Realtime Games Software | Code Like It's 198x

Realtime Games Software began as three computer science students from Leeds University who were very good at drawing things in three dimensions on a ZX Spectrum. Ian Oliver, Graeme Baird and Andy Onions wrote their first game while sitting their finals, and CRASH dated the company’s birth to 8 May 1984, “in the middle of the founding members’ Final Examinations”. Within two years CRASH was calling them the market leader in 3D games on the Spectrum. They went on to convert Argonaut’s Starglider to 8-bit machines, and wrote Carrier Command, a 16-bit strategy game built from filled 3D shapes. Ian Oliver then founded Cross Products, which made development kits for Sega’s consoles and was bought by Sega in 1994.

Fast facts

Founders: Ian Oliver, Graeme Baird and Andy Onions. Oliver and Baird did most of the programming; Onions handled the business and, in his words, “the twiddly bits”.
Founded: 8 May 1984, Leeds.
Address in 1984: Prospect House, 32 Sovereign Street, Leeds.
Games: 3D Tank Duel (1984), 3D Starstrike (1984), Starstrike II (1986), the Spectrum and Amstrad Starglider (1986), Carrier Command (1988), Battle Command (1990).
Publishers: themselves at first, then Rainbird, Ariolasoft and Ocean.
Later: Ian Oliver founded the development-tools company Cross Products in 1989; Sega bought it in 1994.

CRASH scores for Realtime’s own Spectrum games:

Game	Score	Issue
3D Tank Duel	83%	7, August 1984
3D Starstrike	93%	11, December 1984
Starstrike II	96%	28, May 1986

Tank Duel and Starstrike

The three met at Leeds University, CRASH reported, “probably at the college bar, rather [than] in a lecture room on the Computer Science course they were following”, and decided they did not want to work for anyone else. Their first game, 3D Tank Duel, was finished while they were sitting their finals and sold by mail order at £5.50 from an office in Sovereign Street, Leeds. It was a version of Atari’s arcade game Battlezone, and CRASH reviewed it in August 1984 with all three named as authors. One reviewer called it “the closest version yet to the real thing” and “one of the best versions” of one of the oldest arcade games about. It scored 83%, and CRASH later called it “certainly the fastest and most colourful 3D game on the Spectrum, at a time when 3D games in general were fairly thin on the ground”.

3D Starstrike followed at the end of 1984. It was a version of Atari’s Star Wars coin-op, drawn in fast wireframe lines, and it won Realtime its first CRASH Smash in December. Amiga Computing’s Simon Rockman first met the three at a ZX Microfair, “a computer show so downmarket it bears more of a resemblance to Petticoat Lane than the Mayfair atmosphere of most computer shows”, where they were “no more pretentious than the tatty trestle table they stood behind”. What they had on their Spectrum’s screen was “a fast playable 3D vector game which looked uncannily like a full, accurate and realistic clone of the Star Wars arcade game”. Ian Oliver later put its sales at around 60,000 copies, against about 7,000 for Tank Duel.

Starstrike II (1986) replaced the wireframes with filled, solid shapes that still moved quickly, and CRASH gave it 96%. When CRASH‘s Hannah Smith visited Leeds that spring, she found a small, cheerful company in an overheated office near the city centre, about to start the Amstrad version and doing conversion work for the Enterprise computer on the side. Being small had costs. Some large chain stores were “only now accepting Starstrike II on their shelves, having refused to handle its predecessor”, and the team had spent so much on advertising before release that there was “very little cash to live on while the game was finished off”. The founders’ student experience, CRASH noted, “was undeniably an asset during confrontations with Mr. Bank Manager”.

Starglider on 8 bits

Rainbird, British Telecom’s full-price label, asked Realtime to convert Argonaut’s Atari ST game Starglider to 8-bit machines. The Spectrum version scored 95% in CRASH in its 1986 Christmas issue, and 97% for the 128K version, with a David Lowe title tune and speech. CRASH readers voted it the best game of 1986, and Andy Onions, accepting, said it was “the first time we’ve received any sort of accolade in two and a half years”. Amstrad Action made the Amstrad CPC version a Mastergame. Realtime’s Starglider also reached the IBM PC and the Amstrad PCW, and the team wrote StarFox for Ariolasoft, and a version of Elite for the IBM PC with solid 3D graphics.

