Iain Mew
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superchartisland.com
Iain Mew
@superchartisland.com
820 followers 670 following 1.4K posts
Writing a British history of popular video games one UK sales chart #1 at a time. Now in 1986. Also into pop music and writing on The Singles Jukebox. He/him. http://www.superchartisland.com
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superchartisland.com
www.superchartisland.com/v
The ‘V’ in V stands for Visitors (its enemies) or Victory (its slogan of rebellion). The show was conceived by Kenneth Johnson, who had previously been showrunner for the series The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk. Inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, he wanted to make a series about resistance to a fascist takeover of the United States. As Johnson told it to Vanity Fair in 2023, an NBC executive responded that “I don’t know that Americans will get fascism” and asked “couldn’t it be an outside force? Like the Soviets or the Chinese?”. They settled on V's resistance being against disguised reptilian aliens.
January 5, 2026 at 1:24 PM
superchartisland.com
The cover of V the computer game for Commodore 64 A screenshot of V for Commodore 64 showing the player character on board an alien spaceship
December 29, 2025 at 10:35 AM
superchartisland.com
Blue Prince (2025)
A screengrab from CBeebies animation Hey Duggee, specifically The Lost Property Badge (S4E12). The Squirrels are excited because they have just opened a previously hidden safe, on a wall which also has many different pictures on it. Inside the safe is a blueprint, which will allow them to find the hidden Lost Property Room
December 28, 2025 at 4:53 PM
superchartisland.com
This year, across 45 posts about the history of 45 different UK chart #1 games, my blog has gone from June 1983 to March 1986. A thread of some highlights...
An edited screenshot of The Hobbit, with text reading: The Hobbit Melbourne House 1982 ZX Spectrum #1 in MRIB all formats 18 June 1983 An edited screenshot of Elite. Text reads: ELITE Publisher: Acornsoft Platform: BBC Micro Year: 1984 Position: #1 Chart: ASP Non-Arcade Date: W/E 27 October 1984 The game Elite is reasonably fabled for space action and open world gameplay. An edited screenshot of The Way of the Exploding Fist. Text reads: Way of the Exploding Fist Melbourne House 1985 Commodore 64 #1 in Gallup combined formats Fortnight ending 20 July 1985 An edited screenshot of The Way of the Tiger. Text reads: The Way of the Tiger Gremlin Graphics 1986 Spectrum/CPC/MSX Combined formats #1 w/e 22 March 1986
December 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM
superchartisland.com
Safe to say from the stats for each year my new approach to my blog this year has worked out
A screenshot of a bar graph which shows the number of visitors and views on my blog steadily decreasing from 2021 onwards until reaching a new peak this year
December 22, 2025 at 9:43 PM
superchartisland.com
I keep getting a meal kit advert that starts off with the founders introducing themselves as a husband and wife team and seconds later has a shot of this bus going past
A bus with an advert on the side that reads "Divorce made kinder"
December 20, 2025 at 9:07 PM
superchartisland.com
My favourite albums of 2025
CD albums arranged in a square. 1. Rose Gray - Louder, Please 2. Saya Gray - Saya 3. Jade - That's Showbiz Baby! 4. Jens Lekman - Songs for Other People's Weddings 5. F5ve - Sequence 01 6. Shura - I Got Too Sad for My Friends 7. ALT BLK ERA - Rave Immortal 8. Ichiko Aoba - Luminescent Creatures 9. Jennie - Ruby [not pictured because it didn't properly come out on CD] 10. CMAT - Euro-Country
December 16, 2025 at 7:04 PM
superchartisland.com
www.superchartisland.com/uridium
Before the end of 1986, Andrew Braybrook followed up Uridium with Alleykat, another fast-paced spaceship game but with a focus on racing. It didn’t receive quite as positive a reaction but was a #8 hit. He describes something beginning to shift, though. After a couple of years of awards ceremonies, signing autographs and sitting next to Jools Holland, the invites dried up. “Something happened in 1987 that changed the awards ceremonies such that instead of “Best arcade game”, “Best programmer”, or “Best platformer”, the awards became “Best publisher”, “Best advert” or “Best marketing”. Almost as if the publishers decided that they didn`t want developers in the limelight any more as they weren`t paying for the advertising space.” (A world of game award ceremonies dictated by the concerns of advertising… imagine that).
December 11, 2025 at 9:02 AM
superchartisland.com
That looked implausible and it turns out it's because the Official Scottish Albums Chart is a sales cope chart (note streaming missing from the description). Choke Enough was actually a place higher in the equivalent UK sales chart that week.
Official Scottish Albums Chart 14 February 2025 - 20 February 2025 Compiled by the Official Charts Company, Scotland's biggest albums of the week, based on sales of digital bundles, CDs, vinyl and other formats, across a seven day period. Official Albums Chart Top 100 14 February 2025 - 20 February 2025 The UK's Top 100 biggest artist albums of the week, compiled by the Official Charts Company based on sales of CDs, downloads, vinyl, audio streams and video streams. View the biggest albums of
December 6, 2025 at 6:05 PM
superchartisland.com
This cheese flavour 雞蛋仔 was really good - kind of a combined egg waffle and cheese toastie taste
A photo of me wearing a multicoloured stripey jumper and holding up a cheese flavour egg waffle/雞蛋仔. It says 'Eggcelence' on it.
December 6, 2025 at 3:31 PM
superchartisland.com
I always enjoy when I'm reading an old games magazine interview and a music comparison comes up (here from Andrew Braybrook talking about game design on 16-bit computers in 1989)

