Three years on from Steve Davis Snooker, the sport was still popular, for similar reasons. As Jimmy White himself explained recently: “I’d just become famous, because we only had four channels in them days”. Television didn’t offer so many alternatives, 1991 also being right before Sky TV started turning the world of televised sport upside down. TV had in fact long been crucial to the history of snooker’s success in the UK, its big break coming in 1969 when the BBC needed something suitable to show off colour television and settled on a gameshow based on a game with a lovely bright green background and a bunch of different coloured balls. Decades later In the world of sports computer games, another transformative technological advance was to find snooker its perfect showcase.
Jimmy “Whirlwind” White’s snooker game is in many ways functionally identical to Steve “Interesting” Davis’s snooker game. Just like in that one, you take your time to line up your shot direction, spin and power and initiate it with a click. No quick reactions are required, just a bunch of decisions along fine gradients, precision being one thing it is able to bring more of. It’s physics certainly work a little more realistically, with none of the impression that you are actually playing curling. Precision doesn’t offer much in the way of whirlwind, though. What can offer that is 3D.
Running on occasions against the snooker in the afternoons of 1991’s limited TV choices, we were halfway through the run of Knightmare, a children’s gameshow phenomenon based on simulating watching someone in virtual reality via the wonders of blue screen. We were two years away from Cyber Zone and watching Craig Charles shout at people actually playing rubbish virtual reality games. Being part of virtual 3D worlds was in.
Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker is not virtual reality. It is not in any way the earliest 3D game I’ve played for this project (that would be Ant Attack, or for first person 3D it would be 3D Tank Duel from 1984, both part of Soft Aid). But, well, Jimmy White’s Whirlwind Snooker is the first game for this project that offers free movement around a three dimensional virtual space and works. Snooker, the perfect game for the early days of colour TV, turns out to be the perfect game for the early days of 3D virtual spaces too.
Simulating the movements and interactions of spheres within a confined space is not easy. Programmer Archer Maclean, previously responsible for bringing impressively realistic animated movements to International Karate, still had some job to do to make it work as well as it does. But simulating the movements and interactions of spheres within a confined space is a lot more achievable on a 1991 home computer than most other possibilities, and achievable in a satisfyingly complete way. Moving the virtual camera round the table, leaning up and down, swooping to a Steve Davis-style plan view from above the table and back, feels like really being there by this disembodied snooker table. There’s your whirlwind.
