In the spring of 1984 a Spitfire flew under a bridge in a town called Acornsville, and an Air Vice-Marshal who had commanded a wing of real Spitfires over Malta stood beside one at the RAF Museum in Hendon to vouch for it. The flight was on a BBC Micro. Its author, Geoff Crammond, was a 30-year-old systems engineer at Marconi who had never written a program for a home computer until two years before. Over the next eighteen years he wrote games that treated a car or an aircraft as a set of equations to be solved: Revs, Stunt Car Racer and the Grand Prix series, with the strategy game The Sentinel in between.
Fast facts
- Born: 1953 or 1954, and brought up in Somerset.
- Before games: a physics degree from Bristol University, then eight years as a systems engineer in the defence industry, at Marconi.
- First games: Super Invaders and Aviator (1984) for Acornsoft on the BBC Micro.
- Racing: Revs (1985), Stunt Car Racer (1989), Formula One Grand Prix (1991), Grand Prix 2 (1996), Grand Prix 3 (2000) and Grand Prix 4 (2002).
- Strategy: The Sentinel (Firebird, 1986), with 10,000 landscapes.
- Tools: 100% assembly language through Grand Prix 2; “I’m not trained as a programmer,” he told Edge in 1995.
From Fortran to the BBC Micro
Crammond started university studying aeronautics and switched to physics. At Marconi he used Fortran for mathematical modelling. In 1981, he told Acorn Programs, he was thinking of building a simulator in his spare time and meant to buy a home computer to take apart for its chips, until he realised “that most were as good off the shelf as anything I could build”. He saw a BBC Micro at a trade fair that August and ordered one the next morning. It took six months to arrive.
He knew neither BASIC nor machine code, so he taught himself assembly language. Learning the machine took two months and his first game, Super Invaders, four more. He sent it to Acornsoft “out of the blue”. Acornsoft already had a Space Invaders game, but his was drawn in the higher-resolution mode 1 and it accepted his instead. Super Invaders was on sale in Acorn dealers’ lists by April 1983, and Crammond later told Retro Gamer that it earned him about two-thirds of his annual salary.
Aviator
His second game was planned with Acornsoft from the start. They chose the Spitfire, because, said managing director David Johnson-Davies, “You can also perform stunts and aerobatics on it, unlike a DC10.” Crammond deliberately looked at none of the other flight simulators on sale: “Sometimes, just because someone has solved a problem in a certain way, you think that that is the only way to do it.” He borrowed a wartime set of pilot’s notes and worked out the aerodynamics from first principles, in evenings, weekends and holidays, over nine months. To keep the view smooth he gave up colour and drew the town, bridges and landscape in plain lines.
Acorn User reviewed Aviator in May 1984 at £14.95 on cassette. The reviewer thought it “in a class of its own as it gives a sense of really flying”, and noted that it was the first BBC simulator with a cockpit view. As well as aerobatics, it had a game called the Theme, in which the Spitfire defended Acornsville from aliens that ate the crops. With Aviator finished, Crammond left Marconi to write games full time, although, he recalled, “we were expecting an addition to the family within months”.
Revs
Acorn was sponsoring a Formula 3 driver, David Hunt, younger brother of the world champion James Hunt, and after Aviator Acornsoft asked Crammond for a racing game. He had not followed motor racing. Hunt drove him round Thruxton in a BMW, and he visited Hunt’s team, Eddie Jordan Racing at Silverstone, for data on the car. He mapped the circuit in true 3D co-ordinates, which he had not seen done before: in racing games like Pole Position, he said, a bend “seemed like a distorted straight rather than something you actually arrived at”.
Revs came out in the spring of 1985. In June Acorn User announced “the most realistic motor racing simulation for the Beeb”, a Formula 3 Ralt RT3 at Silverstone “with the track’s curves, dips and hills accurately reproduced” and adjustable wings, at £14.95 on cassette and £17.65 on disc. Acornsoft’s advertisement advised players to study David Hunt’s circuit diagram before trying for the lap record. Firebird published a version for the Commodore 64 with Brands Hatch as well as Silverstone, which ZZAP!64 reviewed in February 1986: “There are race games and there are simulations, but there’s nothing quite like Revs.” The racing game entry places Revs at the start of the genre’s simulation branch.
The Sentinel
Crammond’s next game was not a simulation. He had worked out that although computers could not yet do detailed real-time 3D, they could draw a solid 3D landscape once and then pan across it, redrawing only the strip coming in from the edge of the screen. The Sentinel was the game he built on that trick: the player’s Synthoid climbs a landscape of hills and plateaus by absorbing trees and boulders, and must reach the highest point without being seen by the Sentinel standing on it. It took about six months, he said, and six more to convert.
Firebird published it in 1986. ZZAP!64 gave it a Gold Medal, and Computer & Video Games readers voted it Best Original Game of 1986 in the Golden Joystick Awards. Its 10,000 landscapes were generated from their numbers rather than stored; the procedural generation entry explains how. A 3D update, Sentinel Returns, was developed by Hookstone and published by Psygnosis in 1998. Crammond told Retro Gamer he was not heavily involved, beyond supplying source code such as the landscape generator.
Stunt Car Racer
Stunt Car Racer began, Crammond said, as “a sort of land-roving vehicle sim, driving around on a randomly undulating landscape”. Driving it, he noticed that the most fun came from hitting a ramp and taking off, so he flattened the landscape, added more ramps, then a track to join them, and banked the corners so that jumps and drops, not cornering, were the challenge. The result, published by MicroStyle in 1989 for the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga, raced stunt cars round elevated tracks like roller coasters, with a crane to winch a fallen car back on. The 16-bit versions let two players race by linking machines, even an ST with an Amiga, through their serial ports.
