response the game can’t parse, like typing in “prescription sunglasses that your nan uses when she’s driving” during the questions about Seagal’s glasses. Despite consisting of such a small amount of pixels, it has perfectly captured the look of someone who's laughing during a conversation they didn't fully hear and hoping it was a joke rather than a question.

And here’s the finished article. Good god. It is not a great likeness of Steven Seagal, although horrifyingly it does look like me before I started cutting my hair short. It's the bulbous nose that does it. Is this what it means to be hoisted by your own petard? I set out to draw Steven Seagal and ended up with a glimpse into a parallel universe, one where I played this villain in an early-eighties movie about future cops called something like “Star Police 2047” and this was my picture on the computer-generated wanted posters.

That’s about your lot for Facemaker, then. I fiddled around with it for a while and made a few more faces, like “the bloke who complains on Facebook that girls today don’t appreciate men who read books and collect swords” pictured above, and it’s clear that it’s a very limited program. For starters you can only make white people, and I mean white like a close-up of milk. This is probably for the best, because the BBC Micro’s colour palette doesn’t include any shades of brown and trying to make a “black” face with those limitations would look… not good. Plus you can only have “dark” or “fair” characters – that is, brunette or blonde – and all the bright red lips mean that Facemaker excels as a program for designing bootleg Halloween masks of the Joker and little else. But like I say, Facemaker is thirty-five years old, so I wasn’t expecting anything different.
I’m not going to let the "fun" stop here, though. Oh no, I’ve got a little game for us to play. I created a few more famous celebrity faces, and I want you to see if you can guess who they’re supposed to be before reading the answer below each image. Feel free to let me know how you did in the comments.

First up we’ve got this super picture that I heroically spent time looking at despite the risk to both my eyesight and my sanity. I must have an iron will, man. That’s right, it came out looking upsettingly like disgraced sex offender Rolf Harris but it’s actually supposed to be Robert Downey Jr.!

On a similar theme, here’s an actress famed for her beauty so it’s a shame I couldn’t manage to reduce the size of her chin to less than the Bruce Campbell proportions you see above. Fresh from facing Thanos, using Groot like a baseball bat to batter the alien hordes and pulling off the world’s first quintuple motorcycle backflip (I confess I haven’t seen the new Avengers movie yet) it’s Scarlett Johansson! I can only extend my deepest apologies to Miss Johansson.

Here comes a good old-fashioned lover boy, drawn with a casual flick of the wrist. I was under pressure to come up with a good likeness, and maybe I’m going slightly mad but I think this is the most recognisable of the bunch. Not exactly made in heaven, sure, but the miracle of eighties computer technology means that you don’t have to be stone cold crazy to figure out that this is Queen frontman Freddie Mercury.

I’m sorry to do this to you all but yes, this is US President and surely the unwitting star of an alien civilisation’s hidden-camera prank show, Donald “World’s Most Powerful Bigoted Grandad” Trump. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump is the only person whose Facemaker face ended up being more attractive than the real thing.

Do I have to think about Donald’s hair, Facemaker? Can I just, you know, not do that? Brighter minds than mine have tried and failed to figure out what’s going on there.

Finally, here’s a nice palette cleanser with one of the world’s most familiar faces, despite him not being a real person. He’s not French, either, despite what this picture might suggest. You’ve almost certainly spent some time hauling his chubby frame across a variety of fantastical worlds, destroying fungi and chucking dinosaurs down holes. Bingo, you’ve got it – it’s-a him, Super Mario!

It’s a shame that Facemaker doesn’t include any colour options or a flood-fill tool, because that’d mean I could easily make a Luigi, too. Hooked on the brothers. Indeed. Actually, hang on a sec…

Well, that’s Trump fixed. I’m sorry to conclude this article on such an unpleasant note, but I don’t think I can wrest any more entertainment from Facemaker. Only nightmares.

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GRANNY'S GARDEN (BBC MICRO)

We’re heading way back into the depths of home computer history today – or perhaps that should be school computer history? - with a look at a game that’s even older than I am. Take out your pencil case and say “here!” when your name is called, because it’s time for 4mation’s 1983 BBC Micro educate-em-up Granny’s Garden!

Things that don’t really feature in Granny’s Garden: grannies, gardens. They really should have called it Witch’s Woodland, as we shall see, but first let’s have a brief history lesson. Way back at the start of the 1980s, the idea of a regular (albeit wealthy) person owning a home computer was just about becoming a reality. In their finest traditions of education and public betterment, (and possibly to compete with ITV for viewers,) the British Broadcasting Corporation decided to embark on something called the Computer Literacy Project. This was a multimedia project including books and television shows aimed at explaining the concepts and potential of home computers to the British public. There was one extra component: the BBC wanted their very own home computer to tie in with the project. Several computer manufacturers of the time submitted their designs, but in the end the winner was Acorn Computers and thus the BBC Micro was born.

