37 years ago, a developer named Colin Porch started work on a sequel to the classic computer puzzle game Head Over Heels. With the rise of console gaming pushing aside demand for games on early personal computers, that project was shelved – until now. The 81-year-old Porch has just completed and released that sequel, all because an old boss told him about the rising market for retro games.
Return to Blacktooth is available from Thalamus Digital Publishing on Itch.io for both Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. As in its predecessor, you control a pair of characters – Head and Heels – who have different abilities you need to use to solve puzzles and explore an isometric castle filled with hundreds of rooms. To my fellow Americans, who likely grew up either on console games or post-IBM PCs, it’ll look a little weird, but this is bread-and-butter stuff on the computer platforms that were popular in the UK and Europe through the ’80s.
Porch, who had a minor role on Head Over Heals, started making the sequel under Ocean Software in 1989, but with the way the market was shifting at the time, it was soon shelved. Porch only started working on it again after attending a company reunion.
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“My old boss, a guy called Gary Bracey, he asked me, ‘What happened to the sequel you were doing?'” Porch recalls in an interview with ITV (thanks, Time Extension). “And I said, ‘Well, you know, I abandoned it.’ ‘Oh, you need to finish it,’ he said. ‘Big demand for retro games now.'”
The real struggle was finding out who held “the intellectual property rights to the characters in the game,” Porch explains. He doesn’t spell out how he tracked down the proper owners, but judging by the copyright info in the trailer for Return to Blacktooth, the rights belonged to modern-day Atari. Atari’s been pretty open to working with passionate devs on odd projects in recent years, and it seems this was no exception.
“It’s been a labor of love because I was so passionate about the game in the first place,” Porch concludes. “The game is full of puzzles and I had a lot of fun devising the puzzles. You know, it’s my wits against the player that’s going to be playing it.”
If you’re looking to go old-school, here are the best retro consoles you can get into today.
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