The Making Of: Formula One
Glamorous, exciting and dangerous, Formula One racing has no peer in the sporting world. Retro Gamer takes its place on the starting grid to find out more about one of the earliest – and best – management simulations of this high-speed sport
Learn how the talented devs at CRL Group crammed a grand prix into a Spectrum
t wasn’t just precocious teenagers, banging out machine code in their bedrooms, who were inspired by the rise of the home computer in the early Eighties. The phenomenon of the commercially available microprocessor was gripping older generations, too. Two such men were Peter Wheelhouse and George Munday, childhood friends having met at Leyton County High School in the mid-fifties. “Outside of school, we were avid pinball players,” begins Peter, “and we went to local cafes and coffee shops to play on them most evenings.” As Peter and George grew up and matured, such pursuits remained high on their agenda. “We loved board games, and one of our favourites was called Careers, but it wasn’t an exclusive obsession. We were both early players of the new electronic games machines in pubs and cafes, such as Pong, Asteroids, Lunar Lander and others.” With the pair often travelling across London to play new machines, it was inevitable that they would take an interest in home computing. “We both got Sinclair Spectrums quite soon after their release,” continues Peter. “When we visited each other at home, we’d often play games together, taking turns, with the other spectating and offering unwelcome advice and derision!” Two men in their late thirties enjoying an evening of Manic Miner and Football Manager may not sound too strange today, yet 35 years ago, with videogames roundly regarded as ‘for kids’, it was an uncommon activity for anyone over the age of 20 years old. “Quite soon, we agreed that a significant deficiency of all the games was that they were targeted at individual players – there was nothing that allowed multiple players to enjoy and compete together at the same time,” notes Peter.
The plan that emerged from this observation was for a Spectrum version of the board game Careers. With George now a partner in a law firm, the programming experience came from Peter as an IT project manager. “Although I had been a programmer and system designer in the late Sixties and early Seventies,” he explains, “this had been on very large mainframes, and was already a decade in the past.” As a result, coding began in BASIC and an admirably optimistic attempt at replicating the complex options of Careers, together with suitable graphical representation. “BASIC was far too slow for the graphical elements, so we decided to build modules in Z80 assembler, and split the game into separate elements: George’s main focus was on the graphical elements and mine was on the inner workings of the game,” says Peter. Communication was attempted via Prestel, which was abandoned as too unwieldy and unreliable. In the end, Royal Mail came to the rescue, ferrying cassettes of code from one side of London to the other.
With Peter busy on a major work project, it was George Munday who took on the task of trying to find a software house for the game, bizarrely named £SD. “He met up with Clem Chambers, who had founded CRL, and Clem thought it may be a good addition to his portfolio,” recalls Peter. “It was quite a thrill when we got the first commercial copies of our games and saw it advertised in magazines. Although we were old fogies approaching our 40th birthdays, we both thought it was a bit special that we had pulled it all together.” The stimulus of publication compelled the two to discuss further ideas for a game, despite £SD selling a grand total of just 75 copies. “We both loved motor racing, so George discussed it with Clem who thought that a game based on the sport would do well.” A similar pattern to their previous effort now played out, with Peter and George insistent that the game should be playable for both multiple and single players. It was also key that it combine management, interactive and fun elements to produce something which the Spectrum games market had yet to see, and the approach to development took a similar path, except for a debatable upgrade in storage. “We used Microdrives for storage, which we would post to each other, and initially this felt like a major performance improvement over the cassette tapes,” says Peter. “But as we built up the size of the code, you’d go and make a cup of coffee while it was being compiled and assembled into an executable program. It was a major frustration to get a new executable, start a test run and then hit a bug. I spent a lot of time desk-checking new source code, before building a new version in order to avoid this frustration.” With the final Formula One source code clocking in on 30 separate Microdrives, it’s fortunate George and Peter had the pleasure of research to fall back on.
“George had an uncle who was a senior member of Cosworth in the Eighties,” says
Peter, “and this enabled him to make contact with some F1 teams for research. He spoke to at least one manager as far as I recall, Ron Dennis
[of Mclaren].” More poignantly, the developers
“We’d often play games together, taking turns, with the other spectating and offering unwelcome advice and derision” Peter Wheelhouse
found themselves at the scene of one of the most infamous Formula One races of all time.
