Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Frankie Goes to Hollywood was developed by Denton Designs and published by Ocean Software in 1985. It appeared on the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum and is built on the music and image of the Liverpool band of the same name — a group that at the time was dominating the UK charts with Welcome to the Pleasuredome and the singles Relax and Two Tribes while provoking enough for the BBC to briefly ban them from broadcast.

As a game it defies category. You start as a colourless figure in an ordinary Liverpool house and the goal is to become a real person — the game tracks several personality attributes as percentages and you raise them through what you do inside the houses. You walk through rooms, search them, collect items and trigger minigames that switch genre from screen to screen: a shooting gallery here, a puzzle there, and elsewhere something best described as a musical collage. The Pleasuredome waits at the end.

Denton Designs was staffed by former Imagine people and had a reputation for doing things differently. Frankie is the textbook example: it is closer to an interactive album than a conventional game, and contemporary critics praised exactly that nerve.

It has aged strangely. Without a guide, or a willingness to experiment, the opening is baffling — the game never states its objective and the percentage system is unintuitive. Movement is slow and some of the minigames are simply uninteresting now.

It is still worth loading if you are curious about a British scene in which a pop licence did not mean a mechanically churned-out product but an opportunity to make something odd. The SID arrangements, incidentally, still sound good.