The History Of: Brian Lara Cricket
IN THE NINETIES AND NOUGHTIES, A HOMEGROWN CRICKET FRANCHISE NAMED AFTER RECORD-BREAKER BRIAN LARA ENTHRALLED GAMERS. THE ENTHUSIASTS WHO PASSIONATELY CREATED IT SPEAK TO US ABOUT ITS UNEXPECTED RUNAWAY SUCCESS
Jeremy Wellard has a way of thinking that was well-suited to making videogames. “I’ve got that mind a lot of [sports fans] seem to have where you just think about all the little intricacies of the sport that you play that translates really well to games,” he tells us. Jeremy made the first three Brian Lara Cricket games, in addition to working on their predecessors, Graham Gooch’s Test Cricket and World Class Cricket. “A lot of games developers – especially at that time – didn’t have this.”
It’s bizarre to think that there was an era when knowing about sports and programming marked you out as unique now that the likes of FIFA have studios of developers and global fanbases. But in the Eighties and Nineties, sports gaming was a cottage industry with a smaller audience of players. Jeremy helped change this first with Brian Lara and then by working on EA’S Cricket series, showing the sport, like football, had global gaming appeal.
It all started because of a familial connection Jeremy had with Peter Calver
who ran developer Supersoft. Peter was in a relationship with Jeremy’s mother, Pearl, after they met working in an accountancy firm, and the couple soon left this job for Peter’s computing business, which became later known as Audiogenic. Jeremy would playtest the firm’s games in the Eighties, which included Emlyn Hughes International Soccer and the
1988 action-adventurer Exile. This computing childhood was mixed with playing sport at high levels, including representing Hertfordshire in cricket as a teenager.
“After I finished university in 1993, Peter Calver came and knocked on my door and just said, ‘Do you want to come and work full-time? You know it’ll be ideal. Make sports games – you play a lot of sports,’” recalls Jeremy.
Later on, he would help make two editions of FIFA for EA as well as a string of other successful sports franchises, such as NBA,
NHL and Madden after setting up HB Studios in 2000 in Nova Scotia, Canada. The success of the franchises his company produced for EA allowed him to retire five years ago, but it’s the cricket games that he made in the Nineties that he remains proudest of.
The first taste Jeremy had of them was in 1985 with Graham Gooch’s Test Cricket for the C64, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum, which he helped with by formulating the game’s control system when he was just aged 16. GGTC was a blocky affair but offered players the chance to make tactical decisions in ‘simulation’ mode and had a pretty simple knock in ‘arcade’ mode. However, it was lauded for its accuracy – which was Jeremy’s
“AFTER I FINISHED UNIVERSITY IN 1993, PETER CALVER CAME AND KNOCKED ON MY DOOR AND JUST SAID, ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME AND WORK FULL-TIME? YOU KNOW IT’LL BE IDEAL. MAKE SPORTS GAMES – YOU PLAY A LOT OF SPORTS’” Jeremy Wellard
forte, drawing on his first-hand experience of the sport. In the summer of 1993, after
Peter’s fateful call, Jeremy was hired full-time at Audiogenic as producer/designer to work on the latest edition of the series, Graham Gooch World Class Cricket. The PC version was programmed by Simon Prytherch in Coventry, while Gary Sheinwald worked on the Amiga version from Newcastle.
“At that time there was a lot going on,” Jeremy adds. “I worked with Simon on the PC cricket games, Gary on the Amiga and the Mega Drive cricket games, Graham Blighe on the Amiga football game Wembley International Soccer, and at [Liverpool developer] Denton Designs on the rugby games for Amiga and
PC. The Graham Gooch game on Amiga was early in development when I started. I’d been working part-time for the previous three or four years while at university on the cricket, rugby and football games, bringing the sporting perspective. In those days, there was one programmer per project, a shared artist and me. The programmers did much more varied stuff than they do now.”
Graham Gooch World Class Cricket paved the way for the success of Brian Lara Cricket as it earned a lot of plaudits for its faux-3d appearance. It was effectively re-released in 1994 as a special edition on PC but renamed Brian Lara Cricket by Audiogenic after the firm bought the Trinidadian batsman’s image rights. The game then appeared a year later on the Mega Drive and Amiga.
“Brian Lara Cricket was super successful,”
Jeremy says. “We were quite surprised. I remember I knew it was a decent game but I didn’t realise that cricket would be that popular.”
One of the reasons
Brian Lara Cricket gained more mass appeal was because in the mid-nineties Mega Drive owners were willing to experiment with different genres. The console version made batting super intuitive, and moving around the crease, adjusting to the bowling, became a very smooth experience.
“Then it was just a different gaming age,” says Jeremy. “Now people are very particular about what they choose to play. You certainly got people playing it that didn’t usually play cricket or normally weren’t necessarily interested in cricket.”
