Grange Hill: The Computer Game. Bloody hell
"He steals to keep his habit, and makes addicts of children. He is dead, and soon you will be too.”
I’d never heard of the Grange Hill game until recently, but I was chillingly familiar with the grim TV drama it’s based on. Phil Redmond’s “gritty” (terrifying) depiction of a London comprehensive peaked during Thatcher’s Britain of the ‘80s and scared the shit out of a generation of children, who over teatime television learned that they’d be injected with heroin and beaten by a Victorian schoolmaster on the first day of big school.
In the 8-bit micro game, you play Gonch (for this feature, I’ve been playing on the Speccy and C64, but there’s an Amstrad version too). Would you like to see a picture of our hero?
This is not a joke, and neither is the story you’re plonked into. Gonch’s Walkman has been confiscated by the maths teacher, and if you don’t get it back Mum will give you an era acceptable beating. Gonch decides to break in to school with his mate Hollo to get the tape deck back, which sets up a strange combination of sideways “action” and type-in adventure.
The screen’s split in two. In the top half, you use the stick to move Gonch. When you see an item, like a library book, you can activate the bottom part to PICK UP and, when the time’s right, USE it. Then you type in how (STAND ON BOOK).
Grange Hill is a bleak place. Early on, you scramble atop a broken phone box. Later, you get your arm ripped off by a dog called Rolf. There’s a pissy canal you’ve got to fish something out of, and if you make the fatal mistake of pushing left on the first screen of the game you’ll get attacked by your own mother unless you’re holding the Walkman. This software also includes the grimmest game over screen of the age. In a nod to the show’s Just Say No anti-drugs campaign, you’ll find a pusher in the filthy local park. Score some powder and your quest ends immediately:
“There is an empty look in his eyes as he snatches the money from your hand. His face is pale and drawn. His body [is] thin and unfed. He steals to keep his habit, and makes addicts of children. He is dead, and soon you will be too.”
Not exactly Dizzy, is it?
So how’s this thing play? ‘Cos I know what you’re thinking. Yes, it sounds desolate - but also kind of fun. You get to climb in the school’s air vents, throw a dead cat at a bully and smash down the staff room door. Great stuff, right?
Unfortunately, Grange Hill was rushed out for the summer ’87 school holidays and is executed poorly. It’s full of spelling mistakes, bugs and crashes (the C64 version is by far the worst offender). If you manage to get through a game without the code defeating you, the shoddy design definitely will. You’re far more likely to die from tripping over a traffic bollard or a set of false teeth at the OAP’s home than you are a beating from the dealer. Those teeth are a particular clusterfuck, biting you over and over unless you waste an inventory slot and carry them for the whole game. And even when you’ve done that, there’s a glass eye waiting to end you mere pixels away.
And then there’s Hollo, who does nothing but follow you around all game – except when he stops and complains that this is all a waste of time. You have to trudge back a whole screen and type COME ON over and over to the useless git. Right at the end, you find out why he’s there: he’s got the key to the school staff room, but you’ll probably be so frustrated by his pissing about that you’ll never see that screen.
What Grange Hill smacks the most of is missed opportunity. I mean, Gonch? What about Ziggy, Tucker or Mr. Bronson? There was a massive world to get stuck into here. Imagine a whole school to wander about, with all of the show’s characters. Perhaps with lessons to attend and naughty stuff to get up to. Yes, imagine Skool Daze: the game Grange Hill should’ve been. As it is, this software is worth a look as a crushing time capsule of 1980s Britain – but not for very long. And here’s where I end with a Just Say No gag. Sorry.