Retro Gamer

The Making Of: Oink!

WE COULD SAY THIS VIDEOGAME TIE-IN WAS CLOSELY BASED ON THE CHARACTERS OF AN ANARCHIC COMIC CALLED OINK! WHICH MADE ITS DEBUT 35 YEARS AGO BUT, AS YOU’LL SEE, THAT WOULD BE TELLING A LITTLE PORKY

- Words by David Crookes

David Crookes spins a crackling yarn

The editor of the controvers­ial comic Oink! was a pig. Uncle Pigg to be exact. He oversaw 68 issues between 3 May 1986 and 22 October 1988, providing kids with a swill of satire and toilet humour that put it as far apart from the Beano and Whizzer And Chips as you could possibly get.

With anarchic characters such as Weedy Willy, Psycho Gran, Billy’s Brain, Mr Bignose, Burp

The Smelly Alien and The Street-hogs, Oink! revolution­ised the comic landscape. There were photo-led strips, crazy ads called madverts and parodies galore. Whsmith didn’t know what to do with it, eventually consigning the publicatio­n to the top shelves where kids couldn’t reach it.

Now, of course, there were some human minds behind this rebellious creation, chief among them the comic’s founders Tony Husband, Patrick Gallagher and Mark Rodgers. After their proposal for a kids’ version of Viz was accepted by publisher IPC, they attracted some amazing cartoonist­s including Lew Stringer, David Haldane and Jeremy Banks. There were contributi­ons, too, from a 15-year-old Charlie Brooker and Chris Sievey’s papier-mâché persona, Frank Sidebottom.

Setting Oink! apart was ambition. The first issue of the glossy comic had a free flexi-disc music single (with an appropriat­ely ridiculous name) on the cover. A mug, T-shirt and follow-up single were released too. Oink! also decided to have a tie-in videogame so it contacted publisher CRL which, as it happens, had been talking to coder Jon Williams – creator of the Berks trilogy of C16/plus games for CRL – about programmin­g games for the Commodore 64.

“He called me on 15 September 1986 and asked if I’d consider writing a game based on Oink!,” Jon says. “I went up to London three days later and I was handed lots of photocopie­s. I hadn’t read the comic previously but we had a general discussion about the possible scenarios.”

The idea was to create a game around the premise that Uncle Pigg had many empty pages for the next issue despite a looming deadline (set as 7 July – Jon’s birthday). “The budget for the game was pretty small so it had to be written as quickly as possible,” Jon says. “I decided to create three minigames and link into the idea of creating a comic that the player could read.

Ian promised some input from the team behind Oink! which we could add at a later stage.”

Jon quickly had a framework of the game in place but Ian left CRL a month later and, without a firm commitment to continue, work slowed. “I think I restarted work early in 1987,” Jon says. “I know I spoke to Tony Husband on the phone to discuss plans but I can’t remember how the three minigames were decided, only that I created all of the graphics and level maps using my own editors and lots of coloured pencils and paper.”

Three characters were chosen to help save Uncle Pigg’s bacon: Pete’s Pimple, Rubbishman and Tom Thug. By launching each minigame, players would earn points and begin to fill the comic’s blank pages with strips. Yet disappoint­ingly, each strips’ panels would be simply coloured

rather than contain cartoon drawings although clicking on them would reveal jokes. “We received some written text from the Oink! writers for inclusion in the game,” Jon recalls. “I spent ages trying to format it all on the screen.”

Where the game fell down, however, was that the minigames felt familiar but two certainly had very little to do with the comic. Pete’s Pimple, for example, was a polished 12-screen riff on Breakout but if we say the character’s sizeable zit replaced the ball, that’s merely our interpreta­tion.

“I just fancied creating a minigame based on the classic game but with a shooting element,” Jon says, of being able to blast at enemies while collecting mystery bonuses for extra panels, scores, gun shields, energy and the like.

Another minigame, Tom Thug, suffered the same fate. Here, players controlled Tom Thug’s vehicle rather than the character himself, moving it across a top-down maze to find bonus blocks that would allow further progress. There were robots to shoot at and paralyse but you couldn’t move and blast at the same time.

“With hindsight, the Tom Thug minigame might have been a bit of a cop out,” Jon says.

“It was basically a reworking of the Berks game I did for the C16 and I’m sure this happened because of all the delays I’d encountere­d. The way the Thugmobile operated would have been inherited from the C16 version which was character-based and I guess the movement stopped as it made things easier to track bullets and collision? Or it might have just been me being lazy. I honestly can’t remember.”

At least Rubbishman looked liked he could have flown from the comic’s pages. This minigame was a horizontal­ly-scrolling six-zoned superhero jaunt with a sprite that resembled the caped character to some degree. There would be obstacles to go over or under, bricks to smash through, energy to be obtained and rubbish to be collected. It was tricky to get the altitude correct but it was satisfying­ly challengin­g.

“This minigame was always going to be a scrolling game to give a bit of variation but it was originally going to be more of a convention­al side-scroller,” Jon says. “I guess it just changed to a top-down view to be different from the scrolling games I’d done previously. I would think there was also an element of keeping the graphical style, whatever there was of it, consistent between the three minigames.”

The game was mastered at Jon’s home on 6 May 1987 (“a long day”, Jon says). A German version was planned and the translatio­ns were sent through but this was later canned. There were conversion­s for the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, however. “It wasn’t until the C64 version was nearing completion when CRL mentioned a Spectrum port,” Jon says. This work was handed to other coders.

To help promote Oink! on the Spectrum, a 16page comic taster was inserted inside issue 42 of Crash magazine and this included some typein game listings written by Frank Sidebottom (Chris had previously written three ZX81 programs that had been released on the B-side of the 7-inch vinyl, Camouflage). Despite such efforts, Oink! didn’t end up hogging the charts. “But it was such a stop/start affair, I thought it wouldn’t get released,” Jon says. “I’m sure it would have been more cohesive if everything had gone smoothly.”

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 ??  ?? » Oink!’s main editor screen was complicate­d. This document shows the location of the screen interrupts used to shift character sets and sprites around.
» Oink!’s main editor screen was complicate­d. This document shows the location of the screen interrupts used to shift character sets and sprites around.
 ??  ?? » [C64] Mary Lighthouse – a parody of the conservati­ve activist – appears in one of the comic strips you piece together. Note the looming deadline.
» [C64] Mary Lighthouse – a parody of the conservati­ve activist – appears in one of the comic strips you piece together. Note the looming deadline.
 ??  ?? » Creator of the Berks trilogy and writer of Oink!, ^Jon Williams.
» Creator of the Berks trilogy and writer of Oink!, ^Jon Williams.
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 ??  ?? » A section of the Rubbishman map. The bottom half was used to ‘hand compress’ the map by entering 2 by 2 block values along with control codes for repeats etc.
» A section of the Rubbishman map. The bottom half was used to ‘hand compress’ the map by entering 2 by 2 block values along with control codes for repeats etc.
 ??  ?? » [C64] Tom Thug himself doesn’t appear: instead you control the Thugmobile in this scrolling shoot-’em-up
» [C64] Tom Thug himself doesn’t appear: instead you control the Thugmobile in this scrolling shoot-’em-up
 ??  ?? » [C64] The first level – Pete’s Pimple – is a Breakout clone where you need to watch out for oncoming enemies.
» [C64] The first level – Pete’s Pimple – is a Breakout clone where you need to watch out for oncoming enemies.

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