Alongside the likes of Scooby Doo, Hong Kong Phooey, Popeye and a never-ending stream of Looney Tunes stuff, you could always rely on The Flintstones to turn up on TV again sooner or later throughout the entire seventies and eighties! That said, there was one time in particular I became a really avid fan of the latter, and is probably how it ended up at number seventeen on the beyond-nerdy and probably desperately sad list of my top twenty-five favourite TV shows I somehow got into back when I looked at Super Stunt Man on the ZX Spectrum here! Anyway, that time is the end of 1986, and the BBC has just relaunched its Breakfast Time news and current affairs programme, which comes on at seven in the morning. Before that, we’d previously had the delights of an hour of its telly-text information service, Ceefax, which was a regular feature when they had nothing better to show. Not that anything in that time slot had ever previously affected me in the slightest – apart from a bit of Super Chicken just before seven on ITV, there was nothing happening for kids on regular school days and therefore no reason to get up before you really had to! However, this revamp to crack of dawn scheduling now reduced that Ceefax snooze-fest to thirty minutes, and suddenly there was a reason to set the alarm for half-past six because that was the new daily slot for The Flintstones!

In retrospect that doesn’t seem particularly early at all anymore but I remember my parents wondering what the hell I was now doing up at that time every day! I was never much of a bed person anyway so it didn’t take much excuse, and I really did like The Flintstones, even if at age fourteen I was probably borderline too old (in teenager terms at least), which is a point I’ll come back to shortly, but in the meantime, let’s have a quick recap… The Flintstones had actually been around for over twenty-six years by then, having first aired in September 1960, then run in its original format over the course of six seasons, until April 1966. First cartoon to ever get an American prime-time TV slot too! It’s more or less a sitcom, set in the “modern” Stone Age town of Bedrock, complete with all the mid-20th century suburban America mod-cons (and tropes) but in a prehistoric wrapper, and revolves around the (mis)adventures of two caveman families, the Flintstones and the Rubbles. Alternatively, you could spin all that around and say it’s about modern society existing in prehistory but either way, you’ve got Fred Flintstone, husband, father and bronto-crane operator, his spendaholic but otherwise far more sensible wife Wilma, and, later on, baby Pebbles, plus their pet dinosaur Dino, which we know is a sabre-toothed cat from when it throws Fred out of the house after he tries putting it out for the night during the end credits, but I’m not sure it ever appears beyond that! Then there’s Barney Rubble, Fred’s best friend, next-door neighbour and the cause of most of his temper tantrums, who may or may not also work at the quarry but definitely shares Fred’s passion for ten-pin bowling and golf; his wife is Betty, also Wilma’s best friend and with a similar habit for spending money, and then there’s their pet dinosaur-kangaroo-thing called Hoppy, and later Bamm-Bamm, their adopted son.

And then there were over a hundred other characters who came and went, including Mr Slate, the always angry (at Fred at least!) gravel-pit boss; Fred’s nemesis, Arnold the paperboy; another friend, Joe Rockhead; Sam Slagheap, head of Fred and Barney’s Water Buffalo Lodge; The hillbilly Hatrock family who end up feuding with the Flintstones; The Gruesomes, like a cartoon Addams Family, who move in next door; and I’ve got to mention The Great Gazoo, the exiled alien from the final season who can only be seen by Fred, Barney and the kids! They all get up to all sorts of madcap stuff too, from Fred buying a stolen baby grand piano for Wilma’s birthday to Barney turning invisible, but I think my favourite episode was from the first season, when Fred and Barney bought a restaurant at the local drive-in cinema without telling Wilma and Betty, and ended up in hot water thanks to the pair of sexy waitresses they inherited with it! I think that adult appeal is what kept me going as a teenager and why I still love it today, but it’s also got that wonderful, vintage Hanna-Barbara illustration and minimal animation, not to mention some very vintage humour, although their never-ending escapades and slapstick shenanigans will never grow old, which also goes for that iconic theme tune… And, of course, shouting Yabba Dabba Doo! 

