Wings Over Scotland

There can’t be many all-time classic videogames that originated on the Sharp X-1.

But Bousou Tokkyuu SOS (literal translation “Runaway Express SOS”) is definitely one of them. Or the only one of it. Of them. Whatever. But anyway.

Remarkably little is known about it. Its thin Wikipedia entry tells us that the original X-1 version was a solo effort by Fumihiko Itagaki, a coder at famed Japanese developer Hudson Soft, apparently in his spare time. (He mostly worked on NES projects for them, and now seems to earn a living making Mario Party games for Nintendo.)

Subsequently usually known as Stop The Express, it got contemporary ports for the MSX and two hyper-obscure Japan-only machines – the Sony SMC777 and the Hitachi S1 – before making it to the West on the C64 and Spectrum, where it got some dismayingly okay reviews (80% in Crash and Sinclair User, not mentioned at all in Your Spectrum), with only Personal Computer Games properly appreciating it in a 9/10 review from Chris Anderson, who’d later go on to found Future Publishing and TED.

(To be fair, the more lukewarm reviews might be explained by people trying to play it with the stupendously bad and excessively numerous default keys. If you want to enjoy Stop The Express on the Spectrum, use a joystick or the Sinclair keys, which reduce the number of controls from a ridiculous nine to just five, and better functionality.)

Real justice wasn’t done to Itagaki-san’s masterpiece until eight long years later when it was named at No.4 in the Official Your Sinclair Top 100 Spectrum Games Of All Time in January 1992, by, er, me.

But it’s such a great game that in the subsequent 32 years Stop The Express has been continuously ported to new formats, from wildly primitive Russian computers like the fabulously-named (or to be more strictly accurate, fabulously-numbered) Elektronika BK 0010-01 and the forgotten Commodore microcomputer twins the C16 and Plus4, to prettied-up Windows remakes and even a couple of real physical-cartridge releases for the Intellivision and Colecovision consoles.

(The latter two – with the Coleco game re-renamed “Runaway Train” – came out just last year. I have no idea whether either is officially licenced but I bought the Intellivision one as a ROM for 10 quid and it’s very good. I’ve also seen talk of someone making one for the Atari 2600, which would be awesome and seems like it ought to be within the machine’s capabilities, although as far as I know the pic below is just a mockup.)

There’s even a really cute mini-version written in just 10 lines of ZX BASIC.

You can read more about the history and the various versions in this fine feature from Finland (including the NES semi-sequel Challenger), but alert readers will note that one of the ports is immediately and visibly the odd man out.

For some reason, despite the game using a very simple colour palette, the Speccy Express got a whole new paint job, with the train changed from predominantly green to dark blue (and our hero’s purple/pink/lilac/blue hair getting a blond bleaching).

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the blue version – it looks gorgeous. But I was always a bit puzzled about the change, and last Spring when I saw someone suggest hacking the Speccy version to match the others I immediately put the idea to a super-talented Hungarian coder I knew who’d modded several other games at my prompting.

Sadly he was too busy with other projects and thought it’d be really tricky anyway, so I forgot about it until this week, when I was talking about something else entirely to another programmer of my slight acquaintance – Elton Bird of Uprising Games, who not only wrote the Amiga classic Super Tennis Champs (a mighty 92% from Amiga Power) and makes great iOS games like the similarly-titled Super Soccer Champs but also penned the fantastic Mister Kung-Fu, a 2018 Spectrum port of the coin-op Kung-Fu Master, which reached No. 5 in the Speccy Arcade 100.

(And for which I designed the original box art.)

While we were chatting I happened to mention wanting to mod Stop The Express, and straight away he said it was “definitely doable”. He loved the game too, and to cut a long story short, barely 24 hours of poking, testing and tweaking later, here it is.

Click here to download the TAP file, complete with box art by me and a new loading screen made a few years ago by Andy Green replacing the madly-inappropriate Wild West steam-train one that Sinclair inexplicably put on the original Speccy release.

(Of course, the colours in it are wrong now, but they were a bit screwy anyway with the blue bad guy rather than the all-red ninjas of the Spectrum game so hey.)

The download also includes a slight tweak of the original blue-train version, with the new title screen, the ugly cow-catcher cleaned up and nice halogen headlights.

So there we go. 40 years after it came out, the Speccy Stop The Express now matches the other versions, to no particular purpose. Sometimes it’s just fun to make things.

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FOOTNOTE: Something else that would be really cool would be to make a new C64 version with ASCII graphics like those in the C64 port’s terrific loading animation:

Sadly I don’t know any C64 coders, but if you do, plant a seed. Sometimes if you do, things can happen.