B.C.'s Quest for Tires

Lore & Background

The player takes the role of the caveman Thor, who must rescue his girlfriend, 'Cute Chick', kidnapped by a dinosaur. Thor travels on a stone unicycle through several levels, moving from left to right while avoiding dangers. Each level requires jumping over obstacles like rocks or stalagmites and ducking under tree branches or stalactites. Between levels are brief challenges, including jumping on turtles to cross a lake while avoiding the Fat Broad, lining up with the Dookie Bird to ride over a lava pit, gaining speed to jump a pit, and sneaking past the dinosaur on turtles.

Reader's Guide

B.C.'s Quest for Tires is notable for its use of familiar comic characters and its role as an early example of the endless runner genre, though it is divided into discrete levels. The game sold a million copies and received several awards, including the Critic's Choice Award for Best Game For Youngsters, the Arkie Award for Most Humorous Video/Computer Game, Colecovision Game of the Year, Best use of Graphics and Sound in a Video Game, the 1984 Golden Floppy Award for Funniest Game of the Year, and the 1989 Software Publishers Association's best game award. Contemporary reviews praised its animation and graphics, with Softline calling it 'an interactive cartoon,' while Antic noted it was not another 'shoot the aliens' scenario. Compute! praised its 'excellent graphics' and animation approaching cartoon standards. The game's title is a play on the film Quest for Fire.

Did You Know?

• The game's title is a play on the contemporaneous film Quest for Fire.
• A sequel, Grog's Revenge, was released in 1984.
• The game sold a million copies.
• It won the 1984 Golden Floppy Award for Funniest Game of the Year.

Gameplay & Design Philosophy

B.C.'s Quest for Tires places the player atop a perpetually forward-moving stone unicycle, navigating horizontally scrolling levels from left to right. The core loop is deceptively simple: jump over ground-level hazards like rocks and stalagmites, or duck beneath overhead threats such as tree branches and stalactites. What elevates the experience beyond a basic obstacle course is the series of interstitial challenges that punctuate the run. These brief set-pieces—jumping across turtles to ford a lake while dodging the Fat Broad, timing a ride on the Dookie Bird over a lava pit, building enough momentum to clear a gap, and finally sneaking past the kidnapper dinosaur—function as early prototypes of the boss-battle structure that would become standard in later games. Designers Rick Banks and Michael Bate drew clear inspiration from Irem's Moon Patrol, released the previous year, and both titles share the DNA of what would eventually crystallize into the endless runner genre, even though each is segmented into discrete levels. The title itself is a playful nod to the contemporaneous film Quest for Fire, lending a prehistoric adventure flavor to what is fundamentally a timing-based action game.

Plot, Characters & Comic-Strip Heritage

The narrative premise of B.C.'s Quest for Tires is straightforward and charming: the caveman Thor must rescue his girlfriend, known simply as "Cute Chick," who has fallen into the clutches of a dinosaur. His mode of transport is a stone unicycle—referred to in the game as an "impossible wheel"—which carries him across a series of consecutive levels from left to right. The game draws its characters and humor directly from the comic strip B.C. by Johnny Hart, translating the strip's prehistoric slapstick into an interactive format. Sierra On-Line published the title in 1983, bringing it to a remarkably wide array of platforms including the Commodore 64, IBM PC, Atari 8-bit computers, ColecoVision, ZX Spectrum, MSX, and Apple II. The story is deliberately light; there is no complex lore or branching narrative. Instead, the emotional stakes rest entirely on the simple promise that Thor will reach the end of each level, overcome the interstitial challenges, and ultimately confront the dinosaur to free his companion. The comic-strip pedigree gives the game a tone of playful absurdity rather than serious adventure, a quality that reviewers would later highlight as one of its defining strengths.

Critical Reception & Commercial Success

Critical response to B.C.'s Quest for Tires was broadly positive, with reviewers consistently praising its visual presentation and lighthearted tone. Softline noted that the gameplay followed a conventional point-A-to-point-B structure, but argued that the recognizable comic-strip characters gave the run a sense of purpose that a generic obstacle course would lack. The publication ultimately described the title as less a traditional computer game than an interactive cartoon, one with limitations but genuine challenge. Antic appreciated that the game avoided the tired "shoot the aliens and save the world" formula and lauded its animation as first-rate, though it tempered enthusiasm by predicting most players would set it aside after a day or two. Compute! singled out the graphics and animation as approaching the quality of actual cartoons, while InfoWorld's Essential Guide to Atari Computers simply called it an entertaining arcade experience. David Stone, writing for Computer Gaming World, observed that the title demands far more precise timing than strategic thinking, offering fresh obstacles rather than escalating difficulty tiers, yet concluded it remains genuinely fun. Despite some reservations about replayability, the game ultimately moved a million copies, a testament to its broad appeal.

Awards, Legacy & the Road to Grog's Revenge

B.C.'s Quest for Tires accumulated an impressive shelf of accolades across the mid-1980s, reflecting its broad appeal across demographics and platforms. Family Computing's Critic's Choice panel named it Best Game for Youngsters, while Electronic Games' Arkie Award recognized it as the Most Humorous Video/Computer Game of its era. Video Game Update selected it as Colecovision Game of the Year, and Billboard magazine honored its Best Use of Graphics and Sound in a Video Game. Computer Games magazine's 1984 Golden Floppy Award for Excellence crowned it the Funniest Game of the Year in the video games category. Perhaps most remarkably, the Software Publishers Association still listed it among its best games as late as 1989, a full six years after its initial release. The game's commercial success—selling a million copies—paved the way for a direct sequel, Grog's Revenge, which arrived in 1984. Together, the two titles cemented the B.C. comic-strip license as a viable property in early home gaming and demonstrated that humor-driven, animation-rich design could compete alongside more conventional action titles in the market.