Micro Machines began as a game about beach buggies in California and ended up on a breakfast table. It was one of the first games Code Masters made for the NES, and it was made without Nintendo’s licence, on development kits the company built for itself. It shrank its racers to the size of the toy cars it was named after and sent them round school desks, pool tables and bathtubs. Its two-player mode, in which you win a point by leaving your opponent behind the edge of the screen, is the part people remember.
From buggies to toy cars
Edge told the story in 2004. In 1989 the Darlings wanted to publish for the NES without paying for Nintendo’s licensing programme. “At the time it wasn’t easy to get a licence and we didn’t need one, so we went ahead without it,” Richard Darling said. “The hardest part was finding a way to get around the protection system on the NES.” Ted Carron, a Code Masters engineer, built the company’s first NES development system, and a cheat cartridge he designed became the Game Genie.
Andrew Graham, a computer science student at the University of Strathclyde, had converted Treasure Island Dizzy to the NES for Code Masters. In October 1989 he started his first original game, a top-down racer called California Buggy Boys. Then the Game Genie changed its course. Galoob, the San Francisco toy company that licensed the Genie, also sold Micro Machines, tiny model cars. “Their biggest line of toys was the Micro Machines range, and so it was an obvious match,” David Darling told Edge. Graham agreed: “It made sense to exploit this well-known brand, rather than launching the totally unknown California Buggy Boys.”
Work started early in 1990 in cabins Code Masters had put up in a field behind the Darlings’ house, where, Graham remembered, staff tiptoed across wooden boards with their coffee when it rained. Paul Perrot was lead artist, with help from Toby Egglesfield, and John Menzies wrote the front end. The settings came from Graham and Perrot “throwing ideas around”. “I remember the pool table was an option while we were playing pool at the pub at lunchtime,” Perrot said.
Working inside the NES
The NES builds its backgrounds from 8×8-pixel tiles, and “there was a 256 character limit for backgrounds”, Perrot remembered. “There tended to be a fair bit of repetition,” Graham said. “I guess that’s part of the whole Micro Machines ‘look’, where you have a table with 15 cereal bowls, and five boxes of cereal on it.” Perrot worked with “four palettes of three colours and a background colour” and drew nine rotations of every vehicle, which he called “pretty damned boring”.
The computer-controlled cars were steered by a cheap trick. “Basically, the whole world was covered with invisible arrows pointing in the direction the car should drive,” Graham explained. Each car turned to face the arrow beneath it, so however far off the track it went, the arrows led it back. “If you found that the cars were repeatedly banging into a cereal box or something, then it just meant that you had the arrows pointing into the box.”
The game was finished in September 1990, after a run of all-night sessions, in time for Graham to go back to his degree. Then a problem turned up in the cartridge chips. Edge’s account says the first production run of ROMs had come back from the factory in Taiwan with a bug that crashed the game if a player reversed on the first level, caused by a single wrong bit. Rather than scrap tens of thousands of chips, Code Masters added circuitry to the cartridge that worked “like a mini Game Genie” and corrected that bit as the console read it.
Playing it
The races run across household scenery seen from above. Mean Machines listed the hazards in 1992: books and rulers on the school desks, balls and cues on the pool table, garden sprinklers that knock the helicopter out of the sky, rubber ducks in the bath, marmalade on the breakfast table and ink slicks on the desk. The vehicles include sports cars, Formula One cars, speedboats, helicopters and tanks. There is no brake: a light tap on the reverse button slows the car, a longer press sends it backwards, and in the tanks it fires the gun.
In the one-player game you race three computer drivers and must finish in the top two to go on. The head-to-head mode was the idea that lasted. There is no split screen. The screen follows the leader, and when one car gets far enough ahead that the other drops off the edge, the leader takes a point. Amiga Power explained the scoring in 1993: each player starts with four points, and the game ends when one reaches eight. “It was clearly the best part of the games,” Graham said, “making the single-player mode look a bit boring in comparison.” He and Perrot played the prototype to decide who had to walk to the main building to make the coffee.