“BBC Micro” actually refers to a number of models and revisions of Acorn’s computer, but they’re all pretty similar. Now, the BBC Micro might mean little to anyone from outside the UK, but if you’re a British person in your thirties or forties there’s a bloody good chance that the BBC Micro was the first computer you ever used. They were hugely popular in schools, with a generation of schoolkids getting their first taste of typing, programming or playing computer games on one of these humble units. I certainly did, and I while my memory is a little hazy on the subject I’m pretty certain that the BBC Micro was the first computer keyboard I ever clacked away at because we had one in our classroom. Just seeing those bright red function keys is giving me the kind of nostalgia usually reserved for finding a childhood pet’s collar at the back of a forgotten drawer.

Which brings us to Granny’s Garden, an adventure game with educational leanings that many teachers credited with being the application that convinced them and others that computers could play a valuable role in educating children. Granny’s Garden is almost as well-remembered as the BBC Micro itself… okay, so maybe “well” remembered isn’t the right phrase, because you see it pop up a lot on “I’m trying to remember the name of a game” threads and message boards. That’s hardly surprising; the combination of playing it a long time ago as a small child and the striking and often rather strange contents of the game mean it’s something that lives long in many people’s memories. So, if you found this page by Googling “old British computer game with scary witch” then yes, you’re thinking of Granny’s Garden.

The game begins, rather underwhelmingly, with a guessing game. One of these identical trees is filled with magic. Simply type in the coordinates of a tree a la Battleship and hope you’ve guessed correctly. Is it boring? Yes. But is it also dull, pointless and unconnected to the rest of the game? Yes. That’s because we’re looking at it from the distant space year 2018, though. You’ve got to remember that this is before many people even knew what a computer was, so teaching very young kids that you can make letters and numbers appear on the screen by pressing the corresponding key is an important step. Now, I’m all for emulation and I’m happy to play games that way, but for once I’m disappointed that I don’t have a real BBC Micro sat here in front of me because I feel like I’m really missing out by not getting to press those big, chunky keys.

Okay, now we’re into the game proper, having arrived at the Kingdom of the Mountains. It’s a bleak and sparely-wooded land, gripped by permafrost and with only the ominous mouth of a distant cave offering any shelter from the elements. Unless granny lives on Hoth, I think we’re already well outside of her garden.

“Do you want to go in the cave?” it asks. Honestly? No. It looks spooky. I’d rather stay out here in the brisk winter air, enjoying the scent of the pines and trying to figure out what has caused those fissures to appear on the moon. A dread omen of impending disaster seems like a good bet, and if the unspeakable creatures that dwell beneath the lunar surface are about to break free then I think seeing that would be more educational than entering some random cave. So no, I don’t want to enter the cave.

Or, you know, I do. That’s what the game’s telling me, and who am I to argue when the cave has rolled out the red carpet for me? At least I hope that’s carpet.

Here the goal of Granny’s Garden is revealed: find the kidnapped children of the King and Queen. They’ve been locked away by an evil witch, so I don’t have long to find them all before she gets back from the shops with bags full of cakes and sweets to start fattening them up. I mean, if you’re going into the child cannibalism business then the tender, pampered flesh of the aristocracy would be a good place to start.
The game also asked me if I wanted to help the King and Queen. Naturally I said no. Until Lizzie II leads an army into battle wearing full plate armour and setting her lethal attack corgis on her enemies, I shall never respect the monarchy. The game did not accept my refusal, simply saying “That’s not very nice!” until I acquiesced. Not really having a choice is a running theme with Granny’s Garden. I was going to say that teaching kids they have no real choices in the face of the monolithic power structures that rule their lives was a valuable lesson for children to learn early on, but I think that might be a bit dark even for me.

I couldn’t even decline the help of the King and Queen’s magic blue raven. It’s a design that smacks of the developers deciding that they were going to use a raven before they realised the game takes place on predominantly black backgrounds.
They raven says he’s going to fly you to the woodcutter’s house, where the first child is imprisoned. You cannot refuse the raven’s offer.

Here we go, a bit of educational gameplay. What secret word is hidden on the outside of the woodcutter’s house? Hidden might be a bit of strong word, there. I’d remind you that Granny’s Garden was designed for very young children.

Once you’re inside, Granny’s Garden reveals itself to be a very lightweight, erm… I suppose it’s technically a graphic adventure but the graphics are minimal. You type in commands to move around the house and solve a couple of “puzzles,” that kind of thing. I decided to check out the kitchen first – if you could see the elasticated waistband on the trousers I’m wearing right now that’d come as no surprise – but when I was in there I made the foolish error of looking into the witch’s cauldron.

