Barbarian – “Thanks big boy”

“Because the way in which the player loses is always by dying, it was felt to be unsuitable for persons under 15 who might find it frightening to lose several times in solitary play prior to bedtime”. So wrote the British Board of Film Classification in 1986 about the computer game Dracula, a text adventure with some pixel art stills of gruesome horrors and bloody death scenes. The BBFC awarded Dracula a 15 certificate, which meant anyone younger than fifteen wasn’t allowed to buy it. The game’s publishers CRL were disappointed. Not at the over-active concern on display, but because they were rather hoping it would get an 18 certificate. 

Dracula was the first game in the UK to receive such an age rating. Computer games had only come within the BBFC’s scope a couple of years earlier, as an almost incidental side effect of a change in British law. The attention that the controversy-seeking Dracula got through its mature rating did not help it to the upper reaches of the charts. It was, after all, a text adventure in 1986. It did well enough for CRL to keep treading the same path, though. A year later, they finally achieved their 18 certificate with another text adventure, Jack the Ripper. By then, someone else had done a much better job of riding controversy to success. That company, Palace Software, also had some strong links to the matter that had driven the change in the law: ‘video nasties’.

The story of Palace doesn’t start with software, or even videos, but with a cinema. Back in 1980, two years ahead of Channel 4 launching on TV, it moved into a central London office on Tottenham Street. This forced out an alternative cinema in the building which had been enjoying some success. It moved to King’s Cross, taking its name with it, and a vaguely palatial white building on Pentonville Road became the Scala Cinema. Scala head Stephen Woolley brought a love of cinema of many different kinds, experience in mixing cinema with punk rock performances, and a plan to be the antithesis of the snobby National Film Theatre. Emboldened in its new location, the Scala became an influential success. Regular attendees included future directors Steve McQueen and Christopher Nolan.

With VHS players becoming affordable to more people, Scala management saw an opportunity to branch out, and set up Palace Video. They would sign up the rights to screen films and to release them on tape. In 1983, they did just that with Sam Raimi’s horror film The Evil Dead, with Stephen Woolley reckoning that a film that would “scare the life out of you and make you giggle” was “a perfect Scala cult movie”. It went on to be the year’s bestselling VHS in the UK. It also attracted a great deal of controversy. 

The BBFC had passed The Evil Dead as acceptable for people to watch in British cinemas, with some cuts and an 18 certificate. But there was no such age restriction on videotapes. Anyone might watch them, in their own home, again and again. Some people were concerned about the damage that this could potentially do to children and, according to one member of parliament, dogs. Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association coined the term ‘video nasty’ and got some tabloid backing in campaigning against them. Whitehouse frequently mentioned The Evil Dead specifically.

The government published a list of video nasties which might violate the Obscene Publications Act 1959, but it was enough of a stretch to apply that it decided on new legislation instead. The result was the Video Recordings Act 1984, requiring video works to get BBFC certificates. It defined video works as “any series of visual images […] produced electronically by the use of information contained on any disc or magnetic tape, and shown as a moving picture”, a definition with implications beyond VHS. In 1985, the government made an attempt to prosecute Palace Video over The Evil Dead, and was not successful. Palace rereleased the VHS with an extra banner on the front cover proclaiming it “not guilty!” Amidst all of that, another bit of Palace also released a computer game of The Evil Dead. 

Palace Software emerged from yet another part of the Palace group, a London shop called The Video Palace. Pete Stone had previously worked as a marketing manager for Virgin record shops, editing their magazine Blank Space, before managing The Video Palace. Under his watch, it sold not just videos but also computer games. By the end of 1983, Personal Computer Games magazine was reporting on how the shop, pictured with ‘London’s largest video & home computer store’ on its signage, was going to start making its own games. Pete Stone was more interested in computer games than videos, as was sales assistant Richard Leinfellner, and they went off to form Palace Software.