Into the seventies, along came The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show, The Flintstone Comedy Hour, The New Fred and Barney Show, and a load more original TV series that have pretty much continued appearing to this day. Then there have been all the TV specials, the TV films, the compilations, a pair of pretty popular live action films from 1994 and 2000, and who can forget the immortal wrestling crossover from 2015, The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown! I want to turn out attention to the 1988 video game now though, which I think was the second, following Quicksilva’s dreadful Yabba Dabba Doo in 1986, but by my reckoning we’re now up to about fifteen of them in total, of which I’m really struggling to think of any beyond The Flintstones: BurgerTime in Bedrock – which is a decent Game Boy Color skinned-remake of the 1982 platforming classic – that I can remember anyone ever saying anything good about at all! And yes, that does also go for the game we’re about to look at, which I very distinctly remember seeing advertised in Computer & Video Games magazine through the first few months of 1988, but even more so, a screenshot on the back of the Spectrum version box I picked up to have a look at in a shop somewhere, showing Fred painting the living room wall that I thought captured the cartoon so perfectly! But at the grand old age of sixteen by then, there was no way The Flintstones was competing with the likes of Target: Renegade and Robocop, however authentic, and anyway, I was already looking longingly at all those fancy 16-bit flight simulations, photo-realistic graphical text adventures and arcade-perfect conversions by now, so no chance… 

And the reviews that soon followed the advert repeatedly informing me it was as exciting as actually painting a living room wall didn’t help much either! I don’t know why it’s taken me until now to go back to it and find out for myself though! It’s not like I haven’t since gone out of my way to experience the absolute worst of the Spectrum that I fortunately missed out on at the time, like Jack and the Beanstalk and Punchy, as well as the very best and everything in-between, but for some reason, some games just fall through the cracks, number seventeen favourite TV show ever or not! Anyway, flicking through an old copy of C&VG and seeing that advert again recently got me thinking that there’s no time like the present, so here we are! The game was developed by Teque Software, who were behind the fantastic ports of top-down combat-racer Badlands, as well as Continental Circus, Blasteroids, Crash magazine’s immortal Moley Christmas and many others! It was published by GrandSlam, though I don’t know how widespread that was – it also came out on the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amiga and Atari ST the same year, and then a version appeared on the Sega Master System in 1991, but I’m not sure it ever came out anywhere outside of Europe on anything. I’ve never played any of those other versions either, so I’ll see how we get on with the Spectrum one, then maybe at least have a look at one of the 16-bit games for comparison later.

The game begins with Fred looking forward to the weekend, and especially the final of the Bedrock Super Bowl contest! Unfortunately, he’s quickly brought down to earth when Wilma reminds him he’s promised to paint the living room before her mother arrives. Sounds strangely familiar… Anyway, no painting, no bowling, so the first of the game’s four levels has Fred not only painting the walls as commanded but also keeping baby Pebbles out of trouble and in her pen because the minute your back is turned, she’s going to be crawling around with her marker pen and drawing all over your hard work! As the levels are pretty distinct, and there’s only a few of them, I think I’ll run through each one standalone, although I think they all share the same problem of the instructions not really telling the whole story! For example, in this one, they tell you to press fire to paint but that’s it. Now, working out that walking into Pebbles will automatically pick her up, for example, soon becomes apparent anyway, and the same for dropping her back into her pen, or then picking up your living dino-squirrel-thing paintbrush every time it subsequently does a runner, or regularly topping it up at the paint pot. But what about that ladder to get at hard to reach bits of wall? Well, initially I thought maybe Wilma won’t moan if most of it is done but if you so much as leave one of the annoying tiny specks you have to keep going back and covering, she’ll make you start all over again! And I mean literally one pixel worth of speck when she reappears, which seems to be foreshadowed by an egg timer, although that mysteriously refills once it’s done, and she just turns up whenever she wants! Anyway, it turns out you definitely can’t get away with leaving the top of the wall either, so that ladder needs to get moved… And I tried to move it so many times, holding fire and pulling from the front, pushing from behind and doing both right and left of it, and then doing it without fire, and sometimes there was a hint of movement even if I didn’t know why but at least I was onto something!

Eventually, I worked out you need to pixel-perfectly position some of Fred between its casters then move left and right and it will come with you! Something else I then worked out is you can completely ignore Pebbles for the majority of this section, which is mostly going to involve moving the ladder a bit, filling up with paint, climbing up, pressing fire a couple of times to get it on one side of the top half of the wall, going down a bit than facing the other way and going back up to do that bit, get down and repeat across the whole room. Meanwhile, Pebbles has covered the lower half of the wall in scribbles but that’s fine because you have to paint it now anyway, so you do whichever bit she’s not near, dump her back in the pen, do the next bit, dump her once more and finish it off, with just enough time to make sure you’ve not missed even the tiniest bit! And while it’s just as much fun as I’ve just described, at least it’s not frustrating anymore, and Wilma is finally happy, so it’s outside your car where Barney is already waiting to head off to the bowling alley! And you thought the last level was tedious… And it’s a shame because that last level could so easily have been some cool Qix meets Amidar mix of risk-reward to cover the wall against the clock while dealing with dangers, and likewise, this could have been a fun auto-runner with a twist as you race to get to there before it closes. It’s not fun at all unfortunately, and is once again what I initially thought was another case of lack of instruction (and kind of still is) but is more so just really crap!

