In 1987, Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond released Head Over Heels. It was a 3D isometric arcade adventure — you controlled two characters, Head and Heels, navigating interlocking puzzle-platformer rooms across five planets of the doomed Blacktooth Empire. It appeared on the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST, and several other platforms of the era. It was superb. CVG gave it 90%. Your Sinclair gave it 90%. Crash gave it 92%. It was one of Ocean Software’s finest hours.
That same year, a developer called Colin Porch was responsible for converting the game to the Atari ST.
In 1989, Porch started developing a sequel. He told nobody.
He has been working on it, in private, for 36 years.
On May 4, 2026, that sequel releases.
Return to Blacktooth: A Head Over Heels Adventure
The game is called Return to Blacktooth: A Head Over Heels Adventure. It’s published by Thalamus Digital Publishing — the UK indie publisher that has been bringing carefully licensed retro titles to both original hardware and modern platforms — in partnership with Atari, who hold the Head Over Heels licence. It launches on Commodore Amiga and Atari ST on May 4th, 2026.
What Colin Porch has built over three and a half decades: 350+ rooms spread across five game worlds, two playable characters — Head and Heels returning from the original — new enemies, new hazards, new puzzles, and what Porch describes as “a host of challenging new gameplay mechanics.” The aesthetic is 16-bit, in keeping with the original’s spirit. The philosophy is unchanged from 1987: logical puzzles that challenge the brain rather than the reflexes.
“You simply cannot believe how excited I am,” Porch said in the release announcement. “Since working on the original game back in the ’80s, this sequel has been an enormous part of my life. Over the last 30+ years, I’ve added a host of new features to give a new edge to the gameplay while retaining the core ‘feel’ of the original. It’s definitely my sort of game, with logical puzzles that challenge your brain rather than your reflexes. Devious? Certainly! But fair, too.”
Thalamus founder Andy Roberts: “As a diehard fan of the original Head Over Heels, I was adamant that we had to bring Colin’s sequel to its target audience. The game is a labour of love crafted with the utmost care and respect for the original, and I can’t wait for players to dive back into the world of the eponymous Head and Heels once again.”
Why This Is One of Gaming’s Great Stories
Think about what this represents. A developer, in 1989, decided the game he’d just worked on deserved a sequel. No publisher asked for it. No commercial opportunity existed. No one knew he was doing it. He just started building it, on his own time, because he loved the original and wanted to see what came next.
For 36 years he kept going. Through the death of the home computer era, through the console wars, through the rise of the internet, through the smartphone revolution, through everything. The project was never abandoned. It was just his. “This sequel has been an enormous part of my life” — that line is not marketing copy. It’s a statement about what made the bedroom coding era remarkable: people making things because the things mattered to them, not because anyone asked.
There is a direct line from the Manchester Baby to Nigel Alderton learning BASIC from a Sinclair manual to Colin Porch quietly building a sequel to Head Over Heels for three and a half decades. The same impulse. The same culture. The same answer to the question of what you do when you love a thing — you make more of it, whether anyone knows or not.
Where to Get It
Return to Blacktooth launches May 4, 2026 on Commodore Amiga and Atari ST via Thalamus Digital. It’s available on itch.io.
Further ports are planned: Atari Jaguar, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum Next, and eventually PC and consoles. If you want to play it now and don’t have original hardware, WinUAE (Amiga emulation) or Hatari (Atari ST emulation) will run it cleanly.
Head Over Heels was published by Ocean Software, whose story is told in our Manchester computing history piece. The home computers it ran on are covered in our 8-bit era guide. Return to Blacktooth releases May 4, 2026.