Here comes the witch to feast on your bones while rolling her eyes and gnashing her teeth like someone’s slipped her a dodgy pill at a rave. I know there are a lot of people out there who were traumatised by this four-colour monstrosity in their childhoods, and it’s not hard to see why. You’re playing what promises to be a colourful fairytale adventure when you look at the wrong cooking utensil and bam, here comes a nightmare whose traditionally witchy hooked nose and chin have become fully a snapping beak. What’s worse, meeting the witch sends you right back to the start of the game. More annoying than scary, but definitely a good reason to avoid the witch. It’s not always possible to avoid her, though, and it can get a bit frustrating, having to learn all her potential appearances.

What else happens in the woodcutter’s cottage? Well, you can get revenge for that whole Garden of Eden débâcle by choking a snake to death with an apple. “What a good shot you are.” says the game afterwards, and it’s hard not to read it in a condescending voice.

Eventually I found the witch’s hidden broomstick, which revealed the location of dear, sweet Esther. Esther has a skull for a face. That can happen when you’re locked up by a witch for too long, I hear. The King and Queen just wanted their kids back, they didn’t specific that they had to come back without looking like a very dedicated Skeletor cosplayer, so my work here is done.
Now we’re sent back to the first screen of the mountains, but with the password we just acquired we can move on to the next area: the giant’s garden. Oh wait, there is a garden in this game. It’s just really big. So big it becomes, like, a forest or something.

I’m glad I’m being told that this is a talking toadstool. I might not have figured it out on my own, it looks more like a burger bun.

The talking toadstool uses its incredible powers of speech to fill you in on this area’s objective: reach the other side of the giant's garden. There will be obstacles along the way, but by selecting the correct insect helper from the on-screen list you can avoid the danger. You start on the edge of a pond, so the obvious choice is to use the butterfly to fly across, right?

That is indeed the correct solution. If you’re wondering how a butterfly manages to carry a person, don’t forget we’re in a giant’s garden and this is presumably a giant butterfly. It’s the size of a pterodactyl, drinking gallons of nectar through a proboscis like an oil derrick. Personally, the thought of that is creepier than any amount of witches.

Granny’s Garden also offers the potential for immature giggling during scenes like this one, where your character is plagued by nut problems. “The nuts are hurting you” it says, as though you’ve been embarrassingly outplayed in an online shooter and now xX_ELiTE-SNiPaH420_Xx is teabagging your prone body. The obvious solution here is to crawl inside the giant snail’s shell and let that protect you from the falling nuts, and for the most part the solutions are pretty obvious and it’s not like there are many options to chose from. Make the wrong choice too many times and the witch will get you, but it doesn’t take long to get back to this point so it’s not as frustrating as it could have been.

Other solutions include climbing a tree with the help of a spider, having the worm tunnel underground to avoid an army of ants and enlisting this frankly terrifying bee to get rid of the giant’s guard dog. It looks more like a face peering through a toilet seat than a bee and I’m sure you’ll agree that looking into a dark toilet only to see a faintly pleased-looking face staring back at you is the stuff of which nightmares are made. But how does the bee defeat the dog?

It stings the dog right on the arse. Good job, bee. Now please leave and return to your hive, a colossal, skyscraper-sized edifice where tens of thousands of your fellow “bees” huddle together and await the coming of your true master.

Having used the spider to reach the top of the tree, we find Tom and the password for the second half of the game. Unlike his sister Esther, Tom does not have a skull for a face. Instead, his head is shaped like a three-prong plug.

Moving on to the next area now, and it’s the City of Dragons. I really like the way this place looks. Obviously Granny’s Garden’s graphic are so primitive they haven’t even discovered the basic concepts of irrigation and farming yet, but there is something very charming about their extreme blockiness. I think part of the appeal is that they remind me of the sadly-missed Teletext service – and it comes as no surprise to learn that the BBC Micro could indeed be set up to receive Teletext and that’s basically the exact same thing as having the World Wide Web on your home computer, if the internet was made of cinema listings, football scores and Duplo blocks.

Guarding the City of Dragons is Ah-Choo, a little red gremlin who reminds me a bit of an angry tulip. Before he’ll let you enter the city, you must answer Ah-Choo’s question: what is your favourite food? Obviously I gave this some long, serious consideration before answering with the most immature thing I could think of.

Well, you didn’t inherit that particular allergy from your mum, Ah-Choo. Ooh, burn.

