Grand Prix Simulator – “Cunningly devised circuits”

In its January 1984 issue, Computer & Video Games magazine printed code listings for nine different games, ready for readers to type into their computers and run. Each of the nine programs was for a different computer format, and the listing for the Dragon 32 was for a game called Road Runner. “Rev up for a fast and furious race track challenge”, the intro promised. “Will you score the fastest lap — step on the gas and find out!”. In practice, there are no lap times in the game. From a top-down view, you move a square left and right trying to avoid oncoming obstacles, before eventually crashing and getting the message “Tough luck! You’re dead”. 

The magazine printed that Road Runner was the work of Philip Oliver, but that was just the product of the game’s authors assuming that they needed to submit it under a single name. In reality, Philip worked on it with his twin brother Andrew, and it was the first published game by the Oliver twins. Just a few years later in 1987, the Oliver Twins, name now very much capitalised, would put out a press release estimating that 7% of all of the UK’s sales of computer games were of games written by the two of them. That claim had some basis in reality, too.

When Road Runner got printed, the Oliver Twins were happy to see one of their names in print and to receive £10 from C&VG for their work. Not least because by then they’d given up on anything happening after submitting the game a year earlier. They didn’t even own their Dragon 32 any more. C&VG carried on printing listings for Dragon 32 games right through to November 1984, but the twins had given up on it much earlier. “There weren’t many games for the Dragon. The best was Donkey King, but we felt a bit cheated.” They traded up for a BBC Micro.

That period with a disappointing Dragon turned out to be quite formative. Bored with what was available, they turned to trying to input games listings from magazines, but most of them were for other formats. Trying to make sense of them and the modifications needed was the start of their interest in programming. They carried on with that on the BBC Micro, and in 1983, before Road Runner’s publication, they won a children’s game programming competition, run by ITV’s Saturday Show. At the age of fifteen, they got to appear on national TV, and won a monitor which they put to good use.

Their competition winning was a simple turn-based game called Strategy. Under the new name Gambit, it would eventually get published by Acornsoft. Describing their process for producing it in Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean’s history of the Oliver Twins, Andrew Oliver recalled that “we thought we had nothing to lose and would go and try and write a game and send it in. At this point, we’d only just bought the BBC Model B, and only knew Basic, so we decided to make a game that wouldn’t require much speed, since Basic was pretty slow. We came up with the idea of a board game on the computer.” That pragmatic approach to producing something in the face of limitations was something that would continue to serve them well.

The Oliver Twins continued programming, and learning machine code. Other sibling duos around this time often gained an advantage through specialising – frequently one artist and one programmer. Initially, the Oliver Twins instead made a strength of interchangeability, especially when they only had one computer to work on between them. “Our schedule was to do programming for 23 hours per day, with two breaks of half an hour to allow [the computer] to cool! We worked in shifts for 18 hours per day […] during the periods when we were both awake one had to prepare their code on paper, whilst the other used the computer.”

At first they carried on making games for the BBC Micro, and their first chart hit would be on that format, with Interceptor’s budget label Players giving a belated release to their single-screen caveman game Cavey. That reached #7 on the BBC chart in May 1986. The thing was, though, there were lots of very good and established programmers working on the BBC Micro, and its popularity as a format for games had dropped, if not to Dragon 32 levels, well below the level of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The delay for Cavey was because they struggled to find a publisher. And so they swapped again… to an Amstrad CPC.

Going Amstrad may have kept up their record of working with the third most popular format at best, but it was a good move. They described it as looking for a “softer target”, a newer format with less competition, and the CPC would go on to be a much better bet for games. They worked on various games and utilities, to no great breakthrough. That changed when they went to the Personal Computer World show at Olympia in London in September 1986 with a portfolio of their work and meetings arranged with a few publishers.

One unplanned meeting was with David and Richard Darling, who had a stall at the show. The two brothers, barely older than the Oliver Twins, were on the lookout for developers to support the launch of their new budget publisher Code Masters the following month. Philip Oliver later recalled that “Andrew and I were impressed that here was a publisher where the owners were game developers and understood what it took to write a game.” Philip and Andrew presented their portfolio and some design plans for a flip-screen platformer called Super Robin Hood, and the Darling brothers were impressed enough to offer them £10,000 to make it, asking them to do so in a month.