Unlicensed on the NES
Camerica, a Canadian company, sold the game in North America. Its advertisements placed Micro Machines in a “Gold Series” alongside Code Masters’ The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, called it “the best and most innovative racing game on the N.E.S. ever!”, and stated that it was “not designed, manufactured, distributed or endorsed by Nintendo of America”. The name was a trademark of Lewis Galoob Toys, used under licence. When Nintendo put a stronger lock-out chip into a new edition of the console, Game Informer reported in January 1992, Camerica added a switch to its new cartridges so that they would run on old and new machines.
The legal risk was real, and it came from the Game Genie. Nintendo sued Galoob over the Genie, and in 1991, as both Game Informer and Edge reported, a US District Court ruled in Galoob’s favour; Edge added that the decision was upheld on appeal. Code Masters’ own cartridges were built to stay clear of Nintendo’s rights, and Edge concluded that Nintendo could not legally stop their sale. “We were always aware that there was a risk that Nintendo would make a claim that we had infringed their rights,” David Darling told Edge. “This is why we had to make sure development and manufacturing of the games would not infringe any of their rights.”
Game Informer reviewed it in its first issue, in autumn 1991. One reviewer found it “just average” in sound and technology but hard to put down; the other rated it 8 out of 10 and praised the “cool two player option”. In Britain, Mean Machines reviewed the NES version in July 1992 and called it “One of the best NES releases in months, and one no self-respecting games fan should miss.” Graham was less sure it had paid off: “There were plenty of good reviews, but in the end I don’t think Micro Machines on the NES sold in spectacular quantities. In the US there were too many legal complexities, and we were relying on others to market the game.”
Mega Drive, Amiga and the sequels
Code Masters then took the game to other machines, now as its own publisher. Edge listed a Mega Drive version for October 1993, and its charts still carried the game, at £35, through the summer of 1994. Amiga Power reviewed the Amiga version, at £25.99, in October 1993. It counted 24 courses in eight kinds of scenery and 11 drivers, noted that the Amiga lacked some details of the Mega Drive version, and called it “a wonderful game”, let down only by a single-player game with no password or save system.
Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament followed in 1994. For the Mega Drive, Code Masters built two extra joypad ports into the cartridge itself, a design it called the J-Cart, so that four people could play without buying an adapter; Retro Gamer said some clever programming also let two players share one joypad, for up to eight in its party mode. “When you have manufacturing control you can go ahead on your own,” David Darling told Edge in 1996. Micro Machines ’96 and other sequels followed. By 2004 Edge estimated that the series had sold about five million copies.
Sources
- Game Informer issue 1, autumn 1991: Micro Machines reviews (Camerica, NES); the Game Genie ruling.
- Game Informer issue 3, January 1992: Camerica advertisement (Gold Series; the Nintendo disclaimer; the Galoob trademark); Camerica’s lock-out switch.
- Mean Machines issue 22, July 1992: Micro Machines NES review (hazards, reverse gear, two-player scoring).
- Amiga Power issue 30, October 1993: Micro Machines Amiga review (£25.99; 24 courses, 11 drivers; head-to-head scoring; comparison with the Mega Drive version).
- Edge issue 1, October 1993: release schedule (Micro Machines, Mega Drive).
- Edge issue 6, March 1994, and issue 11, August 1994: charts (Micro Machines, Code Masters, £35).
- Computer+Videogiochi (Italy) issue 43, December 1994: Micro Machines 2 review (party play).
- Digital Press collectors’ guide, 2003: Codemasters titles, including Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament and Micro Machines ’96: Turbo Tournament.
- Computer and Video Games issue 169, December 1995: the J-Cart used again in Super Skidmarks, compared with Micro Machines 2.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: “Company focus: CodeMasters” (David Darling on the J-Cart and manufacturing control).
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: “Company Lookback: Codemasters” (Micro Machines 2’s eight-player party mode and J-Cart).
- Edge issue 136, May 2004, pp. 114–117: “The making of… Micro Machines” (Richard and David Darling, Andrew Graham, Paul Perrot and Toby Egglesfield on development; the NES limits; the arrow system; the chip fix; the Galoob case; sales).