“This is Nancy at Chase HQ, we’ve got a problem here, guys.” In most driving games of the 1980s the other cars were in the way. In Taito’s Chase H.Q. one of them was the point. The radio gives you a criminal and a description of his car, a partner shouts “Let’s go, Mr Driver!”, and you chase him down the freeway and ram him until his car gives up. Sinclair User’s coin-op reviewer summed up the idea in December 1988: what do most driving games lack? “A generous portion of gratuitous violence.”
A year later the game did something few people expected. Ocean squeezed it onto the 48K Spectrum, and the conversion was fast enough, and close enough to the arcade, that CRASH gave it 95% and Computer & Video Games 97%. It was the best-selling computer game of Christmas 1989.
Fast facts
- Developer: Taito, 1988; designed by Hiroyuki Sakou.
- Hardware: Taito’s Z System, with two 68000 processors.
- Heroes: detectives Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady.
- Home publisher: Ocean, for Christmas 1989.
- Spectrum and Amstrad versions: John O’Brien (code) and Bill Harbison (graphics), with music arranged from the arcade by Jonathan Dunn.
- Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 64 versions: Teque, the Rotherham developer behind Krisalis.
- Sequel: Special Criminal Investigation (arcade 1989), sold by Ocean at home as Chase H.Q. II.
In the arcade
Chase H.Q. appeared in arcades in November 1988, in stand-up and sit-down cabinets. Retro Gamer traces it to Taito’s earlier racer Full Throttle, whose designer, Hiroyuki Sakou, carried its turbo button into his next game and added a cop show. The game ran on the Z System board Taito had used for Continental Circus, with two 68000 processors, one of them almost entirely devoted to drawing the rolling road, and a Yamaha YM2610 sound chip for the music and the speech.
The player drives Tony Gibson, with Raymond Broady in the passenger seat. Each of the five levels has one criminal. The first is Ralph, “the Idaho Slasher”, a suspected murderer “heading west out of the city in a white British sports car”, as C&VG quoted Nancy’s briefing. The second, Carlos, is an armed robber in a yellow supercar. Every chase runs against the clock. First you have to catch sight of the villain, choosing the right fork where the road splits; once he is in sight, extra time is added to stop him. Nudging other traffic costs time, but ramming the criminal fills a damage meter, and when it is full his car pulls over and he is arrested. Three turbo boosts give short bursts of speed, best saved for when the target is in sight.
The magazines were quick to see the difference from Out Run. Sinclair User reported in December 1988 that it was “reputedly being the highest grossing machine around for some time”, and CRASH’s Mark Caswell wrote in April 1989: “This is the ultimate arcade version of cops and robbers and I can’t wait for the Ocean conversion.”
Ocean’s conversions
Ocean bought the home rights and released its versions for Christmas 1989. The Spectrum version was written in-house by John O’Brien, with graphics by Bill Harbison. Harbison had just drawn WEC Le Mans, and he told Retro Gamer that within a few days O’Brien showed the office a rewrite of that game’s road engine running “more than twice as fast”.
ACE talked to O’Brien in March 1990. The Spectrum version took six months and was written on an Atari ST Mega with Ocean’s own assembler and graphics editor; only the loading screen was drawn on the Spectrum. Much of O’Brien’s time went into a “Jigsaw” graphics language used to enlarge objects as they approach down the road, and the steering routines were rewritten ten times. The screen updated at an average of 13 frames a second. Harbison’s monochrome sprites were then coloured in for the Amstrad CPC version. Jonathan Dunn arranged the soundtrack from the coin-op, and five sound effects were sampled directly from the arcade machine with an Amiga sampler. On a 128K Spectrum the game talked: “Let’s go, Mr Driver!”
The Spectrum game cost £9.99 on cassette and £14.99 on disk.
The Spectrum reviews
Two years earlier the Spectrum Out Run had scored 72% in CRASH. After it, as Retro Gamer later put it, “it seemed that the Spectrum was no longer able to do justice to the latest big name coin-ops”. Chase H.Q. changed that.
| Magazine | Issue | Score |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | December 1989 | 95% |
| The Games Machine | December 1989 | 91% |
| Computer & Video Games | January 1990 | 97% |
| Sinclair User | January 1990 | 96% |
| Your Sinclair | February 1990 | 94% |
| ACE | February 1990 | 868 out of 1,000 |
CRASH made it a Smash. “The road itself is plotted in perfect perspective and moves smoothly and quickly,” one reviewer wrote. “This is an accurate conversion that is as playable as the real thing — and that sure is a big recommendation!” For Julian Rignall in C&VG, the monochrome graphics were “fast, smooth and very impressive indeed”, making it “the most astounding Spectrum game for years”. Sinclair User thought it “one of this year’s best driving games” and, bearing in mind the machines concerned, better than the ST and Amiga versions “on both graphics and gameplay”. It put a playable level on its January 1990 cover tape.
Your Sinclair’s Matt Bielby opened with a joke (“Chase HQ — it’s crap!”) before admitting that it was “one of the best driving games I’ve ever seen”. He singled out the tricks: the road that splits in two so “smoothly”, the tunnel sequence “which doesn’t slow the action down one jot”, the dips that bounce the car off the road, and the police light that appears on the roof as you close in. His complaints were the controls and the loading time. ACE’s Eugene Lacey was cooler, calling it a “novel chase and crash racer” that lacked long-term challenge.
