Go for the Gold – “Your name up there in lights”

When researching less well-known games, I can generally find something interesting and unexpected about their authors. Go for the Gold, though, stands out for just how wild the journey got when I started learning about Michael Crick, the author it names every time you start one of its mini-games. If you believe everything I could find about Crick: he wrote his first computer game in 1966, worked on the precursor to the internet, and invented two games series which remain ongoing household names, as well as the first version of a utility which a vast number of people use every day. And he made a lot of money from Go for the Gold, which reached #1 in the UK charts in 1986, two years after its initial release and under a new name.

Michael Crick was born in London in 1940, nearly two decades before the unrelated British journalist of the same name, and at least a decade before just about every other game designer I have written about. He grew up in Northampton, and studied physiology at University College London, taking after his father, a scientist. He then headed to the USA and to Harvard Medical School. Working with some prominent scientists on a project studying vision in cats, he didn’t get on with the live animal aspects, and wasn’t doing particularly well. He instead found himself drawn to spending time with a group of computer students from the nearby MIT. He ended up dropping out of Harvard and going into computers on a more full-time basis.

Crick found work at research company BBN, where his office was next to that of Wally Feurzeig, one of the inventors of the Logo programming language for children, known for its accompanying moving ‘turtle’. Crick was working on similar things himself, revisiting a moving gadget he had devised some years earlier, and writing a mainframe program based on its movements. In 1966, he says, he developed that into a mainframe game based on training frogs to move in particular ways, called Frog Master. Not long after that, while he was still with BBN, they were chosen to work on ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. Crick says that he came up with the name ‘Internet’, though they didn’t take it up at the time.

By 1976, Crick had moved to work for Boeing in Seattle. He wrote an article for the local Argus newspaper, about a new company who had written an impressive BASIC compiler, which they had sold 1,250 copies of. The compiler was the work of “Bill Gates Jr., son of the Seattle lawyer of the same name”, and the company was Microsoft. Crick claims this as the first newspaper story ever written about Microsoft, although on his website he presents it as such without mentioning that it is his own work. He kept in touch with the subject of his article.

In the early ‘80s, he returned to Frog Master and developed it further for Atari’s 8-bit computers. Then he “got in on the ground floor” with the Commodore 64, which he liked more. Commodore themselves published Frog Master, its frog sport and rudimentary learning making for one of their more unusual early games. Crick later told the ANTIC Atari podcast that the Commodore 64 version sold 35,000 copies, and he had no idea about the Atari version and couldn’t remember receiving royalties for it. Still, he wasn’t too bothered, saying that “I really wasn’t trying to make money very much” and that programming games was “something I did on weekends”. 

Also in 1983, Crick made another Commodore 64 game called Word Feud, reflecting a long interest in word puzzles. The following year, he worked for 3-2-1 Software on a Commodore 64 game that fitted into 1984’s trend for multi-event sports games, inspired by the Los Angeles Olympics. It would go up against assorted decathlon games and Epyx’s Summer Games, among others. The 3-2-1 Software sports game became HESGames when they licensed it to HESWare, short for Human Engineered Software.

HESWare was an American company founded in 1980 by Jay Balakrishnan, which briefly enjoyed significant success as an early player on the Commodore 64. This included publishing in the US some of the earliest games by British indie game legend Jeff Minter. HESWare gave Minter a C64 to work with in September 1982, months before almost anyone had one here, and in 1983 he told Popular Computing Weekly that the majority of his income was coming from the US. HESWare aimed to expand fast but HESGames, among other games, did not perform as needed to match up to their spending. With a trajectory similar to Britain’s Imagine Software, HESWare ended up filing for bankruptcy by the end of 1984.

It’s unsurprising that HESGames had trouble standing out from a crowded field, but is an impressive game for 1984. It has its share of joystick wagging for running events, but even something basic like long jump takes the interesting approach of having the runner run diagonally, closer to the camera as they enter the pit. And there are some more sophisticated ideas in control and presentation in diving, archery and weightlifting, all of which bring more rhythm and strategy into the picture. Its chunky sprites also look good, and it gives players the option to choose the colours of their outfits and keeps track of their performance across all of the events nicely.

HESGames only appears to have received one review in the UK games press, from Tony Takoushi in Personal Computer Games. This was a very positive review with one enormous caveat, namely the price. The game came on disk rather than cassette, and was priced at £27.95. Takoushi wrote that it “offers some of the finest graphics, sound and play for the 64 – if you can afford it!”. It passed pretty much un-noticed here, unsurprising when British players could buy Daley Thompson’s Decathlon for less than a third of the price. 

