Format: Commodore 64
Release: 1989
Publisher: Microprose
Developer: Geoff Crammond

Although never one for self-aggrandisement, Geoff Crammond is one of the few veterans of the early days of home videogaming whose moniker continued to sell product long after the turn of the millenium. His work on well-loved titles for the venerable BBC Micro Computer quickly ensured that journalists and, more crucially, gamers came to see his name as a badge of quality, while work on the Grand Prix franchise in the ’90s sealed his reputation, alongside the likes of John Carmack and Sid Meier, as one of the industry’s elite.
   
Crammond’s calling card is undoubtedly his ability to simulate the nuances of real-world systems, something that can be traced back to his professional work prior to entering the videogame industry. “With a degree in physics, I was working in industry, where I wrote programs which did mathematical modelling of physical processes,” he reveals. “I also did algorithm development and came into contact with realtime simulation work, programming in Fortran and C.”
  
Then came the UK’s first home computer boom of the early-’80s, with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore VIC-20 and Acorn BBC Micro Computer leading the charge. Crammond chose to dip his toes in the water with Acorn’s platform, writing his own interpretation of Space Invaders as a way of learning the machine’s 6502-based assembly language.

His next two efforts were flight simulation Aviator and racing simulation Revs, both published by Acornsoft. The latter game proved particularly challenging, with the unforgiving learning curve leaving some players unable to complete a single lap without incident. The game did, however, reward the more patient gamer with a racing experience uncharacteristically realistic in comparison to other half-baked simulations of the day.
   
His next move was to switch development to the Commodore 64, the newly introduced successor to the VIC-20. The C64 was another 6502-based machine, but although the architecture of Acorn’s BBC-brand machines made vector-style 3D relatively accessible, the graphics chip in Commodore’s computer instead favoured 2D effects through hardware sprite support (then rarely seen on a home computer). Nevertheless, Crammond stuck with solid-shaded 3D for his next project The Sentinel, a foray into strategy gaming, before resuming his experiments with real-world simulation in the game that would literally push the 3D racing genre to new heights.



While those halcyon days of gaming are typified by lone programmers crafting masterpieces in their bedrooms, the reality was rather more mundane and originality was a surprisingly scarce commodity. Many programmers simply looked to the charts for inspiration, or at least the technologically superior fare of the arcades, rather than letting the design grow naturally through experiments with visual styles, control systems or environmental choices.

“Stunt Car Racer was definitely a good example of a game evolving over several months,” says Crammond. Needless to say, the starting point was another of Crammond’s dynamic vehicle simulations, this time dropped in a more abstract 3D environment than the formulaic 3D tracks depicted in Revs: “I had started with a sort of roving vehicle on a rough random terrain, thinking the system might become a tank shoot ’em up-type game. One day I was driving this vehicle over the landscape bouncing around and came across a bit of the random surface which formed a small ramp. I drove up it and launched into the air. I found this to be the highlight of the trip and that started me thinking.”

Soon he had ditched the idea of an undulating landscape, instead creating a flat environment upon which a network of ramps could be placed, those initial thoughts about a combat bias giving way to a design focused on stuntwork. Further refinement of the way the jumps could be integrated into the environment followed. “It became obvious fairly quickly that locating the ramps was too difficult, particularly lining up with them, so I decided they had to be joined by a track,” says Crammond. “I didn’t want cornering speed to be the main feature, as it is with road racing, so I banked the corners. Then I started experimenting with the height profiles to create some interesting new challenges.”