The buying public agreed with the enthusiasts. In March 1990 C&VG reported that the game had “topped every possible chart this month (except the Amstrad one)”, and ACE called it “the top selling computer game of Christmas ’89”. In November 1990 it was still third in Your Sinclair’s full-price chart, which the magazine found remarkable for a game released the previous Christmas. When Your Sinclair chose its top 100 Spectrum games in January 1992, Chase H.Q. was number 22: Ocean had “turned a mediocre arcade game into a Speccy classic”.
The other machines
The Teque versions for the Atari ST and Amiga divided the reviewers. C&VG gave both 93%, praising the speech and sound, while ZZAP! gave the Amiga game 67%: “a playable, enjoyable racer which lacks any sparkle”. The Commodore 64 version, which ZZAP! reviewed in February 1990, used the Spectrum’s monochrome road “but lacks the speed, helicopter and many of the roadblocks in that version”, and scored 53%. “Ocean’s ‘strongest’ title of the year has ironically turned out to be their weakest,” the reviewer wrote. ZZAP! later explained that Ocean had tried to reproduce the Spectrum game on the C64 with added colour, “but as the release date approached this approach obviously ran into trouble”.
Taito made its own conversion for NEC’s PC Engine, which topped C&VG’s PC Engine chart in May 1990. Versions followed for the MSX, the NES, the Sega Master System and Game Gear, the Game Boy, and the Japanese Sharp X68000 and FM Towns computers. In Japan the arcade game later came out on the Saturn, together with its sequel, and in the Taito Memories II collection for the PlayStation 2 in 2007.
Special Criminal Investigation and later games
Taito’s follow-up reached arcades at the end of 1989 under a new name, Special Criminal Investigation. Sinclair User called it “effectively, Chase HQ II”. The five chases were now one story, about the mayor’s kidnapped daughter, and the detectives had guns: Broady leans out of the window, or the sunroof, and shoots at the criminal’s car, while a police helicopter drops power-ups such as a bazooka. Nancy was replaced as the radio controller in the Western versions by a woman called Karen.
Ocean released the home versions as Chase H.Q. II: Special Criminal Investigation in late 1990, converted by Probe Software. The Commodore 64 version made amends for the first game. It was one of the first C64 games on cartridge, and ZZAP! called it “a superb conversion”.
The series carried on in Taito’s arcades and on consoles: the Mega Drive game sold in America as Chase H.Q. II, Super Chase: Criminal Termination in arcades (1993), Super Chase H.Q. on the Super Nintendo (1993), the PlayStation racer Ray Tracers (1997), whose characters include an aged Raymond Broady, Chase H.Q.: Secret Police on the Game Boy Color (2000), and a new arcade Chase H.Q. 2 in 2007. Taito has been owned by Square Enix since 2005.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 81, December 1988, coin-op column: Chase H.Q. reviewed; “gratuitous violence”; Tony Gibson and the black Porsche; the Idaho Slasher; “the highest grossing machine around for some time”.
- Martyn Carroll, “The History of Chase HQ”, Retro Gamer issue 115, 2013, pp. 84–89: the Spectrum after Out Run; November 1988 and the cabinets; Full Throttle and Hiroyuki Sakou; the Z System, 68000s and YM2610; the criminals and their cars; Mark Caswell in CRASH, April 1989; O’Brien and Harbison, WEC Le Mans and the road engine; Teque’s ST, Amiga and C64 versions; the other home and console versions; SCI, Karen, Probe and the C64 cartridge; the later games.
- CRASH issue 71, December 1989, pp. 56–57: Spectrum review, Ocean/John O’Brien and Bill Harbison, £9.99 cassette and £14.99 disk; Nancy, the Porsche 928 Turbo, three turbos, five levels; 95% and a Smash.
- Julian Rignall, Computer & Video Games issue 98, January 1990: Spectrum 97%, Amiga and ST 93%; Nancy’s first briefing; the chase, damage meter and turbos.
- Sinclair User issue 94, January 1990: Spectrum review and cover-tape demo; coin-op review of Special Criminal Investigation (“effectively, Chase HQ II”).
- Matt Bielby, Your Sinclair issue 50, February 1990, pp. 13–14: Spectrum review.
- Eugene Lacey, ACE issue 29, February 1990, pp. 42–43: review, ACE rating 868; Special Criminal Investigation in the arcades.
- Rik Haynes, “Trade Secrets”, ACE issue 30, March 1990, pp. 54–55: interview with John O’Brien (six months, the ST Mega, the Jigsaw language, the steering, 13 frames a second, Harbison’s sprites, Dunn’s music and the sampled effects); “the top selling computer game of Christmas ’89”; the 868 rating was for the Spectrum.
- ZZAP!64 issue 58, February 1990: Commodore 64 (53%) and Amiga (67%) reviews, Ocean prices. Issue 64, August 1990: letters page on the C64 version. Issue 68, Christmas 1990: SCI review.
- Computer & Video Games issue 100, March 1990: charts. Issue 102, May 1990: PC Engine chart.
- Your Sinclair issue 59, November 1990: full-price chart. Issue 73, January 1992: the YS top 100.
- The Games Machine issue 25, December 1989, p. 76: Spectrum review, 91%.
- CRASH issue 49, February 1988: Out Run review, 72%.
- Spectrum Computing, “Chase H.Q.” (database, web, secondary): the Sinclair User (96%) and Your Sinclair (94%) scores, which are hard to read in the surviving scans. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/903/ZX-Spectrum/Chase_HQ