STREET HAWK
VARIOUS, 1986
Riding in on the coattails of Knight Rider came Street Hawk in 1985, effectively replacing a high-tech car with a high-tech motorbike. While short-lived (it only lasted one season), the series was popular enough to persuade Ocean to acquire the licence for a computer game – and that’s where the trouble started. Ocean had committed Street Hawk to the Kays catalogue and Crash magazine as a subscriber perk (the subs offer was first mentioned in issue 18), and when development stalled, it rushed out a Defender-style platform game to satisfy these demands. According to an interview with Gary in Ocean: The History, the first Street Hawk never went on general release. Ocean then released an official version programmed by in-house coder Paul Owens in late-1986. While this newer version was graphically pleasing, especially on the ZX Spectrum, it was met with indifference, and a proposed C64 version was canned.