Auf Wiedersehen Monty: The Platformer That Went on Holiday

By his fourth outing, Monty Mole had stopped being a coal miner’s mascot and started being a tourist. Auf Wiedersehen Monty, released by Gremlin Graphics in 1987 for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and MSX, sends its mole across a map of Europe built from eighty individual screens, chasing a payout large enough to buy him a Greek island and retire from the whole business of being chased by mutants and skulls. That premise sounds slight written down. What makes the game worth returning to is how seriously it takes the logistics of actually getting there.

Eighty screens as a continent, not a corridor

The structure is straightforward platforming on the level of any individual room — ladders, moving platforms, hazards to time around — but the game’s real shape is geographic. Eighty screens map out recognisable landmarks across the continent, the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa among them, and Monty can only move between countries by collecting plane tickets at airports scattered through the map. Reaching the tower in one country does nothing for you if you haven’t first worked out which airport gets you there and which valuables you’ll need to trade or carry to afford the ticket.

This turns Auf Wiedersehen Monty into something closer to a light logistics puzzle wearing a platformer’s clothes. The individual screens test reflexes in the way every Monty game had since the original Wanted: Monty Mole, but the overworld structure tests planning — which route through Europe gets you to enough airports before you run out of the inventory space or the valuables needed to keep moving. That’s a more ambitious framing than “collect items, avoid enemies,” and it’s the part of the design that separates this entry from being simply the fourth lap of a formula the series had already run three times.

The inventory limit that forces the planning

Monty can only carry four items at once — tickets, valuables, whatever the current screen has on offer — and that ceiling is the mechanism that makes the geography matter rather than just decorate. A player who grabs whatever’s nearest without thinking about the route ahead will hit the limit constantly, forced to backtrack or abandon items they’ll need later. The correct way to play is to treat each screen as a stop on a planned itinerary: know which ticket you need before you arrive at the airport that sells it, know which valuable is worth carrying across three screens versus which one is better left for a return trip.

That’s a genuinely different cognitive demand than the platforming itself, and it’s the reason the game rewards a second and third playthrough more than most single-screen collectathons from the same year. The map doesn’t change, but your understanding of the most efficient route through it does, and Auf Wiedersehen Monty is, underneath its surrealist enemy roster, quietly a game about getting better at reading a transport network.

A soundtrack doing more narrative work than the plot

The game’s most celebrated element by a wide margin is its music, and it’s worth taking seriously as a design choice rather than filing it under “nice extra.” Rob Hubbard visited Gremlin Graphics for two days specifically to collaborate with the studio’s own Ben Daglish on the title theme, and the result is a six-minute SID composition built around a wailing lead voice that neither composer’s solo catalogue quite sounds like — a genuine hybrid piece, born out of two of the platform’s best-known composers working the same instrument set in the same room. Layered on top of that title theme, the game plays a distinct national anthem — a dozen of them, one per country — every time Monty crosses a border, turning the act of travelling between screens into a small musical event rather than a silent transition.

That detail matters more than it looks like it should, because it’s the soundtrack, not the sprite work, doing the job of making the map feel like a continent rather than a spreadsheet of eighty numbered rooms. A border crossing that triggers a new national anthem tells the player, audibly, that something has changed about where they are, reinforcing the geographic framing the ticket-and-airport system was already built around. Few C64 platformers of the period used music this deliberately as a wayfinding cue rather than pure atmosphere.

The surrealism as series continuity

Auf Wiedersehen Monty’s enemy roster — crooked mutants, skulls, assorted weird creatures scattered across recognisable European landmarks — reads as an escalation of the visual strangeness the series had been building since its earliest entries, themselves openly indebted to the platform-and-ladder grammar Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy had established a few years earlier. Monty was never trying to distance itself from that lineage; if anything the fourth game leans further into the same tradition of hostile, faintly absurd single-screen tableaux, just relocated from a mine to a continent.