The next segment is all about dragon-wrangling. Two of the royal children are trapped in Dragon City, guarded by these baby dragons. To neutralise the dragons, you have to slip one of your magic dragon-taming collars around their necks, but that’s not as simple as it sounds. You can only collar one dragon at a time, and you have to get it alone because, I dunno, if there’s more than one dragon on-screen it’ll come to the aid of its sibling? I think that’s the implication. So, you need to lure the dragons into a position of solitary vulnerability before you strike, and the way to do that is with food.

This is surprisingly difficult for me to convey succinctly, but here goes. You have four different types of food: chips, buns, lollies and oranges. You throw one type of food to the dragons, and they’ll respond depending on how much they like said food. One of them loves it, two of them are indifferent and one hates it. For example, the blue dragons is a real oddball who hates chips. What kind of maniac hates chips? You’re weird, blue dragon.
The goal is to get one dragon out at a time so you can chuck a collar on it, with the educational goal being (presumably) that the kids try out different foods and write a little matrix recording which dragon likes oranges and which hate buns. Again, who hates buns? “Bun” is such a wide spectrum of baked confection that surely everyone must like some kind of bun.

But I digress. It’s a pretty simple concept, although the slightly random nature of it does mean it can take longer to complete than you might think and you’ve only got three of each food item: use them up and the witch comes along and casts her now-familiar “game over” spell on the player.

Once all four dragons are tamed, Clare and Anna are rescued. It seems that skull-faced-ness is a family trait after all.

Now we’ve reached the final chapter – that Land of Mystery. How mysterious! The last two royal abductees are hidden somewhere nearby, and you’re tasked with finding them by visiting the various locations and figuring out exactly what the hell is going on.

For instance, if you travel to the cottage, you’ll run into the witch again. Imminent danger hangs thick in the air, but the witch is holding a delicious cake, so what are you to do? Given that every other encounter with the witch has ended with a game over, you might be thinking that the best course of action is to leave her the hell alone. Yes, that’s what you’d think. Instead you have to walk over and take the cake out of her hands, which you can do with no repercussions for… some reason. That’s not the greatest piece of design consistency, is it? The antagonistic witch who has plagued the rest of your adventure is suddenly doling out free cake. It’s not even like it’s an apology cake, with “Sorry For Foiling Your Plans” iced on the top either, because later in this very stage the witch will hunt you down.

Or how about this area, where (as far as I can tell) the only way to progress is to tell a hungry giant that you want him to eat you. That might be your kink, buddy, but it hardly feels appropriate for a kid’s educational adventure game.

Certain pathways are guarded by strange creatures, like this one. Nice boots, pal. They’ve all got some kind of question or request for you. For instance, this one won’t let you pass until you’ve been to the forest and found out what kind of trees grow there. Also the forest is on fire, so you need to go to the lake and get some water to put it out.

At the lake is this yellow gremlinoid, who has the weird request that you feed it a key. Like an idiot, I agreed, only to realise moments later that I probably should have used that key to unlock a door or something. And so I became stuck then I reached the Castle of Dreams and couldn’t open the sodding door because some sad-faced creature that looked like a bundle of wheat stalks thought a key would make an appropriate snack. I was genuinely surprised that there was no “hey kids, don’t try eating your front door key at home” warning.

The trick is to go to the Castle of Dreams first, unlock the door and then feed the key to the monster. This whole section has a lot of trial-and-error about it, but I think that’s kinda the point. Kids were supposed to be writing down what was going on and using that information to get through the various puzzles, and each part of the game was intended to spark classroom discussion about the themes encountered therein, like coordinates, insect life and not eating keys.

As for the Castle of Dreams itself, that’s where Granny’s Garden reaches the apogee of its weirdness – it’s nothing but a bizarre series of glitchy images where the games sprites overlap and change colours for a minute or so, filling the screen with a retina-searing wave of primary colours and vaguely unsettling imagery.

When you see scenes like this it’s hardly surprising that some people say Granny’s Garden creeped them out for years afterwards.

Once you’re endured the hallucinatory excess of the Castle of Dreams, you find young Daniel waiting for you somewhere near the back, probably cowering in a corner and vowing never to fall asleep again. After that, you can feed the key to the creature, get some water, put out the forest fire and find the last child inside a ruined tower.

Congratulations, Granny’s Garden is complete and you’ve experienced one of the most foundational works in the history of British home computers (educational sub-division). As a game there’s not much to it and it can be a bit obtuse, but there’s something totally captivating about its weirdness, hailing as it does from a time before the “rules” of what educational programs and even computer games were supposed to be like were codified. I know I’m glad to see the end of it, because I don’t think I ever finished it as a kid. I would have remembered the Castle of Dreams, possibly when waking up at 2am drenched in fear-sweat. It was definitely an interesting experience, even if, looking back on it, I don’t think you’re likely to learn much from it beyond the basic concepts of actually using a computer. But I suppose that was the point, wasn’t it?

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