I thought the nigh on 20 years I waited for Shenmue 3 was approaching some sort of record, but this – this is something else. Jetboard Joust, which just hit Steam late last week, is a sequel to the ZX Spectrum’s Skateboard Joust, released way, way back in 1988. It’s fair to say, though, that there weren’t quite so many people waiting with bated breath for this particular follow-up.
Jetboard JoustDeveloper: BitBull LtdPublisher: Freedom! GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC
“Yeah, it was a bit crap,” admits Skateboard Joust’s developer James Closs tells me some 30 plus years later. “I mean, that’s part of the reason I started doing this – it was a bit of a joke, because Skateboard Joust was not very good.”
Skateboard Joust was made back when James was 16. He had never played Joust, the game from which it took some inspiration, but had seen a screenshot once. He’d never ridden a skateboard but knew it was all the rage, so he fashioned a game to capitalise on the trend. Back then the term granny bait used to be bandied around – a game designed to trick people into buying their grandchildren. By James’ own admission, Skateboard Joust could well have fit the term.
He started coding with the ZX Spectrum his dad bought home from work – having exhausted the games available, he started by hacking the level map in Jet Set Willy for a project that morphed into Subterranean Nightmare. Getting a publisher back then used to be a lot simpler. A lot, lot simpler – it’s how a 16-year-old short on cash could decide to make a quick buck by knocking out a video game, which is what Skateboard Joust was all about.
“We’d just send stuff off to publishers, and there was such a market for it,” he says. “Sometimes we would go around trade shows and things like that, that there actually, there wasn’t that much of that.”
So it was just a case of sending a tape off in an envelope and waiting to get a cheque back?
“Actually, joking aside, it wasn’t that far away from that. You know, it was a lot simpler back then. You did send off an envelope, and then you did get a reasonably big cheque. I think I got paid two and a half thousand pounds for Skateboard Joust, which was a significant amount of money back then. It lasted me through to the end of my college journey, the money I made from that. And you know, I bought a car.