Crawley Strikes Back – 1987

The year was 1987 and video games were taking off in a big way. LUNK had been quiet for a while and it wasn’t until the release of ‘Crawley Strikes Back’ that people realised why. Freck and Cooper had secretly been working on the music for the highly anticipated title from MUF games.

Crawley Strikes Back is based on a real life creature that lives in Clumzo. A sad and lonely soul who is still to this day, seen crawling around the city backstreets. With some desperate hope that someone would feel sorry enough for him, and put him out of his misery. In CSB you got the chance to do exactly this and end Crawley’s life yourself. Unlike every other game, the object to this one was not to survive, but to DIE. You control Crawley by crawling him up the side of a volcano and attempt to chuck him in. There’s one problem… The hand of God is out to slow you down. The hand of God attempts to save him by dropping various items (vitamins, health, fruit, veg) which you have to dodge.

CSB was an enormous success and much like Crawley, LUNK were striking back and had crawled their way back to the top of their game. There was no stopping them.

Here’s a video clip of Freck completing the game. One of the very few people who could actually do this.

TRIVIA: A few years later a sequel was made ‘Cooking with Crawley’ but was nowhere near as popular. The game and music were exactly the same except Crawley was wearing a chef’s hat and instead of a volcano, you crawl up the side of a cooker and chuck him into a saucepan.

Below: Review and article from videogames magazine ‘Floppy 2nds’.

Below: Extremely rare interview my dad gave a couple of years after Crawley Strikes Back. I believe this was the only interview he ever did.