Two years later, with HESWare no more, HESGames got picked up by the label Americana, a collaborative effort between U.S. Gold and budget specialists Mastertronic which was in process of switching from being primarily run by the former to primarily run by the latter. Americana fixed the main problem with the game, rereleasing it with minor changes under the title Go for the Gold, including on cassette at the new price of £2.99. They licensed it from Crick, who had obviously picked up all the rights after HESWare’s collapse. The new title screen said “© Michael F. C. Crick 1986” in place of 321-Software, and every event newly opened with the message “by Michael Crick” on its scoreboard.

Go for the Gold got more British reviews this time. Zzap! 64’s still referred to it as HES Games, everyone else called it “Go for Gold”, but with the price change moving in the correct direction and almost no one having played the original, no one presented it as a World Cup Carnival style con. It didn’t look outdated by 1986 standards, either. “Go for Gold is quite a nice version of the tried and tested sports simulations” wrote Computer & Video Games. Ferdy Hamilton in Commodore User concluded that “It’s not quite in the Epyx league […] But for £2.99 there is nothing to compare with it at this price.” Your Commodore called “by far the best game released under the Americana title so far”. Gary Penn in Zzap! 64 wrote that it was “an extremely classy sports simulation that shouldn’t be overlooked by any self-respecting fan of the genre, especially at the ridiculously low price”.

Go for the Gold hit the top of the UK combined formats chart for one week. For Michael Crick, it also proved the most profitable game he ever made. These two things weren’t particularly connected, though. His big payday didn’t come from royalties, but from the fact that he had successfully trademarked the title Go for the Gold (a phrase which had previously appeared in various manuals of Epyx sports games and been the title of a compilation of sports games for Mattel’s Intellivision). Then the US Olympic Committee decided that they wanted to trademark that phrase ahead of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Records show that Crick cancelled his rights in 1994, and he told the Eastside Journal that his pay-off for doing so was large. “It is a very erratic and unpredictable business. Sometimes the money just appears when you are not expecting it.”

Before Go for the Gold, Crick also worked on Break Street, a breakdancing game made in association with Seattle’s D-Roxy Crew and released in 1984 by Creative Software. At some point he started working at Microsoft, with that early Bill Gates connection coming in handy. There, he apparently worked on the first version of Microsoft Word’s spellchecker. He later designed WordZap, a game where you try to put together words against a computer opponent, which saw release as part of Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3 in 1991, and as a standalone on the Game Boy the following year. 

Just before that he had made a different game for a Nintendo machine, although in a less official capacity. Nintendo only allowed companies who used Nintendo’s licenced cartridges to release games on the NES, but some found workarounds to be able to use their own. One company with such a workaround was American Video Entertainment. Crick worked on a NES game for them in 1990 called Dudes With Attitude, a puzzle game which harked right back to Frog Master in the way your character runs about by themselves and you don’t have complete direct control over them. 

He then worked on a revised version of the same concept called Trolls on Treasure Island, which American Video Entertainment released in 1994, apparently two years after it was finished. Based on its lack of any text around the rights to the image of the Trolls characters it uses, this appears to have been a doubly unlicensed game. Both Dudes With Attitude and Trolls on Treasure Island were actually double Crick efforts, made by Michael and his daughter Cam, who was around 11 years old when they made Dudes With Attitude.

Michael did the programming, but the concept and art were all Cam’s. “My family has been a computer family as long as I’ve been alive” she told The Seattle Times in 1991, and mentioned that she was “not a total Nintendo fan”. “Usually, I play on Amiga. They have better graphics”.  The games are not remembered as classics, for a reason, but are quite charming, especially played in the context of knowing they were largely the creation of someone so young.

In 1991, American Video Entertainment launched a lawsuit against Nintendo, claiming it was operating an illegal monopoly. They later gave up on it, with changes in the legal environment going against their chances. “The lawsuit was an embarrassment to me” said Michael Crick in an interview, because “at that time one of Cam’s friends was Masayo Arakawa” – the granddaughter of the president of Nintendo, and daughter of the head of Nintendo of America. Those were the kind of circles the Cricks were in.

Michael Crick also has a programming credit on Piper, a 1996 Splash Studios FMV game based on the Pied Piper story, and featuring Mighty Morphin Power Rangers star Jason David Frank. Since then, he has worked on various web-based puzzle games, including continuing to update a free version of WordZap. At some point in the early 1990s, he told the ANTIC podcast, he developed some ideas from Frog Master in a slightly different, human based form, in a prototype on the Amiga called Home Builder. He presented this to Maxis, who liked it and… “eventually it came out as The Sims”. 

On further questioning, Crick said that he was invited to join Maxis and unable to do so at the time, and revised his contribution down to saying that his demo helped to “legitimise” some early ideas Will Wright already had, before Maxis turned them into a very different form by the time they released it. Like the hosts, my reaction to the initial telling was very much one of scepticism, but the eventual facts seem at least somewhat plausible, if unverified. I couldn’t find anyone having ever asked Will Wright or Maxis about Crick’s apparent contribution.

