After the international success of war game Beach-Head, Bruce Carver was in a position to grow Access Software. He didn’t have too far to look for help. Just as Bruce had originally learned to program as part of his engineering job, his younger brother Roger’s career in the US Navy had involved working with mainframe flight simulators and learning machine code. When Roger went back home in late 1983, the brothers talked about the software market and, presumably, Beach-Head, and Roger was persuaded to buy a Commodore 64. Next he used it to write a poker game as proof of his abilities, submitted to Bruce. “Let’s get you out of the Navy” came Bruce’s response, “I need you right here.”
The following year, Roger Carver left the Navy and joined Access, putting together the title screen for Raid Over Moscow before being part of the development of Beach-Head II from the beginning. As I mentioned in my Beach-Head post, those games were also hits but saw diminishing sales returns, so Access decided to pivot to a new genre. As the Carvers told the American Commodore Magazine a couple of years later, they were motivated to move into the world of sports in part because “sports games are traditionally popular in the US and England”. They specifically ended up moving to golf, which had a through line in that Bruce Carver’s breakthrough games Neutral Zone and Beach-Head were both primarily about firing objects into the distance in 3D space.
There was another bit of continuity that helped inspire their golf game, Leader Board. For Beach-Head II, the Carvers had bought a video camera and recorded some footage of them and colleague Chris Jones running and climbing, before tracing over it for the animation. They didn’t extend this approach to the parachute scenes, but it worked well enough that they could see the potential of using it again. They worked on it a bit and worked out how to use it for larger figures than they had done previously, too.
So Leader Board’s smoothly animated golfer is based on a recording of Roger Carver’s swing. They used 32 frames, they explained, taking roughly one in every four frames from the video, isolating and projecting the figure before tracing and using it to create the game’s sprite version in pixels. If you play with two, three or four players, they each get the same golfer but in different coloured clothes. In Zzap! 64, Julian Rignall wrote that “the animation on the golfer is stunning with incredible realism”. Bohdan Buciek’s Commodore User review, meanwhile, described them as looking “like Arnold Palmer with lumbago”.
Access situated their golfer within 3D space, calculating each new position on the course and drawing the view from there. They had the option to hide this from view but decided it was interesting enough to show to their players, water and the outlines of bits of land being filled in stage by stage. For memory reasons each hole of the course is constructed out of a limited number of set shapes, overlapping in different configurations of islands. Playing is like seeing the world flash out of existence and be reborn every few seconds, its shape hinging on how hard you hit a ball with a club.
When it came to doing that hitting, Access also came up with a great way of implementing it. First, you hold down the fire button to fill up a power bar and then let go at the right moment. Because that is a little too easily repeatable, you then have to hit the button another time as the bar rushes back in the other direction, trying to line it up with a line. Miss that one and you’ll slice or hook the shot to one side or the other (at least at higher difficulty levels; novice ignores that and the wind even though it still shows them on screen). That control scheme has been a golf game staple ever since for a reason.
Like its geometric courses and their water hazards, Leader Board’s mechanics are simple at the player’s end, but satisfying. You do need the manual to hand to consult on different clubs’ distances, but you get nice touches like the different trajectories of the ball, and the way it can bounce off the flagpole. (“The hole itself has some interesting characteristics. It has a diameter of one foot when you tee off or drive the ball in the direction of the green from a great distance away. When you’re putting, the hole shrinks in size significantly.”) Similarly they do a great job of presenting your score in straightforward and easy to understand terms at all points, while including touches like different colour text for above and below par.
Leader Board wasn’t the only golf game to come out in the UK in the middle of 1986. Many reviews of it mentioned Golf Construction Set, a game released in May which peaked at #6 on the Commodore 64 chart. That one was by the British offshoot of German company Ariolasoft, who had also published Jordan Mechner’s Karateka in the UK. Golf Construction Set not only featured things excluded from Leader Board like trees, but had a much more technical approach where you could do things like change your stance. Plus, as the name suggests, you could design your own courses.
“It’s a pity I played Golf Construction Set before polishing up my clubs for Leader Board” wrote Bohdan Buciek in Commodore User. “It’s like playing pitch and putt after the US Masters.” Golf Construction Set doesn’t let you see your golfer swing, or give you anything like as big a view of what you’re looking at, though. And, of course, a lot more people do play pitch and putt than reach the level of dedication required for the US Masters. Alongside a heavy promotional push from U.S. Gold, eager to regain their reputation after the World Cup Carnival fiasco, the comparison, perhaps, worked well in Leader Board’s favour. Like Sid Meier with submarines, Access may not have produced the most accurate simulation of golf, but they managed to locate the fun in simulating it.
“In play, the game is delightfully simple” was how Peter Luke in Your Computer succinctly put it. I can relate to another bit of Julian Rignall’s Zzap! 64 review: “The last thing I expected when someone mentioned the feared words ‘golf simulation’ was a highly and instantly playable arcade golf game which I constantly returned to ‘just for another go’.” Gary Penn’s verdict alongside him was that “Leader Board makes all other golf simulations look clumsy and antiquated in comparison.”
Zzap! 64 went all out in their recommendation of the game, spreading their review across four pages complete with a diagrammed explanation of their attempts at one hole, and giving Leader Board a 97% score. There was one area where Paul Sumner thought there was still room for improvement, though: “I can only hope that Access and U.S. Gold will turn their attention soon to a ‘links’ style British course with bunkers!”. They would oblige, and I will tell that story when I get to 1987.
Sources:
- Leader Board, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2014
- Access Software, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2014
- The Story of U.S. Gold, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2015
- Carver Gang Still At Large Part One: The War Game Years, John Jermaine, Commodore Magazine No. 7, July 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Carver Gang Still At Large Part Two: Getting into Action Sports, John Jermaine, Commodore Magazine No. 8, August 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
- Zzap! Test – Leader Board, Zzap! 64 No. 15, July 1986, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
- Screen Scene – Leader Board, Bohdan Buciek, Commodore User No. 33, June 1986, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
- Golf Construction Set, chart history at Computer Hits
- Software shortlist – Leader Board, Peter Luke, Your Computer Vol. 6 No. 7, July 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
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