“We went to the Monaco GP [in 1984], partly justified as research, but mostly just because we wanted to,” grins Peter. “It was the year the race was stopped, because of the torrential rain, which was causing a lot of crashes. We were watching from the slopes below the castle to the west of the circuit, and it was a nightmare in the rain and mud.” The controversy did not stop there; with the positions counted from the race’s penultimate lap, Alain Prost was given an advantage over his rivals, helping his team to win the championship by a slim margin later the same year. “Clem was also very much the entrepreneur, and was happy to invest in marketing,” remembers Peter. “One of my workmates, Terry Pudwell, was competing in the British Formula Three championship, and Clem decided to sponsor him for a championship race at Silverstone.” The sleek car, complete with CRL livery, a corporate hospitality tent and pit and garage passes all made for an exciting day out for George, Peter and their families. “From the vantage point of my advancing years, I thought of Clem as a bright and bushy-tailed youngster who was always good fun to be with.”
Research and entertaining days out aside, progress on Formula One the game was painfully slow, thanks to bugs and the way in which they were diagnosed. “The only way to find them was through printouts of the code,” winces Peter, “and it was on that horrible thermal printer paper, which did insist on rolling up while you were working through it. There were times when the living room floor was covered in small sheets of thermal paper with George and I crawling across them, working our way through the code while trying to avoid disturbing the paper carpet.” Development of the game involved the pair meeting up regularly, usually with their partners of the time, who would no doubt smile and nod as the talk turned to Spectrum code, graphics and motor racing.
And it was worth it. Formula One, released by CRL in 1985 on the ZX Spectrum, was the game that fans of the sport had been waiting for. True to its creators’ beliefs, one to six players could compete in a full Grand Prix racing season, taking control over 16 races, monitoring and improving drivers, cars and the precious pit crew. Data about each track needed to be analysed and carefully noted before the race itself played out, with unfortunate events occurring for those who failed to prepare correctly. The game’s main race display would become a focus for huddled excitement, the brightly coloured cars zipping across the screen. “CRL would get letters from people who bought their games, and we got our share,” remembers
“It was a major frustration to get a new executable, start a test run and then hit a bug” Peter Wheelhouse
Peter. “It was mostly really flattering to hear from people who were getting so much enjoyment out of what we had developed – especially when we learned that groups of friends would spend incredibly long periods playing the game, not only overnight but sometimes over multiple days.” On a few occasions, Peter and George even received letters from wives and girlfriends, complaining about the amount of time their partners were spending on their Spectrums, and exasperatedly requesting the coders somehow limit the playing time of their loved ones.
With Formula One in the shops and selling decent quantities – enough royalties to pay for all their equipment and towards a few skiing holidays, according to Peter – the two men began development on a follow-up in early 1985. “It was to be similar, in that it was essentially a motorsport management game, but with a more real-time feel to it.” While writing Formula One, Peter had discovered that he could write code to run within the Z80 interrupt system and connect it to the main program code, running normally. “The Z80 interrupts on the Spectrum ran at 50 cycles per second, and I put the user interface and graphics into modules to run within a single interrupt while all the calculation code ran normally.” The result was a continually ongoing race, even while one of the players was interacting with the game. The increase in speed was vital given that the game would be based around motorcycle endurance racing, condensing 24 hour races such as the
Bol d’or down to just one hour. “It made for quite a frenetic experience,” laughs Peter. “You couldn’t dare go for a cup of coffee or ignore the game once a race had started.”
While not as successful as Formula One, Endurance convinced George and Peter to start working on a fourth project, a World War
One strategy game that included the ambitious possibility of linking two Spectrums together for multiplayer action. Sadly, when Peter was posted to Lisbon shortly after they began development, the unreliability of the Portuguese electrical supply and – critically – its slow postal service, scuppered the development. “At the time, the length for delivery was indeterminate and, if one made several multiple postings over several days, it was not certain in what order they would be received,” says Peter. After six weeks of little progress, the game was abandoned, and it was never resurrected, even when Peter returned to the UK.
But for these two computing fans, it’s the brilliant ZX Spectrum Formula One simulation that they always most fondly looked back on. While George Munday sadly passed away in 2009, to this day his partner is rightly proud of their finest hour. “We were, I think, pushing the boundaries of the possible on the Spectrum at the time, and certainly pushing the boundaries of our own knowledge! One of the managers of an F1 team at the time said that [the game] was overly simplistic and didn’t cover everything needed to run an F1 team. But that missed the point – we wanted a game that anyone could play, and enjoy, without being an expert.”
“It was mostly really flattering to hear from people who were getting so much enjoyment out of what we had developed” Peter Wheelhouse