As our Lord, Noddy Holder, likes to scream every single year: It’s Christmaaaaaaas!

And so it’s time for a quick catch up with a ghost of Christmas Past.

1985 was a terrible year for my family, for reasons that are a bit traumatic to go into.

Yet we moved to a new home, for a fresh start – and my Dad bought our first (and only, I think) actual computer just before Christmas: a Commodore Plus/4.

It was a machine that felt weirdly out of date and underpowered for gaming despite only launching the year before, in 1984 – though I’ve since learned that it was supposed to be a more business oriented machine, rather than one focused on games.

Despite this, the reasonably well known package it was being sold in was absolutely full of games, as well as a joystick (and a cassette deck, separate to the computer itself, to load the games from!).

For the princely sum of £99.99, we got ourselves a machine with an immediate software library of 11 games, several of which I remember being excellent.

Alongside the great Fire Ant and Treasure Island – and several others – was the Christmas-themed Icicle Works, which immediately caught my attention and, given the time of year we acquired it, quickly became a firm favourite.

I had no idea at the time that Icicle Works was a shameless rip off of Boulderdash, albeit with a Santa-collecting-presents theme and aesthetic – but even when I found out, it didn’t matter.

I absolutely adored that game and its physics-based snowball threats; to this day, seeing and hearing it brings back a warm wave of nostalgia; more powerful than most, considering it’s also intertwined with the strong memories of an 80s family Christmas too.

Not many people have heard of Icicle Works, given that the Plus/4 itself hardly set the world alight – and, though it was available on Commodore’s much more ubiquitous C64 and other machines, so was the superior Boulder Dash, so it’s hardly surprising it didn’t make much of a dent in gaming’s collective consciousness.

In fact, it was something I’d only half remembered and suspected I’d sort of made up in my head until the rise of the internet, such was its obscurity and the fact that no one I ever spoke to about it had heard of the game.

It’s hardly considered a classic, but that makes no difference to my memories or what the game meant to me, for a very long time – and, in fact, still does.

Merry Christmas everyone – may you be forming experiences and memories that’ll last you as long as Icicle Works has for me!