You’re flip-screen travelling from your house, with your foot-powered car starting automatically from the first screen then allowing you to accelerate, decelerate and (literally!) jump of your own accord, which you’ll want to do over the rock on the second of about five screens in total, and that’s all fine until the next screen where there’s a rock and a load of small rocks and another bigger one that it seems like you also want to jump over. And it works, as long as you hammer jump until you’re past all three and get lucky on the required timing, but now you’re travelling at a snail’s pace, and there’s no way to speed up again, so you plod along, jumping a couple more rocks, until you arrive at the closed bowling alley (indicated by a now very accurate egg-timer) and after way too long standing looking disappointed, have to start again. And that’s not as big a deal as it was painting the whole wall again but all the same, you’ll keep doing it over and over and not knowing what you have to do to make up the two seconds you need to get there in time. Which is some harsh timekeeping for a bowling alley! Anyway, what I eventually worked out is that rather than jumping, you can just slow down to a snail’s pace yourself and crawl over the rocks instead, and then it will let you speed up again. Then you do it again at the next set, although it seems like most of them on the right side of the screen can simply be ignored! And if you don’t jump, you don’t just not get stuck going slow, but you also have no risk of your wheels falling off, providing you don’t accelerate again until you’re past the last pixel of rock! Yes, I hadn’t mentioned the wheels but if you’re going too fast or mistime a jump, your back wheel falls off, Fred has to get out, jack up the car and replace it. The instructions do give you keys to press for jacking but it doesn’t say what to do with them so after a bit more experimenting, it seems like you simply need to mash them. However, there’s absolutely no point because of that egg-timer being way too harsh for any kind of hold-up, let alone changing a wheel! Honestly, this bit stinks and the only good thing I can say about it is once you’ve worked out how to beat it by going a bit slower over the hazards you actually need to worry about, it’s over very quickly!

Now we’ve made it to the Bedrock Super Bowl and it’s Fred versus Barney in a game of bowling so boring it makes the painting section seem like the first stage of Out Run! Once again, the instructions are very clear but don’t really help beyond move Fred up and down in the side-on view of him ready to bowl on the left, then fire to speed up (on a meter below), then left and right to put spin on the ball, which is shown in the lane view on the right as it travels towards the pins… Maybe! I’ll come back to graphics but while this bit looks great on a screenshot, it’s all so slow in motion, mainly due to the never-ending pin-setting animation every time the ball reaches them, or more likely doesn’t because I’m still baffled by where it disappears to half the time – you throw it on the left then nothing happens on the right until eventually that dreadful animation kicks in again. And again. And again! It might have something to do with a second meter, mysteriously called “Right” under the speed one that’s possibly for applying spin but it’s never explained anywhere and it doesn’t matter anyway because after several mind-numbing rounds of this, including every painful wait while Barney takes his two goes each time, you’ll eventually get an on-screen message saying Pebbles has done a runner and is perched on the end of a stone girder at the top of a new building being built, so you need to drop everything and climb a “bewildering array of girders and ladders” to rescue her!

As thrilled as I was to not have to actually beat Barney to progress to the final stage, unbelievably it gets worse! As you might have guessed, we’re now platforming our way upwards, and as you might also have guessed by now, it’s awful! Jumping is floaty and way too imprecise for the way too precise demands of the platforms you’re travelling across, and it doesn’t help when you’re trying to do so right near the top of one vertically-flipping screen for it to flip one way then back the other mid- jump as your head crosses the screen boundary! And while there’s no esoteric ladder moving or wheel changing or ball spinning to worry about here, would you believe I had to consult a walkthrough video to work out how to actually progress about five jumps in??? I’m on the second screen, and there’s a couple of platforms on the right of where you’ve entered and a big chain hanging vertically to the left, like one you’d see holding a ship’s anchor, so I jump at that assuming I can climb up but no, I just end up going splat next to Barney who’s waiting at the bottom, and with another of my four lives lost, try again and again, experimenting with the controls like I did the stepladder in the first stage but this time to no avail… Turned out one of the platforms was a lift! Apart from the absolutely infuriating positioning required to make certain jumps, which will be the constant cause of falling back down a screen if you’re lucky, or of further lives lost if not, the next part of the climb is straightforward despite the weird human-fish heads floating around, and the guy with a funnel for a face, who will gently push you back on contact, but then you’ll get to some slow moving, oversized nuts and bolts falling from above…

