There I was completely wasting, out of work and down…
It’s 1985, the month not really sure? Let’s say July. Why July, well it was probably sunny in parts of the UK, like the south, you Irresistible Cockney Rebel. In London, Queen and a host of music megastars performed at Live Aid, Wembley Stadium and the likes of Judas Priest, Bryan Adams and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers rocked John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, around 161,500 people attended the two stadiums and an estimated 1.3 billion people watched the spectacle on TV – “Ay-oh.“
If you wanted to go Moonlighting whilst drinking New Coke or go Back to the Future and see A View to a Kill, participate in some Weird Science, ultimately act like a Goonie, it was all fantabulous. Boomboxes not too far away, coloured leggings on the high street, man mullets, man perms and man mascara, as well as women who had The Power of Love. Power dressed, champagne quaffing yuppies with mobile phones the size of an Accy Nori, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – Rainbow Warrior bombed, Titanic found, symbolics dot com. The first registered domain, and currently the oldest, as it’s still in use.
Atari 520ST launched and Buggy Boy from Elite Systems, Impossible (Another visitor! Stay a while, stay forever…) Mission by US Gold and Finders Keepers on the Masteronic label for £1.99 – Rock’n Wrestle, Way of the Exploding Fist (Melbourne House) and Dynamite Dan. A game that my older brother and I played together many times, oddly enough my brother was never a gamer, he played and went to football matches, yet for some reason Dynamite Dan had a pull on him. Written by Rod Bowket and published by Mirrorsoft this platform game was voted the best game of the year by Crash magazine readers.
The aim of the game was to find eight sticks of dynamite that are placed randomly around the playing area whilst avoiding the perils of the game such as moving nefarious monsters, accidentally drowning and plummeting from great heights. Once Dan collected all eight sticks of dynamite, the player must make their way to the central safe to blow it open and steal the plans for Dr Blitzen’s evil Death Ray and escape to his airship.
Some information about Mirrorsoft. Mirrorsoft was a British video game publisher founded by Jim Mackonochie as a division of Mirror Group Newspapers. The company was active between 1983 and 1991 publishing such games as Boulder Dash, Caesar the Cat, Falcon, Zig Zag and Tetris, they shut down completely in early 1992. Read more at Wikipedia, especially about the fate of Robert Maxwell – apparently dying from a heart attack whist urinating naked off the side of his yacht. On that occasion, it was piss happens – not 💩.
Mirrorsoft assets were sold to Acclaim Entertainment of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (1997) fame, who also went the way of the dodo 🦤 – Throwback Entertainment, a Canadian video game developer, acquired the Acclaim library in 2006 and nearly 30 years later are bringing back some favourite titles. Could Dynamite Dan be one? I hope so.
A quick go via Spectaculator. If I was to review the game now, it would very well deserve a Supersauce badge – like this.
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