It took more than two years, and it came out in the same year as Atari’s arcade game Hard Drivin’. Crammond has said that he became aware of Hard Drivin’ only a few months before release and that it had “absolutely zero influence” on his game.
Formula One Grand Prix
Not long after Stunt Car Racer, his publisher, MicroProse, told Crammond it was negotiating a licence with the McLaren team and asked whether he would like to write a Formula One game. He started in March 1990. The licence deal was never signed, but the game was far enough along to finish. Formula One Grand Prix came out for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1991 and for the PC in 1992. Crammond told Amiga Power how he had filled the gaps in his data: he had been videotaping every Grand Prix he could, and when Ayrton Senna was shown lapping with his speed on screen, knowing the circuit meant he “could work backwards to get information”. To draw in players who were not racing fans, he added driving aids such as automatic braking and gears and an ideal racing line. Amiga Power credited Crammond with design and code, and his brother-in-law Norman Surplus with the tracks.
Grand Prix 2, 3 and 4
Grand Prix 2 was meant to follow in 1995. Edge found Crammond working from nine in the morning until midnight on a pure assembly-language engine, adding texture-mapped graphics and a much larger physical model to the original. Norman Surplus had been to Monaco to photograph textures, Dave Surplus tested the handling, and Pete Cooke wrote the menus and the track editor. The game slipped from autumn 1995 until it reached the shops on 19 July 1996, when, PC Gamer reported, 350,000 copies shipped on the first day.
Grand Prix 3, published under Hasbro’s MicroProse name in 2000, added the weather that Edge had called the major omission from its predecessor, with rain that could come and go during a race. Grand Prix 4 followed in 2002, published by Infogrames. By then the work was divided: Crammond told Retro Gamer that a team of about 30 made it, with him writing the physics simulation and computer drivers and MicroProse doing the graphics, sound and menus. An Xbox version had been shown to the press, but MicroProse’s studio closed two weeks after the PC release, and the Xbox version was never finished.
After Grand Prix 4
Crammond has released no game since Grand Prix 4. In 2003 Edge reported that he was about to start Stunt Car Racer Pro, a multiplayer version for internet play, with the British developer Lost Toys; he later told Retro Gamer that the project, which he had financed himself, reached a working demo and was then stopped. In the same interview, around 2009, he said he had begun “a new phase called ‘having a normal life’”, with hobbies and no more seven-day weeks, while writing recreational programs, now in C++. Grand Prix 5, he added, “still feels like unfinished business”. Players have kept Grand Prix 4 going with their own modifications; Crammond was never involved in them for contractual reasons, but said the unofficial support pleased him.
Sources
- Nicole Segre, “Flying high on the wings of a Spitfire simulator”, Acorn Programs, June/July 1984, pp. 12–13: age, Somerset, Bristol and physics, Marconi and Fortran, the BBC Micro order, Super Invaders, Aviator’s development, the Hendon launch and Air Vice-Marshal Sandy Johnstone, leaving Marconi.
- Acorn User issue 9, April 1983: dealer advertisement listing Super Invaders among Acornsoft’s BBC programs.
- Acorn User issue 22, May 1984: Aviator review (£14.95, cockpit view, the Theme).
- Acorn User issue 35, June 1985, p. 11: “‘Revs’ follows ‘Aviator’ lead”; Acornsoft’s Revs advertisement in the same issue.
- ZZAP!64 issue 10, February 1986: Revs review (Firebird, Silverstone and Brands Hatch); issue 11, March 1986, charts (Firebird, £14.95).
- Computer & Video Games issue 66, April 1987, pp. 100–101: the 1986 Golden Joystick Awards; for The Sentinel’s Gold Medal and landscapes, see the procedural generation entry and its citation of ZZAP!64 issue 20.
- The Games Machine issue 24, November 1989, p. 89: Stunt Car Racer review; MicroStyle advertisement, ACE issue 26, November 1989, p. 74 (see the racing game entry).
- ACE issue 49, October 1991: Formula One Grand Prix preview (work began in March 1990; the driving aids).
- Amiga Power issue 7, November 1991: Formula One Grand Prix review (credits, £34.99) and “Crammond: a decade in pole position” (systems engineer for eight years, videotaped races, Senna’s in-car lap).
- Edge issue 23, August 1995, pp. 44–46: Formula One Grand Prix 2 interview (assembly language, the Surpluses and Pete Cooke, working hours, physics degree and eight years in the defence industry).
- Edge special edition, autumn 1995, p. 91: profile (The Sentinel “a six month project”).
- PC Gamer issue 34, September 1996, p. 59: Grand Prix 2 released on 19 July 1996, 350,000 copies on the first day.
- Edge issue 78, November 1999: Grand Prix 3 preview (Hasbro/MicroProse; weather as “the major omission from GP2”).
- PC Gamer issue 113, September 2002: charts (Grand Prix 4, Infogrames).
- Edge issue 125, July 2003, pp. 114–117: “The making of Stunt Car Racer” (more than two years of work; Stunt Car Racer Pro with Lost Toys).
- Computer and Video Games issue 201, August 1998, and Edge issue 57, April 1998: Sentinel Returns (Psygnosis; Hookstone).
- Damien McFerran, interview with Geoff Crammond, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection volume 5 (2011), pp. 182–188: Super Invaders’ earnings, David Hunt and Eddie Jordan Racing, true 3D co-ordinates, The Sentinel’s panning, Sentinel Returns, Stunt Car Racer‘s origins and Hard Drivin’, the McLaren licence, the Grand Prix 4 team and Xbox version, Stunt Car Racer Pro, life after Grand Prix 4.