World Class Leader Board – “Gauntlet Country Club”

“When I joined the company, I kind of had an idea of what I thought quality was and where the bar was to meet in terms of delivering a quality product. But Bruce’s bar was so much higher, and honestly he just opened my eyes to what could be done, to what could be expected. He understood quality and he pushed and he drove for marks that were high, that I never really thought were possible.” So said Vance Cook, the driving force behind the Links golf games, talking to The Life & Times of Video Games about joining Access, the development company headed up by Bruce Carver.

That urge to lift the bar had seen Bruce Carver come up with Beach-Head, not just implementing 3D shooting but adding a whole range of different scenarios and mechanics around it. It had seen Bruce, his brother Roger and the growing Access take the decision to move away from diminishing returns in the military space to go into sports instead, making a ten pin bowling game (10th Frame, a UK #17 hit in January 1987) and a golf game. And it definitely played into the intended scope of that golf game, Leader Board.

Again, just making a breakthrough into 3D wasn’t the aim. As Bruce Carver told Commodore Magazine: “When we started Leader Board, we tried to install trees, roughs and traps into the design of the game”. He was also, ultimately, pragmatic. They had a deadline to make for its 1986 release. “As we were finishing the mechanics of the program, Roger and I had to face reality. We were practically out of memory and had to make some concrete decisions.” “To keep peace with the world, Roger and I decided to forget about trees and things for a while and concentrate on making Leader Board the best game possible using water hazards”. They succeeded in that.

The element of failure nagged away enough for them to quickly seek to remedy it, though not before even more quickly capitalising on Leader Board’s success. Before the end of 1986, Access released Leader Board Tournament, a quite early example of an expansion, which offered four new courses to expand the original Commodore 64 game (they subsequently released it as a standalone game on the Spectrum, and that one became a UK #16 hit in 1987). After that, Access followed up with the standalone Leader Board: Executive Edition, which had a mere two new courses but instituted advances to allow the addition of bunkers, trees and rough, each affecting the flight or hit of the ball with a realism on par with the original game. That one reached #4 on monthly UK Commodore 64 charts in April 1987.

In Commodore User, reviewer Mike Pattenden referred to Leader Board: Executive Edition as “the yuppie version” but was much more complimentary towards it than the original game. “If you haven’t got it already then you have my unreserved recommendation” he wrote, though there was a flipside to that for people with Leader Board: “I’m not so sure you’ll want to shell out another tenner on what you should have got in the first place”. That was much where Zzap! 64 landed too. “The problem lies in the fact that it’s just too similar to its forerunner” wrote Julian Rignall. Gary Penn suggested readers should just “get the original Leader Board instead — it’s just as playable and has twice as many courses.”

Access still had more ideas left to get something more out of Leader Board, and the result was World Class Leader Board. The main new idea was to include real-life courses, and they secured the necessary permission to replicate Cypress Creek, Doral and St. Andrews. To fill out the offer and make it four new courses, they came up with a fictional course designed, to quote the manual, to be “the ultimate World Class golf challenge” in which “the drive down each fairway is harrowing, calling for extreme accuracy to stay out of trouble”. With a possible nod to one of the most popular games of the last couple of years, they called it the Gauntlet Country Club.

If you didn’t know your world golf courses very well, there wasn’t much immediately visible that made World Class Leader Board look particularly different. Access implemented a couple of new mechanics as well, though. One was the punch shot, activated by pressing P on the keyboard, which aims low and makes getting behind trees marginally less certain of a score-ruining disaster. The other one was a top down map, a very useful addition and a further impressive technical achievement to squeeze in.

None of those changes were individually revolutionary, but together they helped World Class Leader Board back to a much more positive British critical reception. Your Commodore asked whether it was worth buying in addition to previous games and answered their own question with “If you enjoyed the game, then my answer is yes.This is sufficiently different to give value from money.” “You may think that U.S. Gold are flogging the Leader Board format to death,” wrote Julian Rignall in Zzap! 64, “but this is the best of the series”. His colleague Steve Jarratt enthused that “Access have finally achieved what might be considered to be the complete golfing simulation […] The presentation and options are excellent, and the game is far more playable than any of the previous incarnations.”

A week at the top of the UK charts in July 1987 followed, and U.S. Gold got versions of the game on the Spectrum and Amstrad CPC out before the end of 1987 as well. From there, Access never made another Leader Board game. They moved into entirely different genres, and games for DOS as the Commodore 64 no longer looked like the best place to be. And in 1990, they brought out Links: The Challenge of Golf, starting over from scratch with more fully three dimensional terrain to go even further with some of their ambitions for simulation.

I recommend listening to the Life & Times of Video Games episode for more on Links. Before that, though, while Access didn’t release any more standalone Leader Board games, they weren’t quite done with World Class Leader Board, and their moves into the future of video games weren’t confined to improving the simulation of golf. Their real world courses idea lent itself to adding some of the famous courses that weren’t in the original game, like Pebble Beach or Royal St. George’s. Access put out three Famous Courses of the World expansion volumes, at least two of which made it into the UK Commodore 64 charts. More than two decades before The Sims 2: Ikea Home Stuff, and nearly three decades before Mercedes-Benz × Mario Kart 8, Access were already rolling with licensed and branded expansion packs.

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Sources:

• Carver Gang Still At Large Part Two: Getting into Action Sports, John Jermaine, Commodore Magazine No. 8, August 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Leader Board, Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, 2014
• 27 – Links, Richard Moss, The Life & Times of Video Games, 2020
• The Story of U.S. Gold, Chris Wilkins & Roger M. Kean, Fusion Retro Books, 2015
• Leaderboard Executive, Mike Pattenden, Commodore User No. 43, April 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Zzap! Test – Leaderboard (Executive Edition), Zzap! 64 No. 24, April 1987, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Reviews – World Class Leaderboard, G.R.H. Your Commodore No. 36, September 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Zzap! Test – World Class Leader-Board, Zzap! 64 No. 27, July 1987, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Leader Board Tournament, Leader Board: Executive Edition, Leader Board: Famous Courses of the World Volume 1, Leader Board: Famous Courses of the World Volume 3, UK chart histories at Computer Hits

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