archive.org/details/theo...
too much machine space is being devoted to presentation, at the expense of gameplay. It is something of a sad situation that good presentation is mandatory to impress publishers and professional buyers who often will not actually play the game at all and you, yes YOU, the end-user are the first to discover that there is no gameplay. So what's the answer? As with the music business, I think it's important to pay attention to who has written the software, not who has published it. After all you don't go out and buy an album because it's on the Vertigo label, you buy it because it's by Rush.
December 1, 2025 at 2:50 PM
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The assumption of a low level of knowledge of American sports among the British computer-owning audience in the mid-'80s was well demonstrated by Imagine. In 1985 they released a game called World Series Baseball, and then they decided on the perfect title for a follow-up:
A ZX Spectrum screenshot of a game title screen. It reads: Imagine Software Present World Series Basketball Press any key for main menu
December 1, 2025 at 10:47 AM
superchartisland.com
I rememeber it, not least from @bradshoup.bsky.social's contribution
Screenshot of a @bshoup quote tweet of the original tweet. It reads: i heard there was a secret cord/you plug it in/and you meet the lord
December 1, 2025 at 7:05 AM
superchartisland.com
uridiumauthor.blogspot.com/2025/10/here...
So, with people keeping the retro flames going and indie programmers writing new C64 games, it was a complete surprise to me how much interest there still is. The old games seem to be freely available on the internet. How do I feel about that? On the one hand, my sales royalty bonus arrangement is long gone, I was not going to be earning anything from my past works, unlike musicians who continue to get royalties from their past works, and TV stars who get repeat fees. They clearly had better unions!
November 28, 2025 at 5:25 PM
superchartisland.com
Ichigo!
Ichigo, a strawberry-themed cousin of the Prince from Katamari
November 26, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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I wasn't expecting the throughline from Nintendo's Famicom version of Spartan-X to Super Mario Bros. to be quite so visually obvious (we wanted to get away from black backgrounds, said Miyamoto)
A screenshot from Spartan-X for the Famicom, showing part of a horizontally scrolling level with an orange/brown floor and a sky blue background, replacing the lilac of the arcade game A screenshot of world 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. on Famicom, part of a horizontally scrolling level with brown floor and sky blue background
November 24, 2025 at 3:59 PM
superchartisland.com
Great write-up! I had a similar thought on paradigms shifting at the start of my Singles Jukebox review at the time:
An excerpt from my review of "Angel of My Dreams" on The Singles Jukebox. Iain Mew: Some of the joy “Angel of My Dreams” has brought is that it’s 80% of the way to being a maximalist Rina Sawayama song, and yet is also a persistent enough UK hit to have re-entered the top ten in its fourth week. The range of possibilities looks newly widened.
November 23, 2025 at 11:32 AM
superchartisland.com
Kind of the vibe of the Temple of Time in Ocarina of Time already
Screenshot of the Temple of Time in Ocarina of Time, looking like it could be in the Home Counties if it wasn't for the volcano in the background
November 17, 2025 at 9:46 PM
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I didn't realise that Rare made the first WWF game. According to Rock'n Wrestle devs Beam Software, that was only because Beam unintentionally ruled themselves out by having already signed up to make a Sgt. Slaughter game
Title screen for WWF WrestleMania (Rare/Acclaim, 1989, NES) Title screen for Sgt. Slaughter's Mat Wars (Beam/Mindscape, 1989, Commodore 64)
November 17, 2025 at 10:26 AM
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A games writer already bored of damsel in distress plots in early 1986:

archive.org/details/comm...
A screenshot of Chris Anderson's review of Kung-Fu Master in Commodore User No. 30, March 1986. “The idea is to progress through five floors of a temple in a bid to rescue a beautiful captive maiden, yawn”
November 14, 2025 at 5:27 PM
superchartisland.com
#TheTwen2ie5
Day 37

Mura Masa ft. Yeule - We Are Making Out
(2024, UK/Singapore)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdKM...

Sharing my Singles Jukebox writeup of this one
Iain Mew: Yeule has long had a thing for exploring and collapsing dichotomies. They started off 2022’s Glitch Princess with a whole spoken track of doing that; the most triumphant moment on 2023’s amazing Softscars was a song called “Cyber Meat” with angels and demons and “there’s a boy and girl inside me too.” The key moment on “We Are Making Out” is when its headlong makeout journey gets to “we are making out online/we are making out in real life”: making out as something immediate and physical, but also making out as a state of mind. The litany of London transport routes is transformed into an attempt to become one with the entire city, in the hope that it might intensify the feeling. Mura Masa matches all that by taking a hedonistic “I Love It” grind and colliding it with something much sweeter, in a way that adds something to both.
November 12, 2025 at 6:54 AM
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The moody opening stage of Little Big Adventure 2
A screenshot from Little Big Adventure 2. The main character stands near a woman with an umbrella and an injured dragon. It is dark and raining.
November 10, 2025 at 5:10 PM
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Google's predictive results certainly suggest that it doesn't!
A search for "pulp discography" Google offers Different Class A search for "blur discography" Google offers Parklife A search for "elbow discography" Google offers The Seldom Seen Kid A search for "Oasis discography" Google offers Definitely Maybe
November 8, 2025 at 9:09 PM
superchartisland.com
To be fair his face there is probably about as close to the final version as the one on that game's cover is
The cover of Dizzy: The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure, with a weird looking Dizzy falling down a waterfall
November 4, 2025 at 12:16 PM
superchartisland.com
This has a quote and a link to a Guardian article (not that I can access it) digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcont...
Some British shops refused to stock Theatre Europe, and Raid Over Moscow was condemned by no less a person than Monsignor Bruce Kent, then general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who thundered against the game, calling it “barbaric and disgusting”.
November 3, 2025 at 8:34 AM