For Palace Software, being financed by the Palace group had its advantages. “I’m not saying that money is no object”, Stone told ZX Computing in 1986, “but we’ve been able to proceed at our own pace”. They also had access to rights to Palace’s films, meaning that making a game of The Evil Dead was an obvious move. Oh, and Palace Software moved into office space inside the Scala Cinema itself. As such they got an up-close view of the controversy and reaction, including development of their Evil Dead game being interrupted at one point by the police raiding their office in search of the masters of the film.

Their game version was a loose adaptation, which Your Computer generously described as “a distant relative of Atic Atac”, alongside observing that “there is nothing here to keep even the most unworldly 12-year old awake at night”. It probably didn’t help that Richard Leinfellner hated horror movies and could barely bring himself to watch their source material. He later told Retro Gamer that “the game was my first programming effort and it was very poor”, while Pete Stone said that “we made pretty much every possible mistake, but we were learning from those mistakes”. Despite its many failings, The Evil Dead reached #15 in the UK combined formats chart in September 1984.

The computer game of The Evil Dead was not subject to any kind of Dracula-like certification from the British Board of Film Classification, as Palace Software didn’t submit it. Computer games matched the definition of video works in the Video Recording Act, but got a special carve-out. A video work was specifically exempted if it was “a video game”. Except there was a further exception to the exception that left some grey areas; games depicting certain elements were not exempted. These elements included “human sexual activity”, “human genital organs or human urinary or excretory functions” and “mutilation or torture of, or other acts of gross violence towards, humans or animals”.

Ahead of the law passing, a May 1984 Popular Computing Weekly story about The Evil Dead included Palace Software’s Pete Stone complaining about the law’s implications. “X-rated films will be banned on video and for computer games the situation will be even crazier. Where do you draw the line — is Space Invaders an act of gross violence? The problem is that the people pushing these laws through have no idea what the video and computer games industries are about”. Elsewhere in the article he said that while Palace’s game was a horror game, “we have gone out of our way to make sure there is nothing nasty about it”.

That article also said that “Palace is the first film company to move into software”, which was definitely not true, given Lucasfilm Games had released their first titles the previous year. In the UK, though, Palace were better known for now. Having learned lots of lessons from The Evil Dead, Palace Software took on more staff, and set to work on designing better games. They started work on another horror movie adaptation, Halloween, but decided to cancel it. This cancellation was influenced by their struggles in getting some distributors to take The Evil Dead, at least according to Chris Neary, who did some initial work on Halloween. He blamed “the video nasty brigade”. “Had they left us alone, we could have really made an excellent adult version of it.”

One of the newcomers who worked on the beginnings of Halloween was Steve Brown, whose background was not in computer games but mostly in commercial illustration. He had also done covers for Games Workshop magazine White Dwarf, including a Conan-inspired one for the 1980 The Best of White Dwarf Articles compilation issue. Brown had answered an advert for an artist, which Palace had placed in advertising industry magazine Campaign. Leinfellner gave Brown a crash course in games, including iconic platformer Manic Miner and Konami shoot-’em-up Scramble. Brown caught on fast and soon ended up as Palace Software’s leading game designer.

Brown’s first successful idea was to combine elements of platforming and horizontal shoot-’em-up together, along with some visual elements rescued from work on Halloween. The result was the still spookily-themed Cauldron. That became a UK #5 hit in July 1985. Appropriately for someone with an advertising background, Brown’s design approach included thinking about the marketing from early on. “I think he had the box [design] before we had the game design”, Leinfellner later recalled. After Cauldron, Palace Software released a distinct and inventive sequel, Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back, which reached #7 in May 1986.

After that, as Steve Brown told it later, “I was given pretty much a blank canvas to do whatever I wanted after the success of the Cauldron games. I went to the guys with my checklist for the game that I would want to play”. He was inspired in part by Yie Ar Kung-Fu and similar games, and by the 1985 film Red Sonja, the Richard Fleischer-directed sequel to Conan the Destroyer. Red Sonja doubtless got shown at the Scala. 

