EastEnders (1987-)

If you’ve been lurking round your local WHSmith or Boots lately, you’ll have noticed the tape racks looking more like the BBC listings page. Since about ’85, there’s been a steady invasion of home computer games wearing the names of our telly favourites like a badge of honour. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Grange Hill kid, a Doctor Who nut, or glued to Coronation Street—some publisher’s probably had a bash at turning it into a 48K adventure.

Now, when these things are done properly, they can be cracking fun. Take Yes, Prime Minister—a witty, brainy text adventure that actually captured the dry, political wrangling of Hacker and Sir Humphrey. Even EastEnders tried to do more than just sling in Albert Square as a backdrop—it mixed location-hopping with light puzzle solving that, while hardly arcade-action stuff, at least made an effort to fit the show’s chatty, character-led vibe. In those rare cases, you could tell the coders actually watched the programme before slapping sprites together.

But blimey, there have been some absolute stinkers. Grange Hill, for one, felt like somebody had dusted off an old school-based adventure, changed a few names, and sent it off to duplication. And Dallas? If you could work out what was going on between the blocky faces and the sluggish controls, you deserved a medal. Far too often, these licensed jobs seem to have been thrown together over a couple of long weekends, banking on the idea that a big telly logo on the inlay would shift enough copies before word got round in the playground.

From the publishers’ angle, you can sort of see the logic. The Speccy, C64, and Amstrad shelves are crammed tighter than the bus to the computer club, so sticking a household name on your game was a shortcut to instant attention. Parents buying for Christmas saw a familiar programme title and thought, “Well, they watch it on telly—must be good!” That’s a lot easier than trying to sell something called Space Blaster IV from a no-name outfit in Barnsley.

The problem is, quick cash-grabs don’t often lead to classics. Tight deadlines, wafer-thin budgets, and the odd bit of recycled code meant loads of these games shipped with jerky scrolling, clunky collision detection, or gameplay thinner than the pages of a Sinclair User demo tape manual. For every thoughtful effort like Yes, Prime Minister, there were a half-dozen Auf Wiedersehen, Pet or ’Allo ’Allo! affairs that felt more like novelty souvenirs than actual games.

Still, I’ve got a soft spot for this flood of telly tie-ins. They’re a real snapshot of the UK games scene—scrappy, opportunistic, and quick to jump on a cultural bandwagon. Sometimes that meant a little gem you could show off to your mates, and sometimes it meant a cassette you quietly filed next to your copy of Horace Goes Skiing and never loaded again. Question is, will we see studios slow down and put some real polish into these adaptations… or is the market heading for a proper soap-opera-style cliffhanger ending?