The Making Of: Loco
Time flies by when you're the driver of a train especially if it's a fast-paced arcade shooter turned dodge-'em-up coded by C64 wizard Tony Crowther
Antony Crowther explains how a ten-minute play on an arcade game led to this classic
It’s the summer of 1984 and Tony Crowther and his family are promenading along Blackpool seafront, when the 19-year-old Tony decides to turn it into something of a busman’s holiday. Having coded Bug Blaster and Bat Attack the previous year, clones of Centipede and Galaxian respectively, he slips into an arcade to see if there are any coin-op titles which might inspire him. He stumbles upon a train-themed game he’s not seen before and begins to watch it intently. Not play it, you understand. Just watch.
“I wasn’t keen on spending money on them,” laughs Tony, “plus I wasn’t very good, so I’d watch other people play. I watched for about ten minutes or so before my mum said, ‘Come on, we’re going,’ and then went home to Sheffield and did my version! I thought I knew everything about the game – even the music, which I was sure was Jean-michel Jarre.”
Tony is reminiscing about that fortuitous summer holiday sat in the canteen of Sumo Digital, the Sheffield-based developer where he has worked since 2011. The game that caught his eye that day was Super Locomotive, a rare 1982 release from Sega, and what captured his imagination was the amount of scrolling the game utilised. “I was really into scrolling games, kind of addicted to them, and this had two speed scrolling,” he recalls. “I thought it was a way I could push myself to somewhere new.”
Once home, he drew a few ideas out on paper, planned what percentage of the screen would be scrolling for each ‘section’ and at what speed and soon got the technical side of things moving smoothly. We ask what his thinking was in moving the track layout to the bottom of the screen and the view of the train to the top, which is the opposite setup to the arcade game? He looks at us
with bemusement. “What, did I swap them round? I could have sworn that was how it was supposed to be. I was only watching for ten minutes…”
That’s right, Tony took no notes during his brief spell with the coin-op and so it is particularly impressive just how many elements of the original game made it into his home version. Your steam train puffs past a pastoral backdrop, while planes and airships, the latter emblazoned with Tony’s initials, fly overhead, dropping bombs on your little engine. Well-timed bursts of smoke from your chimney will see off enemies above while releasing steam from the front of your cab will dispose of dynamite-laden handcarts let loose on the interweaving network of track you must traverse between stations. Switching train lines is vital, not only to avoid deadly collisions but to collect fuel and keep your engine running. There is a lot happening on the screen, which meant some trickery to overcome the hardware limitations of the C64, with interrupts used to split the screen into ‘segments’ and then the eight sprites used on the upper screen could be ‘recycled’ to display different objects in the bottom section. And all this took Tony just a fortnight to finish.
“I’d set myself a challenge for each day and I wouldn’t go to bed until it was done, which could take me two days sometimes,” he grins. “I was working in the Alligata offices in the day, in the back room just next to these big tape duplicating machines, and then I’d carry on at home in the evenings. I worked solidly for those two weeks but it never bothered me. I was young and loved it.”
Tony’s work rate was impressive. He produced six C64 titles during 1984 alone, including hits like Monty Mole and Son Of Blagger, by setting himself the target of coding a game in two or three weeks and then having the following month off to visit various videogaming publications to promote his latest work and generally enjoy himself in the Big Smoke. In fact, the many journeys south actually helped him create the background landscapes for Loco. “I used to travel on the train a lot, going down to visit the gaming magazines in London,” he recalls, wistfully. “I’d visit Stuart Cooke at Your Commodore quite regularly and
I did all the graphics for Loco from my head so maybe those trips had an influence… and I did watch Thomas The Tank Engine as a child so there may be a connection there.”
If you look carefully as you speed through one of Loco’s station, you’ll indeed see a slightly slimmed down incarnation of the Fat Controller, waving you onward. He awards you a flag each time you pass him and if you collect five, you move on to the next level. A crash robs you of any flags accrued though, meaning you have to clear five stations without losing a life to progress, a big ask even for the most skilled of drivers. Tony, surely that was overly harsh?
“Erm, I was just saving the player from the even harder challenge of later levels,” he offers, rather unconvincingly. “That was what games