Brown’s checklist included “huge characters; brutal, over-the-top violence; laugh-out-loud moments; and cool sword fighting moves that were properly researched and animated”. Once again, as Pete Stone put it, Brown “saw it as a complete concept from the beginning, imagining the gameplay, how it looked, the packaging, the advertising, the whole PR campaign”. The result was sword-based fighting game Barbarian, and this time the whole campaign approach would prove a memorable success.

One thing that Steve Brown thought could be improved from the fighting game norm was bigger characters. Leinfellner and a newly enlarged team rose to the challenge of making that possible through sprite multiplexing. They also worked on improving the fluidity of animation using rotoscoping. Brown spent hours studying Conan videos and working out how to replicate the movements, practicing in front of a mirror with a wooden replica of Conan’s sword made by his girlfriend’s dad. Then he and Gary Carr acted out the moves for filming and feeding into their multiplex sprite editor.

Barbarian looks tremendous, not just on the original format of the Commodore 64, but on the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum too. Its shirtless musclemen move quickly and smoothly and its backgrounds are very striking, both the outside ones on one side of the cassette and the atmospheric dungeon ones on the other. Converting it to the Spectrum was a particular challenge, and Brown decided to take inspiration from Knight Lore and go for a monochrome approach. It worked, and the Yie Ar Kung-Fu-style red starbursts whenever a blow connects stand out brilliantly. One of the Spectrum stages, with a purple landscape under a bright red-and-yellow sunrise sky, may be the most incredible-looking out of all the versions.

Beyond looks, while Barbarian may have been based on a different genre of films than the kung-fu-inspired The Way of the Exploding Fist, there are a lot of similarities in what it gets right. Barbarian’s characters and their moves connect with a similar sense of weight, and its moveset works well within the constraints of a one button joystick to provide different reactive and tactical approaches. The differences in its spin on fighting feel appropriate to its genre, too. Rolling into your opponent to knock them down to the ground is a key way to manage positioning, you can headbutt, and the fighting is suffused with not just a sense of strategy but a palpable last-ditch desperation that’s a long way from the dojo.

Palace followed that through with a fittingly dramatic and more extreme counterpart to the Exploding Fist concept of getting more points for moves which fully connect. That is, in Barbarian if you press fire and back your character jumps up to do a spinning blade attack, and if you land it onto your opponent’s neck then it takes their head off and you win instantly. A goblin then appears to drag the body away, kicking the head as they go, which is marvellously grotty. Rather than just being for show, this fatality is a crucial part of the game’s strategy, pushing you towards doing a time-consuming move which opens you up to attack — high risk for very high reward.

The decapitations were enough to get Barbarian banned in West Germany, once prosecutors managed to properly organise someone who could play the game in court and show off that feature. British magazines inevitably reported on the news of that ban with some glee. In the UK, Palace once again decided to gamble on their game not counting as depicting an act of gross violence towards humans, and escaped tabloid outrage enough to get away with that. The British Board of Film Classification wasn’t exactly ready to devote a lot of attention to games; its offices didn’t have a single one of the popular microcomputers.

That fact comes from an article in ACE magazine in 1988, which explored the possibility that various games including Barbarian had been breaking the law. ACE talked to James Ferman, long-term head of the BBFC, and asked his views. Ferman’s personal influence would go on to be largely responsible for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles becoming Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the UK, and for Namco having to change a character’s nunchucks in our version of Soul Blade into a ‘three-part staff’. On Barbarian, though, while Ferman agreed that Palace should have submitted it for classification, he dismissed any greater concern since it was just “storybook violence”. He said that he would have given it a PG rating, leaving it free for sale to all. Palace may have failed to inspire much controversy in the UK with violence, but they had a fallback.

Barbarian got a lot of positive reviews. Eugene Lacey in Commodore User concluded that “although it’s a bit sick, it has to be said that Barbarian is a real winner.” Popular Computing Weekly’s Duncan Evans wrote that “if you’re looking for Way of the Exploding Fist with sex and violence then you’ll probably find Barbarian an ideal buy”. “I think this is one of the best-presented games this year” wrote one of Amstrad Action’s reviewers, going on to say that “it’s a thrill to play the game: the action is furious and addictive.” 

