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OutRun Europa featured dull, monochrome graphics, but preview shots painted a much brighter picture. Where did the colour go?
Martyn Carroll investigates.
The Background
Spectrum owners were used to seeing screenshots from other formats on game packaging, but US Gold’s 1991 release OutRun Europa went one further — the ‘Spectrum’ screen shown on the back of the box was bugger all like the game itself. What was promised was a full-colour racing game that looked ST-esque. What was delivered was a black and white monstrosity; a real dog’s dinner of a game.
Clearly the screen on the box, and those that appeared in previews
(including the one in Crash issue 91), were mocked up rather than taken from the actual game. US Gold had form with such tactics, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. But
what turned shady marketing into a genuine mystery was a review that appeared in Your Sinclair (which was the only Speccy mag to review the game, oddly). In it, James Leach wrote: “The graphics are big and dead colourful… this causes a wee bit of colour clash, but nothing too drastic.” Dead colourful? Colour clash? Did James review a different game? And if so, what happened to the Rainbow Brite version of OutRun Europa?
The Investigation
The mystery was mused about in Speccy circles over the years, until a surprising breakthrough was made in 2012. World of Spectrum forumite Rafal Miazga discovered that the game actually featured a working attribute routine that was nullified so that the graphics were always white on black. By entering a couple of POKEs you could reactivate the colour. It was unoptimised and as messy as hell, but by God there was colour.
At this point I decided to track down the game’s programmer and find out the reason for hamstringing his own code. This was another mini mystery, as online sources at the time erroneously credited the game to Ian Morrison and Alan Laird, who converted the original OutRun and Turbo OutRun to the Spectrum.
The pair actually began work on a different OutRun Europa shortly after converting
(see the preview in Crash issue 64), but this
OutRun
was shelved when the Turbo OutRun licence came along. So who was the actual programmer? A clue was to be found in the Amstrad CPC version, which featured the name ‘Von Dazzlin’ on the high score table. This name was also listed as the programmer
of Turrican on the Spectrum, and a magazine preview of that game revealed that Von Dazzlin was an alias of Daren White. I got in touch with Daren and he explained what happened.
Daren’s memories were featured in the Fusion Retro book The Story of US Gold (Nice plug – Ed), but here’s the bit about Europa. “The monochrome Spectrum graphics were partly due to budget issues — the boss didn’t want to pay for extra graphics work — but mainly time constraints,” he told me. “I wrote a tool that took the Master System graphics and converted them to the CPC to be touched up, but when it came to converting to the Speccy, they looked a bit rough because of the two colour limit per character square and needed a lot more touching up. The artwork as well as the code would have had to change and this would have taken extra time. So in the end it was decided to just go with monochrome. The code handled the colour version, but shamefully wasn’t used as it was intended to.”
The Outcome
There was never a finished, colour version of the game back in the day, so it’s not clear what the story is behind the YS review. James has been asked and can’t remember the specifics, but it’s likely that the CPC version was used as the basis for the review, as the Spectrum version would have been quite similar — had the graphics been tidied up as originally planned.
There’s a happy end to all this. After Rafal discovered that it was possible to switch the colour back on, Dean Swain started work on polishing the graphics, doing what the original team didn’t have time to do. Only the first stage was reworked, but the results were brilliant
— in both senses of the word.
Join us next time as we solve more Speccy Mysteries.
If there’s a longstanding mystery you’d like us to unravel, write in and we’ll don the old deerstalker for you.
Well, here we are in much smaller living quarters but I’m sure we’ll all get along and things will go swimmingly after an initial teething period.
Anyway, once again I have been asked to rummage through the online galleries and potentially discover artwork that is new to the readers out in the real world.
I decided, as is my wont, that this month, the first in our new format, I shall be completely controversial and focus my
1: Batman
Here we have as fine a Dark
Knight Detective as one could hope to see in pixelated form.
This is one of two he has created, and it was a tough decision, but this particular image ticks lots of design boxes for me.
Clean lines, bold use of colour regardless of the liberties taken with Batman’s body armour and great composition. The images from the original game art have been manipulated to perfection and form a visual shape that contains action, potential motion and the grim visage of Gotham’s defender executed magnificently. attentions on four examples all by the same incredibly talented chap; Mr Marco Antonio Del Campo Gomez, or MAC as he is known on the Spectrum scene.
I must stress that this is not me saying I could not find suitable examples by other gifted exponents of Spectrum art, but every time I am called upon to do these reviews I am always torn with my selections because of the volume of work he has produced. 2:
Thanatos
4:
Rocky 3: Phantis 2016
The sheer level of detail that fills this composition is phenomenal and is virtually identical to the original box art, again by Alfonso Azpiri.
Digging up more information regarding this particular title, I was fascinated to discover that this is Game Over Two, the sequel to the Ocean/Imagine release whose adverts were infamously censored albeit somewhat belatedly in gaming magazines at the time.
This image, for me is infinitely superior to that of the first release for many reasons. Yes, there is a statuesque and gravity defying warrior-woman, but the space-goblins or intergalactic troglodytes who are pressing far too close for comfort and propriety are both menacing and comedic.