Sure enough, by the end of the year, with the initial offer switched out for a royalty-based one which would still serve the twins well, Code Masters released Super Robin Hood. They later helped with developing Spectrum and C64 versions as well, and once those came out it reached #3 on the combined formats chart in August 1987. By then, the Oliver Twins had written a successful follow-up too: a variation of the same platformer template with rather more macho energy, called Ghost Hunters. That was a #12 hit on the combined formats chart in June 1987, and a #1 Amstrad CPC hit.

Alongside Ghost Hunters, they had started work on a car game called Safari Madness that wasn’t working out. Then, as they tell it, they saw the Darling brothers’ BMX Simulator and decided to do that, except with Formula 1 cars. As Philip Oliver later told Retro Gamer, “Within a minute of seeing BMX Simulator, it was obvious how we would create Grand Prix Simulator“. They would return to top-down driving but, unlike Road Runner, this time there really would be a race and fastest laps. “We started by drawing courses created from a small number of repeated sprites and we produced a top-down car sprite with rotated versions”. They used their own (commercially published) CPC Panda Sprites utility for that.

They could move the car sprites around quickly, at the cost of them being very blocky. The cars you drive do not look like Formula 1 cars. They don’t really handle like them either, with the way they powerslide. But they added some nice artwork of Formula 1 cars at the top of the screen, and went with the Simulator title nonetheless. They worked on the game on their Amstrad CPC, alongside extra help from James Wilson with the graphics, Nigel Fletcher with design and Jon Paul Edridge on the audio. The Oliver Twins also came up with some interesting solutions to issues along the way.

“We based our collision on reading the screen pixel colours, so if the car was on black then it was the road, but if it was on green then you were on the grass” Andrew Oliver later explained. “It became a little trickier when we had to deal with the bridges […] this approach led to a bug where you could crash the AI cars and leave them very confused.” To reduce the chances of this happening immediately on the first track, they had a very pragmatic solution. They delayed the computer-controlled car at the start of the race to give the player a chance to build a gap.

Amstrad Computer User responded positively to the game, with reviewer Nigel noting that while “the ‘superbly drawn graphics’ are small orange/grey/red rectangles with a white splodge”, “this is a pretty good game […] it’s very difficult to get going, but once you do, just try stopping!”. Fellow reviewer Liz wrote that “the drone car has a tendency to get lost and the game is very difficult” but that it was “a brilliant game. And it’s budget.” John Cook in Popular Computing Weekly started his review with “Much celebration, hang out the bunting, fire cannons, declare public holidays, etc, at last someone has produced a Super Sprint clone.” I’ll return to that subject.

One page earlier in the same magazine, dated 17-30 April 1987, Code Masters took out an advert trumpeting their success to date. “We’ve had five NUMBER ONES and nineteen of our games have reached Gallup’s TOP 20 CHARTS! We’ve done all this in only five months because we sell the best games in the best packaging with effective World-wide Distribution.” The number ones count there clearly included ones for individual formats. Beneath that, Code Masters called for programmers for conversions of many of their games. Right at the top of the list was a Spectrum version of Grand Prix Simulator, for which they were offering £3,000. They were also after versions for the Commodore 64 (£3,000 too) and Commodore 16 (£2,200).

They found takers for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 ones. The C64 conversion was the work of Adrian Sheppard (who had also done an Atari conversion of BMX Simulator) and of Steven Day for the loading screen. On the Spectrum, programming was by Serj Dosanj (who had previously worked on the conversion of Ant Attack from Spectrum to Commodore 64) with graphics by Mervyn James. David Whittaker did music across both. Code Masters also had an additional marketing flourish to go with the new versions, including on their packaging an endorsement from British Formula 1 driver Johnny Dumfries. 

“Playing Grand Prix Simulator requires accuracy and finesse, just like driving a real race car” Dumfries told Computer & Video Games, which is certainly technically correct. These days there is a lot of discussion about how seats in Formula 1 are now only accessible to the most privileged people. Back in the egalitarian 1980s, we had Johnny Dumfries, aka John Crichton-Stuart, 7th Marquess of Bute. The inlay for Grand Prix Simulator mentioned his place as Ayrton Senna’s teammate at Lotus for 1986, but not that he’d lost that seat at the end of the year, an exit from the grid which turned out to be permanent.

