I have not had cause to mention the BBC Micro for a while. I think Football Manager was the most recent occasion, back at the start of 1985. Even as the Amstrad CPC thoroughly took over as the UK’s third most popular microcomputer for new games, though, people were still making BBC Micro games. 1985 saw some of its definitive titles, like expansive platform adventures Castle Quest and Citadel, and Repton’s bold reimagining of Boulder Dash. Others were still to come later still, like the uniquely tense 3D world of Geoff Crammond’s The Sentinel, and two other games with an author in common, Jeremy C. Smith. His games included, in a sense, the final BBC Micro game to top the UK chart.

Jeremy C. Smith grew up in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. Then, like Charles Davies, who worked on Psion’s Flight Simulation, Smith studied physics at Imperial College London. He gained a first class honours degree and, also like Davies, started working on applying physics to computer games. The BBC Micro was his platform, and he got two early games published in 1982. One of these was Asteroid Belt, a straightforward imitation of Atari’s famous Asteroids, with its pointy spaceship working with thrust and inertia.

  • Asteroids (Atari, 1979, Arcade)
  • Asteroids (Atari, 1979, Arcade)
  • Asteroid Belt (Computer Concepts, 1982, BBC Micro)
  • Asteroid Belt (Computer Concepts, 1982, BBC Micro)

The other game, published by Bug-Byte without a credit for Smith, and apparently completed earlier, was Pirates in Space. This is visibly built on the same code, although the ship has a slightly different design and the UI is in white rather than yellow. More interesting are the tweaks it applies to the Asteroids formula. The risk doesn’t just come from enemies crashing into you, but if you kill them too close by you will be caught in the resultant debris. More significant is the way that your remaining lives are physically represented in the playing area by circular pods, and enemies try to haul these pods away, giving a lot of extra strategy within what is still a quite straightforward game.

  • Pirates in Space (Bug-Byte, 1982, BBC Micro)
  • Pirates in Space (Bug-Byte, 1982, BBC Micro)

Smith’s big moment a few years later, Thrust, would involve a similar refresh of an Atari game. The game he took as a model this time was 1982’s Gravitar. Arcade game Gravitar, by Rich Adam and Mike Hally, itself took Ed Logg and Lyle Rains’s Asteroids as a starting point, with the same kind of movement and shooting. It added in the influence of the even earlier Atari game that Asteroids had been built on top of, Lunar Lander by Wendi Alan and Rich Moore. In Gravitar, you have to shoot all of the fixed enemy guns on screen, while simultaneously maintaining a fuel supply and dealing with the effects of Lunar Lander-style planetary gravity on your ship. This takes place across a set of increasingly awkward landscapes.

  • Thrust (Superior, 1986, BBC Micro)
  • Thrust (Superior, 1986, BBC Micro)
  • Gravitar (Atari, 1982, Arcade)
  • Gravitar (Atari, 1982, Arcade)
  • Gravitar (Atari, 1982, Arcade)
  • Lunar Lander (Atari, 1979, Arcade)
  • Lunar Lander (Atari, 1979, Arcade)

Thrust’s simple vector-based graphics look like Gravitar’s, and it uses essentially the same enemy fixtures. You pick up supplies of fuel with a tractor beam in a very similar manner. The game’s sequencing, running through a set of levels and then repeating them with reverse gravity, an invisible landscape, and finally both at once, is also the same. Had Smith decided to make Thrust a clone of Gravitar, it would probably have been a good one. Instead, he changed things around again. The aim is no longer to destroy the enemies; you can leave them all there if you don’t mind running a gauntlet of bullets. The new aim is to retrieve a circular pod, like those in Pirates in Space, and it transforms the experience.

When you pick up the pod, it attaches to your ship on a fixed line. Its momentum, as it swings and pendulums, affects your ship too. The physics feel both real and discomfiting, making the journey back out of any of Thrust’s devious caves a much trickier prospect than the journey in. The new challenge multiplies the potential for slapstick errors, making the final Thrust experience a predecessor in some ways to the likes of Octodad or Baby Steps. You are in control but the range of ways things can go wrong is enormous. I remember as a child that Thrust was a favourite communal viewing experience on my aunt’s BBC Micro as we each tried and failed to complete its theoretically easy tasks.

