The Making Of: Surfchamp
Surfchamp was an anomaly when it was released on the Spectrum 35 years ago: a hardcore sports simulator with a plastic surfboard peripheral, created by a team of ambitious Irish academics. We caught up with the developers to find out more
Doctor Norman Mcmillan revisits his peripheral-based surfing simulator
You have drowned, use a leash!” Not the first thing you might expect after getting into the water in a surfing simulator. However Surfchamp, released for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in 1985 by Irish company New Concepts, was a scientist’s take on a surfing game. Before you can even begin playing, you have to input data like your height and weight, select your gear (the wrong outfit can make you drown) and read detailed weather information.
Once you’re in the game, the tide constantly shoves you back until you manage to hop on a wave, taking you to a close-up of a surfing stickman. However, it’s quite difficult to play Surfchamp as it was originally intended today without its star peripheral: a plastic surfboard that attaches to the keyboard.
Dr Norman Mcmillan, the 75-year-old CEO of Advanced Nano Technologies [ANT], cofounded
New Concepts in 1984 whilst lecturing at the Carlow Regional Technical College, alongside fellow academics Susan Mckenna-lawlor, an internationally renowned astrophysicist, and John Frayne, a jewellery craftsman. They self-funded the company, with Norman contributing £20,000, and hoped that it would generate enough commercial revenue to fund their research projects.
Norman has decades of experience in scientific research and education, and he played football growing up, although surfing didn’t come quite as naturally to him. “I wasn’t a great surfer because I was always too old,” he laughs. However, Norman thought that surfing was “fabulous fun” and wanted to develop a physics-based simulation with New Concepts. “I couldn’t give a monkey’s about gaming,” Norman says. “I am a surfer who’s interested in proper simulation of the sport.”
Damian Scattergood, managing director of STAR Translation Services in Dublin, was 18 years old when he joined New Concepts as a programmer, one of his first jobs. Damian developed the tutorial for the Commodore version of Surfchamp. “You knew when you were hired, you were here to make stuff up, you were here to be creative… you were going into the unknown” he explains.
The game was played using a plastic surfboard overlay, created by John Frayne, which was held in place on a keyboard with a plastic clip and tilted to control the on-screen surfboard. By combining different motions, players could pull off different manoeuvres. “We would know, you’re pressing these three keys here and one [on the] left, so you must be trying to do a Hang Ten,” Damian explains, gesturing to a keyboard enthusiastically. “Obviously the graphics were a bit ‘Eighties’, but it worked reasonably well.”
Norman analysed “the physics of waves and the relationship between [it and] the movement of the board on the water” to write machine code algorithms for Surfchamp. “He was looking for brilliance and we were trying to give him brilliance,” Damian says, who enjoyed the freedom of working on a project that had few reference points at the time. However, memory limitations and the addition of what Norman calls “peripheral stuff”, like surf music and a busier interface, meant that the game had “less proper implementation of the algorithm”, becoming more sluggish and falling short of his ambitions.
Promotion for the game included a visit to the European Surfing Championships 1985 in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal. Exceptionally calm seas sent dozens of pro surfers to compete in the ‘First World Computer Surfing Championships’, with British surfer Jed Stone becoming the first (and last) champion,
Sinclair User magazine reported at the time. Jed praised Surfchamp, telling the BBC in May that “the basic principles [of surfing] are there” and describing it as a “forerunner” of modern sports simulators. New Concepts even had hopes of having more ‘World Computer Surfing Association’ competitions run in conjunction with the British Surfing Association, according to design documents Damian shared with us.
Coming up to Christmas, New Concepts had orders for approximately 180,000 copies of Surfchamp. “We had the manufacturer in Dublin, we had the boxes, we had the printing, we had the computer tapes ready to be manufactured… they were all ready to go,” Norman remembers. However, the Industrial Development Authority Of Ireland [IDA Ireland] only offered funding for 3,000 copies of the game for test marketing. Norman heavily criticises the lack of awareness that the organisation had of the videogame industry at the time, saying, “The IDA thought we were the same as making tables and chairs.”
After this test launch, the team at New Concepts was told they would have to make a version of Surfchamp on the Commodore by the IDA. “I said, ‘You’re a bunch of donkeys, you don’t know what you’re talking about, we won’t sell any, it’s already been released,’” Norman says. As he’d predicted, they sold just 600 copies of the Commodore 64 version and started to run out of money.
This left ideas for water skiing and sailing simulations, of course with bespoke peripherals, and a version of Ski Champ for
IBM PCS dead in the water. However, neither Damian nor Norman have any regrets about the closure of New Concepts. “We never really stopped,” says Norman, who is currently working on a way to identify COVID-19 molecules in drop samples using his company’s Spectrometer device.
Or, in Damian’s words: “We had an opportunity, but the world wasn’t ready for us to do it.”