After the massive success of The Hobbit, the wait was on for Melbourne House’s successor. Before they’d even finished it, Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler had decided on their next subject. With label boss Alfred Milgrom keen to avoid having a similar negotiation of book rights involved, they went for Sherlock Holmes since those stories were public domain, at least in the UK and many other places. Even after Megler’s departure, Mitchell still followed that plan, and magazines reported on the upcoming Sherlock… and its delays, and further delays. I will write about that game, but not just yet.

In the meantime, it can be inferred that Melbourne House were keen to get Mitchell to work on something which would not take so long. With his efforts added to those of Clive Barrett and artist Russell Comte, the result was Mugsy. Perhaps the 1920s era of the later Sherlock stories was already on their mind, because Mugsy is set in the same period, but instead of London it is set in America. Specifically, the prohibition-era gangster America of the popular imagination. The game and its packaging don’t specify a location, but various magazines zoomed in on Chicago, although given the nod to Bugsy Malone in the title, New York may have been at least as fitting.

Mugsy is rather like a version of The Fall of Rome where its text-based resource management doesn’t even have the complication of multiple territories to watch. You are a mafia godfather, and your underlings bring you questions about how your mob should operate for the year: how much to spend on weapons, how much on bribes, how many of your protection racket ‘clients’ to go after. Then you get the results, and go round for another year. Did you spend enough on weapons to keep your people alive? Did you bribe the police enough to keep from getting raided too badly? How much did you make?

As you get further the necessary inputs scale with the amount of money you’re making, which makes sense as police and rivals start going after you more. It means that it isn’t just a case of finding out the right numbers and plugging them in again and again. There are two different animated sequences which can play out at the end of each year, and one simple arcade bit where you shoot down would-be assassins (Mugsy’s cassette inlay claims that it includes “a full arcade game”, a claim which might generously be described as cheeky.) After that you are free to keep trying different number combinations and seeing slightly different stories, but most of that difference relies on you reading narrative into numbers and a few words of difference in dialogue. It doesn’t take long at all to see almost everything Mugsy has to offer.

Several magazines reflected that limitation in their reviews. “There is not a great deal of variety in what happens from year to year compared to programs like Dictator by DK’Tronics”, said Sinclair User. Micro Adventurer went back further still, talking about the mainframe game Hamurabi (dating back to 1968) in which an adviser asks you how to manage your kingdom and how much wheat to plant for your people. They identified Mugsy as a barely disguised version of Hamurabi. “For wheat, people and deposed, read clients, hoods and hit”. Big K described Mugsy as “exceptionally repetitive” noting the resultant “astonishing inanity”. Crash’s three reviewers all likewise found that it “soon gets a little repetitive” and that “this program largely plays by itself”; “it really isn’t much of a game as such”.

Despite those well-documented shortfalls, Mugsy was a big success. It was top of ASP’s non-arcade chart for an impressive seven weeks in a row. Lest you consider that an easier feat than the arcade equivalent, it’s worth noting that it was definitely the best-selling game on the Spectrum overall for the one of those covered by Your Sinclair’s alternate chart. More than chart success, though, it was clearly loved. It won the Best Strategy/Simulation category at Crash’s readers awards 1984, taking 18% of the vote. (There is an implication that Football Manager might have received more votes, but was ineligible as it was released too long ago).

The explanation for that lies in everything Mugsy does which isn’t just processing numbers. This was a time when a lot of the most popular Spectrum games still used the default Spectrum font, but Mugsy not only brings its own font but sets it within cleverly designed speech bubbles. That’s part of an overall conceit of being an interactive comic book, something reflected in both the noir-inspired images and the stylised language of all of its text. There is a whole lot of dis, dat and da other as you work to bring in da dough.

Melbourne House went out of their way to make this style capture the imagination, working on a press campaign which included sending people dressed as gangsters to the offices of various computer magazines for a spot of simulated intimidation. Said magazines bought into this enthusiastically, reporting on the intervention with helpfully provided pictures. Even Crash, who were denied such a visit by their Shropshire location, reported on it anyway, sardonically noting that “apparently gangsterism doesn’t stretch further north than Watford“. 

Possibly helped by that stunt, assorted magazines couldn’t resist taking up Mugsy’s version of gangster-speak in their reviews and news. In the game it is grating and executed with no great care, but that’s nothing compared to some of the other attempts. Your Spectrum made a valiant effort at being the worst, with their “makka lotta dough” more In the Night Garden than Al Capone. Popular Computing Weekly, though, took the crown with its incoherent splurge. “Da tru admospear ob da East sibd is dere”, apparently. 

Just as distinctive but more appealing than the text is the pictures. Melbourne House had developed their own Melbourne Draw utility to make producing those easier, and Russell Comte did a great job. Working within the limitations of the Spectrum’s garish colour scheme, he took the sensible approach of making them mostly monochrome, and they are an atmospheric triumph. Even the way the full-screen pictures render as geometric shapes before slowly cohering into a scene works in its favour, giving an extra sense of figures looming out from the shadows. Where there is more colour, its sparing use works very effectively. The band playing in the spotlight in one of those animations, yellow standing out starkly, looks great. 

The bits I didn’t include in my review round-up earlier reflect the success of Mugsy’s visuals. Just as with Lunar Jetman, reading reactions from the time gives a different sense of how much they stood out. Computer & Video Games introduced extra screenshots to its normal layout just to show a bit more of it; “when our reviewer first looked at Mugsy, he kept calling people into the room to look at the pictures”. Some of the same reviews which found the game limited nonetheless gave it high marks because this was so outweighed by the graphics. Sinclair User’s sums up the tone of much of the response particularly well. “Melbourne House has captured the atmosphere of old Hollywood movies so well that one tends to forget the limitations of the game and enter into the spirit happily”.

  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 2 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 9 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 16 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 23 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 30 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 7 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (non-arcade) for week ending 14 July 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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