Monty on the Run: The Music That Made It

There is a small category of games whose soundtrack has escaped them completely. The tune goes on tour. The tune gets covered by a metal band, arranged for orchestra, played to a room of people who have never held a joystick, while the game it belongs to sits in a box in a loft in Sheffield. Monty on the Run is the purest example the Commodore 64 produced, and the odd thing is that the game underneath is perfectly good.

Gremlin Graphics released it in 1985, written by Peter Harrap, the third outing for a mole who had started life the year before in Wanted: Monty Mole — a game whose premise was a miner crossing a picket line during the actual miners’ strike, which is the most 1984-in-Britain sentence available. Monty had since been jailed, and a second game had handed you a stoat to break him out with. Now he was on the run for real, heading for the coast across a flick-screen landscape of England.

The Freedom Kit

Before any of that, the game does something almost nothing else in 1985 did: it makes you commit to a build before you have any information.

The opening screen presents a scrolling carousel of objects. You choose five. That set is your Freedom Kit for the entire run, and there is no shop, no second chance, no way to swap. Then the game starts and you find out what the objects were for by reaching a place where you needed one.

This is a genuinely interesting design object and it is also, by any modern standard, indefensible. The correct set exists. Choose wrong and you will play for twenty minutes and arrive somewhere that cannot be passed without the thing you did not take, at which point the game is over in the sense that matters while continuing to work perfectly in the sense that does not. It will not tell you. It does not warn you. You simply run out of world.

I want to defend it slightly, because the instinct behind it is real. A choice made in ignorance and paid for an hour later is a commitment, and commitment is a thing games are structurally bad at extracting from us. Everything modern is respeccable. Everything is reversible. Monty’s carousel is asking you to be the kind of player who lives with a decision, and the horror of arriving at that gap with the wrong five items in your pockets is a legitimate feeling that almost no game since has been brave or rude enough to give me.

The reason it does not work is information, and it is the same failure as an unwinnable state in a Sierra adventure. A commitment is only meaningful when you can reason about it. Monty gives you pictures of objects with no stated function and a landscape you have never seen, so the “choice” is a lottery, and the actual 1985 solution was to buy a magazine and copy the list. Which everybody did. Which means the design’s real effect was to sell issues of Zzap!64 and Crash, and I suspect nobody involved was upset about that.

Compare it with the choice at the front of Head Over Heels, where the two bodies’ abilities are demonstrated immediately and the whole game is you reasoning about a constraint you understand. Same era, same country, same appetite for cruelty — and one of them gives you the premises.

The game underneath

Harrap’s platformer is better than its reputation, which is a strange thing to say about a game with a five-star reputation attached to the wrong department.

It is a flick-screen run of roughly sixty locations, each a static screen of platforms, ledges and moving hazards, and the design vocabulary is precise. Objects move on fixed cycles. Death is contact. Progress is a matter of reading a screen, finding the rhythm in it, and executing a short sequence of jumps at the right moment in the cycle. Harrap’s jump has a fixed arc — you commit at take-off and the air offers no corrections — which puts the game in the same British lineage of locomotion-as-obstacle as Cauldron II the following year, though Monty at least consents to stand still.

What makes it work is legibility. Every screen is a small self-contained puzzle whose solution is visible from the doorway if you look properly, and the pleasure is the four seconds between understanding a screen and performing it. That is a good loop. It is the loop Manic Miner established and the loop half of British 8-bit development spent the decade refining, and Monty on the Run is one of the better executions of it: fair, readable, mean.

The Sheffield house style is all over it too — Gremlin’s games had a scruffy, cartoonish, faintly sarcastic personality that separated them from the slicker London labels, and Monty is a mole with a face, running through a version of England that includes a fair amount of visual grumbling about it.

The three-voice cathedral

And then there is the music, and I have to be careful here, because the temptation is to write about it the way people write about wine.

Rob Hubbard’s Monty on the Run theme is a long-form composition for three oscillators. Three is the whole of the SID chip: three voices, one filter, and whatever the programmer’s ingenuity can do with them at fifty interrupts a second. Hubbard’s theme sounds like a full band because the voices are being time-shared with a violence that is audible if you know to listen for it. A voice plays the bassline; for a fraction of a frame it stops and provides percussion out of filtered noise; it returns to the bass before your ear notices the hole. The chords are arpeggios — the notes cycled so fast the ear stacks them — which is why the era’s music has that specific bubbling shimmer and why every homage to it since starts by imitating exactly that artefact.

The theme is around three minutes long, it develops, it modulates, and it contains a section widely noted as a nod to Charles Williams’s “Devil’s Galop”, the galloping orchestral piece that British listeners knew as the Dick Barton theme — which is an entirely apt thing to quote in a game about a fugitive fleeing across England. Hubbard was writing to a title screen and produced a piece that has since been performed by symphony orchestras and covered several hundred times.

The lesson is the same one Sanxion teaches from the loading screen: the SID’s poverty made composers write melodies. When you have three voices you cannot hide behind texture or production. There is nowhere for a bad tune to live. So the C64 produced a generation of writers who were forced into the one skill that survives every format change, and forty years later the tunes are on streaming services and the games are in emulators.

Where to play it, and what to do first

The C64 version is the one that matters; Spectrum and Amstrad conversions exist and neither has the chip. It emulates instantly and it will take an afternoon.

Do this. Load it, and then sit on the title screen for three minutes and let the theme play all the way through before you touch anything. That was the ritual in 1985, and the reason was practical: you had waited five minutes for the tape, the music was the reward for the wait, and the game arrived as a bonus. Then look up the Freedom Kit, because life is short and Peter Harrap has been punishing people for forty years and you have nothing to prove.

The game is good. The tune is immortal. Gremlin got a bargain.

Spoilers below

The Freedom Kit’s correct contents are the game’s actual secret, and the reason the answer is a list rather than a principle is the honest criticism of it.

There are five slots and a longer carousel to pick them from, and the required set is fixed. Specific obstacles later in the run each demand a specific item, the carousel carries decoys alongside the necessities, and none of the objects announce what they are for. Every published solution from the period is a straight enumeration of the correct five, because there is no way to derive the list from anything the game shows you before you commit to it.

The consequence is a game with a hidden fail state that arrives long after the mistake. You do not lose. You keep playing, competently, for a considerable stretch of a landscape you have paid attention to, and the loss has already happened somewhere behind you on the title screen. Sierra’s adventures were doing the same thing in the same years and got two decades of criticism for it, and the criticism was correct. A game may take everything from you provided it tells you the price before you pay.

Which means the Freedom Kit is a lock with a printed key rather than a puzzle. The generous reading — the one I half believe — is that Harrap knew exactly this, that the magazines were the intended distribution channel for the answer, and that the whole apparatus was a piece of 1985 social design: the game shipped incomplete, and the missing part travelled by playground.