Now, here are the beginnings of each of those reviews. Commodore User: “Boobs. That’s what’s upper most in my mind as Barbarian loads.” Popular Computing Weekly: “Barbarian is rapidly becoming more famous for its advertising than the actual program, thanks to the prominence given to […] Maria Whittaker”. Amstrad Action: “The advertising was sexist”. Barbarian’s reputation was initially driven less by the game itself than by its surrounding imagery.

Both Barbarian’s cover photos and its advertising came from the same photoshoot, inspired by much the same tropes as the game itself was. Steve Brown’s all-encompassing vision for a hit game included photos of a muscled male warrior in a loincloth, together with a woman in a bikini he was rescuing, posing either up against him or on the floor in front of him. For the final thing, she was played by Maria Whittaker, an 18-year-old model known for her appearances on page 3 of The Sun. As for the male role, while Arnold Schwarzenegger was not yet at the height of his fame, he was still out of Palace’s price range. So in stepped bodybuilder Michael van Wijk, later best known as Gladiators pantomime baddie Wolf. 

Steve Brown took a hands-on role in the photoshoot, including making outfit modifications with a pair of pliers. He also posed for some photos himself, with Whittaker at his side. Some games magazines printed those in their news sections. “No prizes for guessing which is the programmer…” quipped Your Computer. “Is this the silliest, most sexist piccy of the year?” asked Computer Gamer. “Well, yes, so far.” Each copy of the game came with a free poster of one of the (Brown-free) photos. By way of explanation, Pete Stone later asked “why wouldn’t we have something that every little boy would put up in their bedroom?”, a line deeply loaded with heterosexist assumptions. 

As an excellent Where Were They Now? post on Palace Software astutely observes, Barbarian’s cover and adverts didn’t depict anything that wasn’t commonplace on B-movie posters or some kinds of book covers (Brown took specific inspiration from fantasy illustrator Boris Vallejo). Yet in moving from illustration, of a kind that Brown himself had previously done, to photography, the feeling changed a lot. The results moved further away from pastiche. If Palace Software had seen what happened with The Evil Dead and thought that a smaller scale version of that uproar might be rather helpful, the photos did the trick. The adverts stood out, and computer magazines wrote about them, and Barbarian, a lot. 

This included running many complaint letters, which were a blend of those complaining about the adverts’ sexism and those applying their own. One Electron User reader lamented that “beautiful young women displayed in all their glory […] must sow seeds of discontent in the minds of men when they go home to their wives who occupy the other 98 per cent of the female population” and suggested that this might be contributing to high divorce rates. Superior Software, publishers of the Electron version of the game, contended that “our view that the advert is not in bad taste has been supported by the Advertising Standards Authority”.

The sexist tropes recognised by many magazines at the time extended into the game itself. Princess Mariana, the character whose role Maria Whittaker took, watches over some of the battles waiting to be rescued, dressed in a bikini. Upon completing the Spectrum version of Barbarian, she comes down to join your character, and reclines in recreation of one of the photoshoot poses. For the Commodore 64 and Amstrad versions, she just stands a short distance away, but there is an added message: “Thanks big boy”.

No women are credited as part of the team that made Barbarian. One Popular Computing Weekly news item referred to the “tacky” ad and then continued “if your sexism nodes withered at the thought of that, then don’t go anywhere near the Palace King’s Cross programming offices. They’re more like a shrine to the mammary gland, with blank wallspace at a high premium”. In photos of the Palace office from 1986, there is only one such poster obviously visible, so either PCW’s John Cook applied some journalistic license, or things escalated as Palace developed Barbarian.

Whatever the objections, short of the actual law coming into play, there was never really any question of British people not being able to buy Barbarian. There is a comparison to be made with the difficulties faced by modern indie developers making contentious material, like Santa Ragione seeing their game Horses blocked by various online games retailers. In the 1980s, our nascent computer games industry had a range of different shops to sell games in, including the likes of The Video Palace. And, happily, none of them were subject to the puritanical whims of American payment processors.