It’s not clear how much Dumfries’s endorsement moved copies of Grand Prix Simulator, but once it was on all three main formats it did very well indeed. It climbed to the top of the combined format chart in October 1987 for two weeks, and returned there twice more. Between its initial release and that success, the issue of the game’s similarities to Super Sprint had turned into a source of some controversy. 

Super Sprint is a top-down racing game which Atari had released in arcades in 1986. It involves racing Formula 1-like cars around single screen tracks with obstacles like oil slicks and shortcuts which open and close. When Grand Prix Simulator came out, the resemblance was widely noticed. Crash’s preview of Grand Prix Simulator pointedly started by describing it as “inspired by the coin-op Super Sprint (to which, incidentally, Activision have the rights)”. Having seen their home conversion pre-empted, Activision kicked up some legal and press fuss.

The Oliver Twins maintained that their inspiration had been BMX Simulator, not Super Sprint. There were a couple of problems with that. One is in how closely some particular details matched, like collecting score bonuses in the form of spanners on the track. That stretched the idea that the resemblance was coincidental beyond credulity. The other is that the timing makes it entirely possible for BMX Simulator to have taken inspiration from Super Sprint to begin with.

Popular Computing Weekly made a good point on the wider implications, though. “The battle could prove something of a test case. Previous disputes over licensing copyright have usually concentrated on specific sprite design and screen layout – certainly not the case between GPS and Super Sprint. If Activision wins on the premise that the general game concept is part of the licence, the implications are enormous.” There are some echoes of music plagiarism cases in more recent years, which have thankfully now mostly now trended away from deciding a similar kind of stylistic debt is worthy of punishment.

Sinclair User reported on the disagreement like it was introducing a boxing match (“In the red corner, Activision. In the blue corner, Code Masters.”) but finished by saying that “there’s definitely a fight in here somewhere, but I’m not sure whether it will actually get to the ring”. They were correct. Code Masters were happy to pursue further publicity from the challenge, and it certainly never went to court. 

The Oliver Twins later reported that Grand Prix Simulator went on to sell more than 250,000 copies, against a general expectation from Code Masters that even a very successful game would normally get to about 100,000. Even just its initial success had made clear how important the twins had become to the rapid success of Code Masters. As a result, the Darling brothers would give them free rein to make exactly what they wanted next. Even if what they wanted to make was a cartoon adventure starring an egg.

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Sources:

• Let’s Go Dizzy!: The Story of the Oliver Twins, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2016
• The Codemasters Years – The early years, The Oliver Twins, 2002, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• Britsoft: An Oral History, Alex Wiltshire, Read Only Memory, 2015
• The Oliver Twins, Neil Reive, Arnold 2: Amstrad CPC – The Developers Q&As Uncut, 2021
• The Dizzy Duo, Malcolm Oliver, Crash No. 96, February 1992, accessed via the Internet Archive and also available at Crash Online
• Interview with Andrew Oliver – Making video games, Richard Lissaman, Mathematics Today, October 2023, reproduced by Institute of Mathematics & ITS Applications
• The History of Code Masters Simulators, David Crookes, Retro Gamer No. 218, October 2018
• Road Runner, Philip Oliver, Computer & Video Games No. 87, January 1984, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Road Runner code, arhneu, GitHub, 2016
• The Dragon 32, Nostalgia Nerd, 2016
• Review – Grand Prix Simulator, Amstrad Computer User No. 31, June 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Races away, John Cook, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 16, 17-30 April 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Code Masters advert, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 16, 17-30 April 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Tartan Terror, Computer & Video Games No. 76, February 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Merely Mangram – Preview, Crash No. 43, August 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Activision and Codemasters in Grand Prix Row, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 6 No. 18, 8-14 May 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Whodunwot, Sinclair User No. 64, July 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Cavey, Super Robin Hood, Ghost Hunters, chart histories at Computer Hits

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