Computer Warrior

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Computer Warrior (initially titled Ultimate Warrior) was a comic strip that debuted in Eagle on 13 April 1985 (shortly after the comic merged with Tiger) and ran for another seven years. The plot involves people playing real-life versions of computer games and seems inspired by the movies Tron and The Last Starfighter.

When his friend Martin French disappears, Bobby Patterson receives a message in which Martin reveals that he had discovered a code to activate a real life facility on his computer, enabling him to literally enter the computer games realm and that his disappearance means that he has lost a game and is now trapped within the Nightmare Zone.

In order to rescue Martin, Bobby must practice on the games before using the code to play the games in the computer realm. A single loss would mean Bobby himself would also be trapped in the Nightmare Zone. The only way for Bobby to free him was to complete a certain number of games himself using the code, but failure would mean he would also be trapped.

Martin was eventually rescued after several months, but (due to the strip's popularity and a desire to continue it beyond the original concept) it was then revealed that the purpose of the challenge was to find a champion to defeat the dark forces of the Nightmare Zone. The realm's ruler, the computer warlord, gathered together all qualified computer warriors and eliminated them one by one in a series of tests to find the 'Ultimate Warrior'.

As before, each test was the successful completion of a popular computer game of the time. Bobby made friends and enemies amongst the other computer warriors as the tests went on, but eventually Bobby emerged triumphant and became the Computer Warlord's champion.

The Computer Warlord then set Bobby 5 more tests to defeat the Nightmare Zone creatures once and for all. In the final test the Nightmare zone creatures picked a champion to defeat Bobby, his evil self! Finally, Bobby defeated this last enemy and the nightmare zone creatures were trapped in a 'cube of holding' by the warlord.

In future stories, Bobby defeated various nightmare zone creatures who refused to enter the cube, became Computer Warlord, invited 'Eagle' readers to take part in their own 'real life' games, then summoned before the 'council of warlords' to be told he wasn't really a computer warlord, and demoted to just plain computer warrior. Then another warlord named Baal set Bobby test after test after test for Bobby to 'prove he was a champion' which lasted for the rest of the strips duration.

For the first three years the writer was credited as "D. Spence" a pen-name used by Alan Grant.


[edit] Games featured in the story

The strip itself was thinly-veiled advertising for the computer games it featured. While the comic featured both fictional and real games, the majority of the titles were games published in the UK by U.S. Gold for 8 and 16 bit computers.

(dates denote year of UK publishing for the Commodore 64)

[edit] References

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