What is less plausible is the way this was reported in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper in 2012, which was that Michael Crick was “developer of Microsoft’s Spell Checker and popular games like Will Wright’s The Sims and John Madden Football“. NBC News and The Smithsonian have mentioned the spell checker as well, and Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News also said he helped design John Madden Football. Two of his former 3-2-1 Software colleagues, Dennis Kirsch and Mark Madland, did go on to work on an American Football game, but it was Activision’s GFL Championship Football and Crick isn’t included in its credits.

You may have noticed that while I have been able to trace Michael Crick’s life and career unusually well, this post has been very short on games press sources and heavy on the likes of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News and the San Diego Union-Tribune, not the kind of publications I generally get to use. There is a reason for this. I mentioned back at the start of the post that Michael Crick’s father was a scientist. More specifically, his father was Francis Crick, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for his work on documenting the structure of DNA, the prize shared with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins (but not others including Rosalind Franklin whose work heavily contributed). 

Francis Crick wrote a letter to his son discussing this new discovery in 1953, when Michael was 12 years old. That letter has since been published and the subject of much discussion, as well as selling at auction for more than $5 million in 2013. Michael Crick’s famous father is the angle of interest for so many of the published stories about him, by people that clearly know little about computer games. The DNA link makes the angle even more irresistible and, indeed, journalists have also taken it for stories about Michael’s daughters and their own pursuits in games and art. 

It seems likely that Michael Crick’s background was a factor in his ability to make games while not caring too much about making money, and to the resultant unusual shape of his long game development career. Still, when as a young child I worked through the cases full of old Commodore 64 games we inherited from relatives, there weren’t many that I loved with the same intensity as Go for the Gold. Its big and colourful athletes, and its events that mostly owed more to technique than raw speed, played a role in my own early love of computer games. And when I read the name Michael Crick on the screen, I had no idea whatsoever who he was, or who his dad was.

There is also something else I didn’t mention. Crick personally had the trademark for the name Go for the Gold, and it says regularly in-game that it is by Michael Crick. In its original form as HESGames, though, it had a detailed credits screen available from its main menu (Go for the Gold has those credits only in the small print of its cassette inlay). Said credits screen provides the information that HESGames was the product of design and implementation by Michael Crick and Dennis Kirsch, with graphics and animation by Steve Chin and Mark Madland, sound and music by Bob Landwehr, and composition by Ray Rideout.

Most of them, minus Kirsch and Rideout, also worked on Break Street, and Landwehr worked on Piper too. Chin and Madland both went on to work for EA, with Madland rising to senior producer on Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 in 2002. When I tried to find out much more than that about anyone other than Crick who worked on HESGames, my findings were limited in a way that I am more used to. But they all contributed to the game that I loved, even if none of their contributions to computer games history have been recognised by the San Diego Union-Tribune.

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Sources:

• ANTIC Interview 166 – Michael Crick, Frogmaster, ANTIC the Atari 8-bit Podcast, 2016
• Master of the game, John Cook, Eastside Journal, 8 April 1998, as documented on Michael Crick’s Home Page
• Human Engineered Software (or, The Software Icarus), Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2014
• Galloping llamas!, David Kelly, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 2 No. 20, 19-25 May 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• A Game Developer Named the Internet, Ok so… (YouTube), 2025
• Americana Checklist, Simon Plumbe, Mastertronic Collectors Archive, 2024
• Go For The Gold Application #73827403 (and associated documents), uspto.report
• Michael Crick Interview, NESWorld, 2007
• Screentest – HESGames, Tony Takoushi, Personal Computer Games No. 13, December 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Zzap! Test – HES Games, Zzap! 64 No. 15, July 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Software Reviews – Go For Gold, Computer & Video Games No. 61, November 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Reviews – Go For Gold, G.R.H., Your Commodore No. 27, December 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene – Go For Gold, Ferdy Hamilton, Commodore User No. 38, November 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• The story of American Video Entertainment, NESWorld, 2002 
• New app dethrones NYT crossword puzzle, San Diego Union-Tribune, 19 August 2012
• When DNA pioneer’s Nobel Prize and mementos are sold, science profits, Alan Boyle, NBC News, 2013
• Inventor: I know what kids want, Scott Williams, The Seattle Times, 20 May 1991
• Document Deep Dive: Francis Crick Explains the ‘Secret of Life’, Smithsonian Magazine, 2013
• Crick progeny follow their own passions, Carol Potera, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News Vol. 31 No. 4, 2011
• Kindra Crick’s mad pursuit, Bob Hicks, Oregon Artswatch, 3 December 2015

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