Brian Lara Cricket mimicked the TV coverage of the sport with the batsman facing the camera, and the game showed the player where the ball would hit the pitch – so although you were a batsman, you had the TV camera’s view of the action. Bowling – which in real life can be up to 100mph – would be too difficult to play if
“FOR A BUNCH OF WEEKS IT WAS NUMBER ONE DURING THE SUMMER, WE WERE QUITE SURPRISED. I REMEMBER I KNEW IT WAS A DECENT GAME BUT I DIDN’T REALISE THAT CRICKET WOULD BE THAT POPULAR ” Jeremy Wellard
you saw the action from the batsman’s ‘eyes’, so this Tv-like angle meant novices could learn to hit the ball easily and wannabe star batters (like your correspondent) could (sometimes) live out their fantasies of scoring centuries against the most feared bowling attacks in world cricket.
Using Brian Lara’s name was a masterstroke, too, as the talented batsman was more iconic than Essex and England’s Graham Gooch, and he had just become a record-breaking star scoring 501 in a match for Warwickshire, which is still the highest score by an individual player. Codemasters, which is based in the county Brian Lara played for, would have taken note of both the game and the star attached to it as the company was building up a reputation for sports franchises.
At the time, the only title that came close to being a rival to BLC was a SNES game called Super International Cricket made by Beam Software, a sequel to the Australia-only release International Cricket. It was faster paced than Brian Lara, more arcade-like (it even had ‘poppy’ on-field music) and there were no licensed player names – some cricketers were even named after the developers. SIC spawned several sequels and morphed into EA’S Cricket in the Noughties, but in 1994 all British gaming cricket fans were Brian Lara fans.
Alan Perrie, senior product manager at Codemasters, agrees that Brian Lara was the ideal choice for the series but claims that the gameplay was key. “Codemasters had a real knack for choosing sportsmen who were slightly left-field who had global appeal rather than just local appeal,” he says.
“Cricket can get complicated with fielding positions. But the essence of having a knock-about and not getting bogged down in all that was certainly part of [BLC ’s] success.”
The first Brian Lara game was so sought after that it only dropped down the charts because copies sold out. The Mega Drive version was produced by Audiogenic for Codemasters and the deal worked so well that Brian Lara Cricket 96 was also published that way. This sequel had the same fluid game mechanics and more features, such as different tournaments, historic matches, rain and an incredible 16-bit theme tune based on Booker T & The MG’S Soul Limbo. Crucially, Jeremy included the revolutionary autoplay innings option, which meant players could get the CPU to skip bowling and concentrate on batting, which was far more fun.
In the end, Codemasters “swallowed up” Audiogenic after Lara 96 so that it could own and control an elite cricket series to go with the other sport franchises it was producing. It meant that Jeremy, Gary Sheinwald and Graham Blighe joined the Midlands firm that was producing hits such as Jonah Lomu Rugby, Pete Sampras Tennis and Colin Mcrae Rally.
“The first day they met me at the reception and took me to the room where they’re working,” says Jeremy who moved to Warwickshire when the deal was made.
His other Audiogenic colleagues worked remotely and Peter Calver did not follow at all. “There was no computer. They were really disorganised at that point. There was a lot more pressure, a lot more. It was a lot higher profile.”
The game Jeremy was brought in-house to construct at Codemasters was Brian Lara Cricket 99 for Playstation and PC, the first proper 3D version of the sport. He had total control of the product, with Gary focused on the back end and Graham on the front end.
“That was an epic development process,” he says. “It was 17-hour days. As a producer and designer, I just lived that game more than any other. I tend to throw
“I ACTUALLY DELAYED THE RELEASE SLIGHTLY BECAUSE I WASN’T HAPPY WITH A FEW GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS WHICH WEREN’T AS POLISHED AS THEY COULD BE ” Justin Forrest
myself into it. I’d be in the office for hours, and I’d take it home and I’d play it all the time to see if the CPU makes the right tactic choices or it feels right. I just spent forever playing that game and that’s the one I’m most proud of.” As well as being 3D, it was the first game of the series to feature commentary, with Jonathan Agnew and Geoffrey Boycott adding their voices to what was now edging towards simulation. But it still retained its quirky nature. “Me and my friends played cricket, and lots of Brian Lara,” adds Alan Perrie. “We would say stuff in real cricket that we’d hear Agnew say in our game, so if there was a run out we’d always shout: ‘They’re in disarray!’”
The motion capture was done by Jeremy simulating batting, bowling and fielding – and the game became more difficult to bat with more shot options and experience of actual cricket being helpful. Now a player could bat freely at domestic level but have to rein themselves in on the international stage in an intuitive and rewarding process. Compared to its predecessor, it was a commercial failure. But considering it was shipped in the winter of 1998 after missing its summer deadline, it was
popular, reaching number four in the Christmas charts. “It was a really good game,” says Jeremy. “We started making the follow-up on Playstation but then I emigrated in the summer of 1999. Gary and Graham left soon after.”
