Yeah but that's only because Ocean was willing to give any profitable license a game regardless of quality and the state of the US gaming market meant that there wasn't really many options out there both for developers and in this case a successful way of selling a game (it was too early for the NES despite that the Famicom/FDS did get Transformers games later and too late in many cases for the Atari consoles meaning that your only options would have been the smaller home computer market e.g. C64 and the Apple II). I think at the time, the UK/Japan/Spain gaming industries were like the largest with heavy contributions from Australia (Melbourne House) and Hungary (Novotrade) as well as the beginnings of the German and the growing French markets. Batman as a gaming franchise also started off in the UK.

Weirdly the C64 version (not be confused with the Activision game The Battle to Save the Earth) was finished earlier so either there were problems porting this to the Spectrum or had some development hell due to most of the dev team left Denton Designs. The graphics artist aka the only one left was embarrassed of the game and said that they had problems coming up with stuff that tied in with the series, Ocean more or less forced them to make the game.

Hard to believe that transformers as a game franchise started here...