That continuity matters for reading the game correctly. It’s not attempting satire of European travel or a serious geography lesson — the landmarks are set dressing for the same kind of screen-by-screen platform challenge the series had always offered, and the humour sits closer to Jet Set Willy’s household surrealism than to anything pointed. What’s new isn’t the tone. It’s the decision to hang that tone on an actual transport network with real logistics attached, rather than a single sprawling house.

Why the tourist framing is the design, not the decoration

It would be easy to dismiss the European travelogue as a thin coat of paint over a fourth instalment that needed a new hook to justify its existence, and there’s a reasonable version of that criticism — the individual screens of platforming don’t reinvent much beyond what the previous three Monty games had already established. But the framing earns its place because the airport-and-ticket system genuinely changes what a completionist run of the game asks of the player, compared to a game where every screen’s contents are simply there to be grabbed on first contact. Knowing that a valuable found early might be worth more held onto for a later trade, or that a ticket bought too early wastes inventory space you’ll need at the next border, means the map has to be read as a system with dependencies rather than as eighty independent puzzle boxes. The tourism isn’t decoration sitting on top of the platforming. It’s the reason the platforming has a structure larger than the individual screen at all.

That’s worth dwelling on because it’s a genuinely uncommon move for a mid-1980s platformer to make. Most games in the genre at the time were content to string single-screen or single-room challenges together with minimal connective tissue beyond a shared aesthetic — get through room one, get through room two, and so on until the game ends. Auf Wiedersehen Monty instead builds connective tissue that actually constrains how a player should approach the individual rooms, which is closer to what a light strategy layer does in a much larger game than what a platformer usually bothers with.

Reading it against the rest of the Monty run

The clearest companion piece on the desk is Monty on the Run, the entry that immediately follows this one in the series and which shares the same basic bet that a Monty game’s music can carry as much of the design’s identity as its level layouts do — Hubbard’s work on that later title extends the same logic Daglish and Hubbard’s collaboration establishes here, that a C64 platformer’s soundtrack can function as a structural element rather than mere backing noise. Setting the two side by side shows a series that kept experimenting with what a “level” even meant for Monty — a house, then a police chase, then a continent — while treating the music as the one constant thread tying the experiments together.

It’s also worth thinking about Auf Wiedersehen Monty alongside the format it shipped in. This was, for most buyers, a tape-loading game on Spectrum and C64 alike, which means the eighty-screen map arrived at the end of several minutes of patience before a single ladder was climbed — a detail easy to forget from a modern vantage point, and one that makes the game’s insistence on rewarding careful route-planning over reckless collection feel of a piece with the era’s broader relationship to time. Nothing about 1987 home computing let you rush carelessly through a mistake; Auf Wiedersehen Monty’s inventory limit and airport logistics just make that general truth into an explicit mechanic. The tape load itself was part of the same discipline the game asks of a player once it’s actually running — a format that trained patience before the cartridge even reached the title screen, and a design that then kept asking for exactly that patience at every airport and ticket counter across eighty screens of continent.

Where to play it now

Auf Wiedersehen Monty runs well on both C64 and Spectrum emulation, and the eighty-screen structure suits short, planning-focused sessions rather than a single long sitting — the natural unit of play is “get to the next airport,” which is a comfortably modern-feeling chunk size for a thirty-eight-year-old game. The Hubbard-Daglish title theme is worth hearing on its own even outside the game, and turns up on SID-music compilations independent of the platformer it was written for.

Spoilers below

The endgame condition is exactly what the premise promises and nothing more elaborate: accumulate enough wealth through the valuables scattered across the map’s eighty screens to afford the Greek island Monty has been chasing since the title screen, at which point the game ends on that purchase rather than on any twist to the travelogue framing. There’s no final boss waiting at a specific landmark and no dark turn in the plot — the entire back half of the game is simply the front half’s logistics puzzle, played out to its planned conclusion, which is the most honest kind of ending a game built around route-planning could offer.