THE MAKING OF FRUIT MACHINE SIMULATOR
the Phillip and Andrew Oliver tell us about title that raised eyebrows
Designed by James Wilson and written by Mark Baldock, Fruit Machine Simulator was a controversial game – but not for the reasons you’d imagine. Far from worrying the game could encourage gambling, most objectors were concerned the game didn’t actually let you win anything and that, they said, rendered it all rather pointless. But did it? The game certainly had many features familiar to anyone who played a fruit machine, from cash box to nudge to feature holds. It was also it good fun for up to four players since encouraged you to beat your friends’ winnings and it felt quite competitive as a result. Despite that, its origins remained the odd since artist James Wilson wrote whole game as a lengthy description. this Since James wasn’t a programmer, he was passed to Mark to implement and in huge did so, before seeing the game sell numbers. Sadly, James died in an accident and so he didn’t benefit from the royalties. his family, the Olivers stepped With the money then earmarked for version to keep the cash in and agreed to create the Amstrad flowing. Once again, it sold loads. we had such a slick pipeline “By the time we came to write this, easier to just look at the for writing games that we felt it was reproduce all the Spectrum game that had just been produced, with our own code,” graphics elements and tie them together even look at the original remembers Andrew Oliver. “We didn’t right decision as it only took Spectrum code, but it was clearly the us a week to complete.” to be reformatted given In order to do this, the graphics needed was 256x192. But in deciding that the Spectrum game’s resolution a resolution of 160x200), it to use the Amstrad CPC’S Mode 0 (giving use to 16. “We felt making upped the number of colours they could more important,” Philip says. Fruit Machine Simulator colourful was problems with the text on the “That, however, gave us quite a few four-pixels wide.” buttons because some of our fonts were the Olivers also used As was becoming their trademark, with the technique in Super digitised speech (they’d amazed players
Prix Simulator). “It was very Robin Hood, Ghost Hunters and Grand it added an additional feature basic and it took a lot of memory but added this after finishing the and extra quality,” says Andrew. “We spare memory.” main game, making use of the available Action gave the game So what did they make of the fact Amstrad says. “For some reason zero per cent? “It was so absurd,” Philip no physical money being they could accept that, regardless of virtual currency. Interestingly involved, it was still fun to play with
Andrew and I did use real enough, whilst debugging the game and the banker.” money, taking it in turns to be the player