In 1989, Colin Porch started a sequel to Head Over Heels in his spare time. Ocean let him go in 1992, and he packed the discs away for the better part of thirty years. Then a reunion, a drink with old colleagues, and—thirty-seven years after he began—Return to Blacktooth is a real Atari ST game. I bought it, wrote it to a floppy, and booted it on the real thing.
A round yellow face called Head and a pair of springy legs called Heels hop through pastel isometric rooms, climbing on top of each other to reach switches neither could manage alone. If that setup sounds familiar, it should—it's the language of Head Over Heels, Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond's 1987 isometric classic. What's new is the year on it. Return to Blacktooth is a brand-new Atari ST and Amiga game, released in May 2026, and the story of how it got here is better than most launch-week headlines.
A room on one of the game's five planets—isometric puzzle-platforming straight out of 1987, shipped in 2026.
The sequel that waited
The game is the work of Colin Porch, a British programmer whose career—by his own account in a 2026 interview on The Retro Hour—ran through Imagine, Special FX, and Ocean Software, the Manchester house behind home conversions of arcade hits like Operation Wolf and Gryzor. In his telling, he began Return to Blacktooth around 1989, in his spare time, while still on staff at Special FX. By 1992 Ocean no longer needed him, and he couldn't see a future for the project. So he packed it away—kept all the discs, everything he'd built—and stopped.
The discs sat for the better part of thirty years.
A reunion, and a restart
What restarted it, again in Porch's telling, was a reunion of Ocean staff in Manchester: old programmers in a room, a few drinks, the inevitable "whatever happened to…" The project came back out of the drawer. He finished it, and with Thalamus Digital Publishing he shipped it—version 1.0 on 4 May 2026, for the Atari ST and the Amiga. (The Head Over Heels lineage is now owned by Atari Interactive, which licensed it; the new game carries "©2026 Colin Porch.")
How long did it take? Depends where you start the clock. Thalamus markets it as "almost 40 years in the making," counting from the 1987 original. Porch counts thirty-seven, from when he first picked up the sequel in 1989. Both are true, and both are a long time to carry a game around in a box of floppy discs. He's in his eighties now, and by his own account not in the best of health—which makes finishing it at all the kind of ending you don't get to write very often.
What's actually in it
And it's a real game, not a nostalgia demo. Return to Blacktooth is an isometric arcade-adventure cut from the Head Over Heels cloth: 300-plus rooms across five distinct planets, Head and Heels to swap between and combine, crowns to collect, and Emperor Blacktooth to topple at the end. On the ST it runs on any 1 MB machine, with enhanced sound on the STE.
The credits read like a small reunion of their own. The original game is Ritman and Drummond's. The cover art is by Wil Overton, a name familiar from the pages of Super Play; the stark monochrome loading screen is by Ste Pickford, one half of the Pickford Brothers. The music—more on that in a moment—pairs two veterans of the European demoscene.
Ste Pickford's monochrome loading screen, drawn for the ST's high-resolution mode.
The sound of it
That last credit is worth its own paragraph. The original music is by Jochen "Virgill" Feldkoetter, an Amiga-scene composer since the late eighties; Ian "h0ffman" Ford did the ST's AY chip music, plus mastering and sound effects. Both are fixtures of the demoscene—h0ffman's "Generator" took first place at the Revision party in 2015—and chip music this confident coming out of a 1 MB Atari ST is half the reason to boot the thing on real hardware instead of just reading about it. Here's Thalamus's own reveal trailer, so you can hear it:
h0ffman is a big enough story on his own that he's earning a dedicated post here soon—still shipping new demoscene music most months of 2026, decades after he started. Consider this the overture.
The one that got away
There's a second story hiding in Porch's résumé, and it's the mirror image of this one. In 1992—the same year Ocean let him go—they also hired him to port Taito's Parasol Stars to the Commodore 64. He built a strong demo and got the green light, and then the game was lost. Ocean's public explanation at the time was a burglary; whatever the fuller story, the development discs were gone, and the C64 Parasol Stars became one of the machine's most famous unreleased games, documented for years by the archivists at Games That Weren't.
So the programmer who just finished a thirty-seven-year-old sequel is also the man behind one of the C64's great "what ifs." The one that got away, and the one he finally finished.
The Parasol Stars that shipped: Ocean's Amiga version (©1992 Taito and Ocean), running on my AmigaVision. Colin Porch's lost port was the C64 one.
The Parasol Stars that did ship—the Amiga version, ©1992 Taito and Ocean—still plays beautifully; that's it above, running on my AmigaVision setup. Colin's lost port was the C64 one: a different machine, a different fate.
How I'm playing it
Here's where it comes home. I bought Return to Blacktooth on itch.io—a purchased, current commercial game, not a dump—and the store page tells you exactly what to do with the download: write the disk image to a floppy to play on real Atari ST hardware. So I did. I wrote it to a 3.5-inch disk with a Greaseweazle and booted it on my 1040 STe, where it plays without complaint. If you want the full bench version of that—the drive, the exact command, the disk that failed verification once and then pretended it never happened—that's its own Bench Note.
It's the same feeling as the Barbarian port that finally reached the Atari 8-bit a few weeks back: forty-year-old machines still getting brand-new, ambitious games from people doing it for love. Return to Blacktooth just happens to arrive with a thirty-seven-year head start—and a pink-labeled floppy on my bench that says so.
The payoff: my own floppy, written with a Greaseweazle and hand-labeled “Return Blacktooth,” at the door of the ST drive.
Frequently asked
What is Return to Blacktooth?
Return to Blacktooth is a brand-new Atari ST and Amiga game, an isometric arcade-adventure in the mold of Head Over Heels, with version 1.0 shipping on 4 May 2026 through Thalamus Digital Publishing.
Who made Return to Blacktooth?
British programmer Colin Porch, whose career ran through Imagine, Special FX, and Ocean Software; he began the sequel around 1989 and finished it thirty-seven years later.
How long was Return to Blacktooth in the making?
It depends where you start the clock—Thalamus markets it as "almost 40 years in the making" from the 1987 Head Over Heels, while Porch counts thirty-seven years from when he first picked up the sequel in 1989.
Who composed the music for Return to Blacktooth?
The original music is by Jochen "Virgill" Feldkoetter, an Amiga-scene composer, while Ian "h0ffman" Ford did the ST's AY chip music plus mastering and sound effects.
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