Carrier Command

Carrier Command, published by Rainbird for the Atari ST and Amiga in 1988, was Realtime’s own design and the game that made its name on 16-bit machines. You captain one of two aircraft carriers sent to colonise a chain of 64 volcanic islands; the other has been taken over by terrorists. With a squadron of Manta aircraft and Walrus amphibious tanks you capture islands and link them into a network that supplies and rearms your carrier, and you win by taking every island or sinking the enemy carrier. Amiga Format later summed it up as a game that asks you “to conquer an island network using an aircraft carrier, fighter planes and amphibious tanks”, all drawn in solid 3D.

Simon Rockman visited Realtime for Amiga Computing in October 1988, as the Amiga version was finished. The game had 1.2 megabytes of source code and had taken a year to write. Realtime developed everything on a Compaq 386 PC that had cost £8,000, with an assembler called PDS, which could assemble 500K of code in under 30 seconds against more than six minutes on an Atari ST. On the Amiga, Realtime used the blitter to draw horizontal lines and clear the screen, which gave a line-drawing speed of 140,000 pixels a second, Rockman reported, against 85,000 on the ST. The team, he wrote, were “about as old school tie as a teddy boy’s bootlace”, and he quoted the entry they had placed in their university rag magazine: “Realtime (Games Software) Limited — Great guys to go out for a drink with”.

ACE profiled Realtime in August 1988, noting that its next game for Telecomsoft would again use solid 3D, “a field that Realtime pioneered and BT are swiftly monopolising”. Carrier Command scored 927 in ACE on the ST. The Spectrum version followed in July 1989, at £14.99 on cassette, and ACE gave it 860: “the gameplay is just as brilliant on the Speccy as it is on ST and Amiga”, although it would “only work in 128K mode”. By then Telecomsoft had been sold to MicroProse, whose British office in Tetbury had been selling its own flight simulations and Origin’s Ultima games. ACE thought MicroProse “must be thanking their lucky stars they now have the publishing rights to excellent strategic software like Realtime’s brilliant Carrier Command. It wipes the floor with anything the Tetbury based outfit have come up with themselves in the last two years.”

Battle Command

The follow-up went to Ocean. Amiga Format reported in December 1989 that Ocean had acquired Battle Command, “once jealously guarded by now-Microprosed label Rainbird”. ACE said the game had been under development for 18 months, mainly on 16-bit machines, that Realtime was keen to stress “it is not a tank simulation”, and that it would bring “far more complex solid 3D graphics with highly detailed objects, and a better gameplay balance of strategy and shoot’em up”.

It was late. Promised for March 1990 and then for the summer, it was still being shown as work in progress in November, and the Amiga version reached reviewers at the turn of 1991. The finished game gave you a single Mauler assault tank, carried in and out of enemy territory by helicopter, and 16 missions, from straight shooting to hunting for a satellite or hijacking a train, played at 24 times real speed with a day and night cycle. Amiga Computing found it frantic fun but more Battlezone with solid graphics than Carrier Command with tanks. The Spectrum 128K version arrived in 1991, and CRASH greeted it with “Yes, it’s finally out!” Oliver remembered it as Realtime’s last Spectrum game.

Cross Products

Realtime had always been as interested in development hardware as in games: Rockman found staff taking an Apple Macintosh apart to add a PDS interface to it. That interest became the business that lasted. Ian Oliver founded Cross Products in Leeds in 1989. Its SNASM development systems connected a PC to a games console for writing and debugging code, and in 1994 Sega bought the company. In 1995 Edge described Cross Products as the “Sega-owned firm behind the Saturn’s official development hardware”, formed “by ex-game coders from Realtime Games (responsible for classics such as Starstrike and Carrier Command)”, and in another issue it put the change more simply: “Realtime is now a Sega-owned company called Cross Products”. Oliver went on to run it as Sega’s research and development subsidiary. In 2001 Sega sold Cross Products to Imagination Technologies.