These start easy to avoid, although get hit by one of them and it could be all your lives lost in one go because it can restart you back a second or so before you died, right underneath it falling again! The collision detection is outrageously bad too, but regardless of that, you’ll soon get to two of them (one of which is now moving up and down) where the timing is impossible, and for this it turns out there’s a hard-hat you’ve missed on the other side of the building, which is easy to do because it’s just a mess of pixels behind one of the floating fish-men! Suitably equipped now though, you can now stroll past the falling hardware towards the big stone chain holding the big stone girder, so with a leap of tremendous faith towards that after your previous experience, pushing up as you get there to grab on this time (also obviously not explained anywhere though) you need to go down a couple of screens, compensating for the now slightly more dangerous shoves from the fish-faces, and there’s Pebbles, who you need to grab and bring all the way back to where Barney was at the start. And that’s mostly straightforward, apart from the further deaths you’ll (both!) suffer because of the further leaps of faith onto the waiting platforms on the screen below, which you’ll have to remember to memorise the positions of next time around because there’s no way you’ve got any lives left by now! Not to worry though because if you fail this bit, either through lives lost or the sands of time running out on your egg-timer (multiple times but it’s still unclear how many!), then you’ll just get a message to say Barney rescued her anyway, and either way, you’ll be dumped back onto the title screen.

I do get all the losing lives to get better at the game, and to add a bit of longevity to what is over in about twenty-five minutes once you’ve been through the pain, but the prospect of getting back to this final stage to learn just a bit more is just soul-destroying! There’s just so little fun to be had in any of it, and not so much through frustration up to this point, but just sheer tedium! I’d rather watch the paint dry once that first level was done than have to drive as slow as the timer would allow on that driving level, then watch tedious pin-reset animation over and over and over again, only to be rewarded by an overweight caveman playing Mario! Let me consign this back into history by quickly covering the presentation, and I can be really quick on the sound because there’s none to speak of at all on the 48K version I was playing! A really occasional Spectrum squelched beep to signify a level has loaded or the welcome embrace of death or something but that’s it, and I’m not exaggerating! There’s little more to sound effects on the 128K version either but it does have a fantastic rendition of the theme tune, as well as variations on it throughout. Graphics, on the other hand, you couldn’t ask for more from however you’re playing! I really love how this thing looks, from the TV-style cutscene with Fred (albeit just his silhouette) sliding down the dino-crane’s tail to start the game, to the absolutely spot-on characterisation in every level. It’s mostly monochrome, allowing for loads of detail and limited colour-clash, and maybe apart from a bit of a lacklustre final level, it’s all totally authentic and shows a real appreciation for the source material. The odd splash of colour on the mostly bright yellow backgrounds really adds interest too, alongside thoughtfully selected props like the prehistoric TV in the living room. Animation is fine too (when it’s not taking forever to complete!) with lots of neat touches, like your living paintbrush leaping around or Wilma’s angry mannerisms! And while I’m not a huge fan of bowling video games in general, as bad as this one plays, that level is gorgeous and is probably one of the best-looking examples of the genre I’ve ever come across!

I’m not sure I can bring myself to get into many of the other versions after all that but I did say I’d at least fire up a 16-bit one for comparison so we’ll go Amiga, and it’s exactly the same game with exactly the same issues but it looks absolutely stunning! Proper filled-in Fred sliding down the dinosaur tail this time too! The rest is like watching the cartoon come to life, which makes it an even bigger shame the gameplay is so lifeless, and weirdly, the theme music is nowhere near as good as the 128K Spectrum version’s either! Whichever one though, its style over substance, all fur coat and no knickers, or however else you want to put it! Which I think is what all those very average magazine reviews we started with were also saying too. Unfortunately, that was par for the course as far as cartoon tie-ins were concerned back then though – I do like Scooby Doo on the Spectrum, even if it’s not what the game we originally wanted, but despite dozens of the things, we weren’t exactly spoilt for choice for decent ones! Hope springs eternal and I’ll always keep my eye out though, and you’ll be the first to know should I ever come across anything that changes my mind!

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