So instead of producing more Brian Lara games, Jeremy moved to EA in North America and started work on the rival series, Cricket. This franchise, which ran alongside FIFA and other EA titles, proved popular and it gave Codemasters a headache as the Brian Lara games were much-loved but someone had to replace Jeremy.
To solve this problem, the Midlands firm copied English cricket with its recent history of importing South African talent (à la Kevin Pietersen) and it hired Justin Forrest to work on Brian Lara International Cricket 2005. “I kind of went in with a completely clean slate because I had my ideas of how or what I wanted to see in the cricket game,” says Justin whose family left South Africa due to apartheid.
“One of the key things was focusing on the balance between bat and ball. Most cricket games focus on batting, and bowling is almost an afterthought. I played cricket my whole life so it’s part of my DNA. The core of the sport is that balance between bat and ball, and people may enjoy batting more than bowling but I think that’s because a lot of cricket games have failed to deliver something that makes you kind of have fun when you’re bowling.”
He’s right. Previous Brian Lara games had made batting fun and bowling something that was akin to a chore, especially as autoplay encouraged players to skip it. Justin removed this option and concentrated on making every aspect of the game enjoyable. Like Jeremy, who now was effectively his rival, he worked tirelessly on the game to get it ready for the summer of 2005. He had to, as Jeremy had access to EA’S vault of money to back his vision up and Cricket 2005 was being produced with an official Ashes licence.
“I actually delayed the release slightly because I wasn’t happy with a few gameplay elements which weren’t as polished as they could be,” Justin says. “The game actually came out the day before the Ashes kicked off.”
The summer of 2005 is cricket’s 1966 FIFA world cup, where the greatest Test series ever featured one of the toughest Australian sides to tour and an emerging England side boasting a ferocious pace attack. Cricket 2005 and Brian Lara 2005 were playing out the same bruising battle, with Jeremy’s immense cricket experience making him a favourite to produce the better game and top the charts, especially as EA was now the market leader producing hits Cricket 2002 and Cricket 2004 after a mixed success with is predecessors in the Nineties and the disappointing Cricket 2000. But it was the South African export that won the battle (like Ashes winner Kevin Pietersen for England) both critically and commercially for Codemasters, with Brian Lara 2005 topping Playstation charts for 12 consecutive weeks and being the allformats number one for a month.
“To have an event that lifts the profile of the sport is always huge,” says Justin. “There’s no doubt about it. But I really do honestly think that the key reason why the game was so successful was the fact that it was really good fun to play.
“I never expected the visual fidelity of the game to be anything approaching something like a FIFA because we just didn’t have a 50-man art team. It was a very small art team who had a lot on their shoulders, and I think they did a good job, but certainly that would have been an area that you could improve just by throwing extra resources at it. Gameplay, you can’t improve by throwing extra resources, you’ve got to get that right at the core level.”
A lot of gamers found that EA’S Cricket 2005, which disappeared from the charts, was a bit on the buggy side, but Jeremy disagrees saying it was a general gameplay issue with HB Studios making two sports games at the time for EA.
“We split into two teams at HB for the first time,” Jeremy tells us. “I put all my attention on Rugby which in hindsight was not what I should’ve done. Cricket kind of just got dragged along and it didn’t get much attention at all. So while visually it was really good, gameplay was pretty poor.”
The final EA cricket game, Cricket 07, was more memorable than the last two editions of the Brian Lara series (Lara 2007 and Brian Lara Pressure Play) made after Justin left Codemasters. Which is not a surprise as Justin departed for EA, too, to work on Cricket 07 to form a dream team with Jeremy, who was creative director. Brian Lara himself retired from the game that year and the Midlands firm moved on as well buying an Ashes licence for a 2009 title, fronted by Kevin Pietersen, which was a commercial hit. The last cricket game the firm produced was International Cricket 2010 with sales being marred by a poor English summer for the sport – a home series against Pakistan dogged by cheating accusations.
In fact, post-2005, cricket’s popularity in general as a sport declined in the UK because of television coverage moving behind a paywall at Sky and it became more of a niche pursuit. Also, as Jeremy mentioned, it was starting to become a time when console gamers were becoming less willing to try different genres.
But for the Nineties and Noughties, if you were a cricket fan then Brian Lara was the game to own. However, Justin doesn’t entirely agree with us and throws in a googly: “I’m going to be contentious here, and probably put people’s noses out of joint, but my favourite was Super International Cricket on the SNES!”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, Jeremy disagrees and concludes that Brian Lara was the definitive cricket videogaming series. “Super International Cricket was pretty much unknown and not a patch on our games,” he tells us. “I had a very tight focus on how I wanted Brian Lara to be and Super International Cricket definitely wasn’t it.”