Befitting a superior level of game, Smith got Thrust signed up by Superior Software, who had come a long way since being taken to court over their Hunchback rip-off. Superior’s specialism was the BBC Micro, including having published Citadel and Repton, and Smith needed to look elsewhere for other formats. He shopped Thrust around and Telecomsoft, the newly privatised BT subsidiary who had also published Elite on other formats, took an interest. Their product manager later recalled how addictive they had found Thrust, and that after playing it for days they were determined to get it. Unsurprisingly, they were able to do so.

  • Thrust (Superior, 1986, BBC Micro)
  • Thrust (Superior, 1986, BBC Micro)

Telecomsoft saw the game as a potential standout title for the budget range of their Firebird label, a range which in 1986 they were starting to push more aggressively. Their marketing team had hired Alison and Stephen Bielby, whose background was in the home video industry, and whose experience with getting videos into small newsagents and grocery shops proved handily transferable. Firebird had also recently reduced prices to £1.99, the same price charged by their budget rivals Mastertronic. Having decided to make Thrust a priority, they ended up moving faster with it than Superior.

Just like Ian Bell and David Braben with Elite, Jeremy C. Smith handled the Commodore 64 port of Thrust himself. It was a relatively easy job given the similarities between the computers, and he was able to produce something that was largely the same game. Bob Stevenson added a new title screen, and Rob Hubbard some new music. It was this Commodore 64 version that came out first, by a matter of months, and reached #1 in the UK combined formats chart in May 1986. 

  • Thrust (Firebird, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Thrust (Firebird, 1986, Commodore 64)

“It could just be the best budget arcade style game released yet” said Computer & Video Games magazine. Eugene Lacey in Commodore User concluded that “for a budget game it really is a £2 sensation.” Meanwhile in Zzap! 64, the always arcade-aware Julian Rignall wrote “At last!! A version of Gravitar which plays just as well as the original. Although not being a totally faithful copy, Thrust adds its own elements and comes up with one of the most addictive and playable arcade games I’ve played in a long time.”

Coming second with the BBC Micro original was an interesting position for Superior Software to be in, not least when they were charging several times the price. It did allow them to put “Already a number 1 best seller” at the top of their adverts for Thrust, alongside citing Smith’s degree results, but brought some slightly ironic dissatisfaction from reviewers. “Whilst Thrust is well-packaged and plays well,” wrote Matthew Fifield in BBC Micro mag A&B Computing, “I can’t resist the feeling that conversions of Commodore 64 games (no matter how well they are done) are not the ideal way forward for Beeb programming.”

  • Thrust (Firebird, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • Thrust (Firebird, 1986, Commodore 64)

For the other most famous game that Jeremy C. Smith worked on, there was to be no doubt that it was a BBC Micro game first and foremost. He teamed up with Peter Irvin, who had known Smith at school before writing Starship Command for the BBC Micro, one of the key influences on Elite. Together they worked on getting the absolute most out of the computer they loved, and the result was Exile, published by Superior Software in 1988. It once again places thrust physics to the fore, having you control a man with a jetpack who boosts and tumbles through the air. Working at a level of complexity well above Thrust, though, it is an enormous game of freeform exploration, with physics-based puzzles and emergent gameplay. An incredible technical achievement, it is a pretty imposing thing to actually play, but acquired quite the cult following.

  • Exile (Superior, 1988, BBC Micro)
  • Exile (Superior, 1988, BBC Micro)
  • Exile (Superior, 1988, BBC Micro)

From there, Irvin went on to work on the sequel to Elite. Jeremy C. Smith was killed in an accident in January 1992, and we will never know what else he might have gone on to achieve. There is a message in an undisplayed section of the code to the BBC Micro Thrust which summarises the attitude he brought to his games, and which he was able to transmit to those who played them:

I love space

Physics is fun

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 10 May 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 17 May 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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