On the other hand, it’s entirely in keeping with the way things go now that Barbarian didn’t face much of a problem, since it wasn’t providing anything challenging to the status quo. After all, the element of its package that ended up providing the biggest shock value was literally a toned-down version of something that appeared in a mainstream newspaper every day. As such, it’s a little surprising that even one high street chain, Boots, asked for a change of cover in the name of propriety. It “didn’t want that sort of packaging in its stores”, reported Popular Computing Weekly. Boots was big enough that Palace provided them a version with an alternative, zoomed-in version of the cover photo. As the same PCW report noted, “it appears that Boots didn’t object to the semi-naked man”.

Semi-naked men and illustrations being unobjectionable were not universal rules, as Crash magazine was about to demonstrate. Its illustrator Oliver Frey had plenty of experience on that front, from a long career drawing gay erotica for various British publications. As he explained in a 2010 interview, “The rules were no erections […] no visible penetration or oral sex […] we may have stuck to the rules, but the vice squad didn’t always seem to recognise them!” Indeed, Frey and his partner Roger Kean had started Crash after the entire stock of their gay magazine HIM had been seized by the police, under the same Obscene Publications Act that was initially used against The Evil Dead and its fellow ‘video nasties’.

For Crash No. 41, the June 1987 issue, Oliver Frey provided an intense Barbarian cover showing two mostly naked men in a desperate grapple, one with his sword pointed at the other. Letter-writers complained that Crash was “dealing with EVIL” and “almost obscene”, with several asking somebody to think of the children: “what about the younger brothers and sisters of all the kids that buy your magazine?”. Crash printed all these responses on top of a monochrome recreation of the offending artwork, with a “CENSORED!!” bar covering not much of it at all.

Another correspondent warned that “continual exposure to scenes involving two bloody men, one of whom is skewering the other through the chest with a knife” would desensitise those who saw it, perhaps to the point of being “capable of committing the act themselves”. “Actually,” responded Crash’s Lloyd Mangram, “the picture does not depict anyone being ‘skewered’ — the artist didn’t go that far at all.” There was, indeed, no visible penetration.

That wasn’t enough to satisfy retail chain WHSmith, which threatened to withdraw Crash from sale and only relented when its publishers Newsfield provided a written guarantee that there would be no more of this sort of thing in future. None of the letters Crash published actually mention sexuality, but I still wonder if it was a factor in the response; the version of masculinity on the cover was a long way from that of Michael van Wijk looming impassively. Perhaps my thoughts there are conditioned by the regular modern experience of Steam excluding games for queer content not otherwise different than that of plenty of games it is happy to sell.

Barbarian went to the top of the UK charts, more than once. Looking back at the advertising and beheading controversies together, Pete Stone later ventured that “I think it honestly doubled or trebled our sales”. The people writing in to Crash to say that they were cancelling their subscriptions made no noticeable dent in its circulation figures. Maria Whittaker soon starred in her own computer game, Maria’s Christmas Box, a festive strip poker game by Anco which did not trouble the charts. The Palace group launched film production company Palace Pictures, and Stephen Woolley went on to produce many Oscar-nominated movies including Mona Lisa, Interview With the Vampire and Carol. The Scala Cinema carried on until 1993, when it was finished off by a combination of rising rents and a prosecution for running unadvertised screenings of the still-banned A Clockwork Orange.

In 1988, Palace Software released a Barbarian sequel, Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax. It reached #1 on the Commodore 64 chart and #2 on the combined formats full price chart. Similarly to Exploding Fist sequel Fist II, Barbarian II was an exploration-based adventure with fights thrown in. This time, Palace gave Princess Mariana a much more active role. Players could choose between playing as the Barbarian with an axe, or Mariana with a sword (this was a year before Golden Axe; there was no dwarf third option). The cover photo, with a returning Maria Whittaker and Michael van Wijk also saw Whittaker’s role change. She stands, sword raised, foot resting on a vanquished beast.

Of course, Steve Brown still put Mariana and Maria alike in bikini armour.

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Sources:

• Palace Software, Sham Mountebank, Where Were They Now?, 2022
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