The dawn of the 1990s was a time of huge upheaval in the British games industry. Most of the well-known studios – the likes of Sensible Software, Th

The Making of Micro Machines

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2024-10-15 17:00:04

The dawn of the 1990s was a time of huge upheaval in the British games industry. Most of the well-known studios – the likes of Sensible Software, The Bitmap Brothers, Elite Systems, Gremlin Graphics and Hewson Consultants – had specialised in the home computer market, progressing through successive generations: the ZX81 and VIC-20; the Commodore 64 and Spectrum; the Amiga and Atari ST. But the irresistible rise of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the promise of the SNES and Sega’s Mega Drive, heralded a new era of console gaming, of closed systems replacing open architectures, and of global marketing and distribution. It would require a radical shift in approach, there would need to be entrepreneurism and chutzpah, but the outlook was simple: adapt or die.

At the spring Consumer Electronics Show in 1989, Southam-based publisher Codemasters found itself on a stand next to the dominant force in the industry: Nintendo. The Japanese company was still showing off the NES, which by then was starting to show its age, but while driving through the US, Codemasters founders David and Richard Darling had been amazed to see the console’s games and accessories being sold in every gas station they stopped at. ‘It was the first time we’d seen games go completely mass market,’ recalls David. ‘We knew we needed to find a way to develop games for this platform’. Since 1986, the studio had been churning out budget Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad games such as Dizzy, Super Robin Hood and Grand Prix Simulator – it had little experience in the console sector, but didn’t see that as a barrier. ‘We actually visited the Nintendo stand, but they basically said they were too busy to talk to us,’ he recalls. ‘We thought, “Okay, this is going to be difficult.”’