In 2012 the Czech developer Bohemia Interactive released a remake, Carrier Command: Gaea Mission, first shown the year before.

Sources

CRASH issue 5, June 1984, p. 44: news of Realtime’s tank game, the authors studying in Leeds.
CRASH issue 7, August 1984, p. 77: 3D Tank Duel advertisement (£5.50; Prospect House, 32 Sovereign Street, Leeds). Pp. 88–89: review (Ian Oliver, Andrew Onions and Graeme Baird; 83%).
CRASH issue 26, March 1986, p. 107: preview of Starstrike 2 (3D Tank Duel as a version of Battlezone; Starstrike as an implementation of Star Wars).
CRASH issue 28, May 1986, p. 20: Starstrike II review (“filled in 3D graphics”).
CRASH issue 29, June 1986, pp. 54–55: “The Three Dimensional Trio” (Leeds University, the founding date, the finals, the CRASH Smash, the office, the Enterprise conversions, the chain stores, the bank manager, the division of work).
CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 33: readers’ awards for 1986 (Andy Onions).
CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (3D Tank Duel 83%, issue 7; Starstrike 93%, issue 11; Starstrike II 96%, issue 28).
CRASH issue 91, August 1991: subscription offer (“BATTLE COMMAND … Yes, it’s finally out!”, 128K).
ACE issue 11, August 1988, p. 37: Realtime’s work and the Telecomsoft project.
ACE issue 22, July 1989, p. 76: Carrier Command Spectrum review (Rainbird, £14.99 and £15.99, 128K only, 860; the ST version 927; the MicroProse comment).
ACE issue 27, December 1989, p. 9: “Command performance” (Battle Command).
ACE issue 32, May 1990, p. 71: Battle Command as Ocean’s successor to Carrier Command.
ACE issue 38, November 1990, pp. 41–43: Battle Command feature (the Mauler, 16 missions, the time scale).
Amiga Computing, October 1988, pp. 20–21: Simon Rockman, “Experts in the impossible” (the Microfair, Starstrike, the rag magazine, StarFox, the PCW Starglider, the PC Elite, the Compaq and PDS, Carrier Command’s islands, source code and blitter figures).
Amiga Computing, January 1991, p. 45: Battle Command review (Ocean, £24.99).
Amiga Format issue 5, December 1989, p. 11: Ocean acquires Battle Command. P. 25: vector graphics feature (“Realtime, authors of 3D Starstrike, wrote Carrier Command”; the island network).
CRASH issue 36, Christmas 1986, and Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987: Starglider reviews, as cited in the Vault’s Starglider entry.
Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004, p. 45: the PC Elite “coded by 3D experts Realtime Games”.
Edge issue 20, May 1995, p. 49: “Realtime is now a Sega-owned company called Cross Products”.
Edge issue 23, August 1995, p. 44: Cross Products and the Saturn development hardware.
Philip Bee, “Interview with Ian Oliver”, World of Spectrum, January 1998 (web, secondary): the first game in the final year; sales of Tank Duel and Starstrike; StarFox; Battle Command as the last Spectrum game; Cross Products founded 1989 and bought by Sega in 1994; Oliver’s Sega role. https://worldofspectrum.net/interviews/OliverIan.htm
“Sega swoops in and snaps up games tools king Cross, Leeds”, Computergram International, 17 August 1994, via Tech Monitor (web, secondary): Sega of America’s purchase of Cross Products and SNASM. https://www.techmonitor.ai/?p=153926
Wikipedia, “Imagination Technologies” (web, secondary): the purchase of Cross Products on 26 September 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagination_Technologies
Shacknews, “Carrier Command: Gaea Mission media deployed”, 9 June 2011 (web, secondary): Bohemia Interactive’s remake. https://www.shacknews.com/article/68845/carrier-command-gaea-mission-e3
Wikipedia, “Carrier Command” (web, secondary): the remake’s release in 2012 by Bohemia Interactive’s Prague studio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Command