The New Zealand Story
AND YOU THOUGHT BUBBLE BOBBLE WAS CUTE…
» ARCADE » 1988 » TAITO
I’ve always loved birds, so any game that features a bird protagonist is going to be my sort of game. This holds true for games with dinosaurs in as well, because they’re essentially retro birds.
While I was initially attracted to The New Zealand Story because it features a cute (and completely unrealistic looking) kiwi called Tiki, I stuck with Taito’s game, because it was just so much fun to play. The Japanese developer was the king of cute during this period and for me, The New Zealand Story was easily the cutest game it had made at that point. I mean, just look at this opening sequence where an evil leopard seal has kidnapped all of Tiki’s mates. You can’t help but say “aww”, even though you inevitably know that in the end, you’ll eventually have to kill it.
That cuteness pervades Taito’s game, from its sickeningly sweet enemies to its oversized anthropomorphic bosses and cheerful backgrounds. And then of course there’s that maddeningly catchy theme tune that becomes impossible to listen to without humming along. If rainbow factories existed and there was ever an explosion in one, The New Zealand Story would have no doubt have been discovered after sifting through the colourful wreckage.
While it might be more colourful than a Care Bear Stare, there was a brutal difficulty to The New Zealand Story, which belied its cheerful exterior. I’m sure there’s a Youtube video of someone single-crediting the game, but it’s a feat that will be forever beyond my abilities. In fact, now I think about it, despite owning numerous versions of the game over the years, from the Amstrad CPC to Sega’s Mega Drive (why did I sell that particular version?), I don’t think I’ve ever completed Taito’s game. I’ve got versions of the arcade game on a couple of compilations I own so maybe 2021 is the year I finally complete it? Just think. Rather than simply saying “aww”, I can finish it with an “aww, yeah!”
Having banged out budget games for Mastertronic for a few years, Richard and David Darling pulled on the brakes. They took a few months out and looked to ride on their development success by creating the publisher Codemasters in 1986. They also quickly figured that the best way to get things moving again would be to journey back to their first successful game.
In 1984, the brothers had developed BMX Racers on the Commodore 64 – a game that was, in many respects, the starting point for endless runners. It had players cycling through a series of short, top-down courses avoiding obstacles until they eventually crashed but, while simple, it bunny-hopped on the huge craze for BMX bikes and quickly became Mastertronic’s biggest-selling original game.
“BMX was really popular – all the kids had BMX bikes, they’d go to the BMX parks and they’d race and do jumps and tricks,” says David, part-explaining why the game sold 345,423 copies. “We were quite interested in BMX generally and we knew the theme worked from being at Mastertronic. In fact, we’d learned from our time at Mastertronic that games based on real-world themes tended to perform best so when we started Codemasters we wanted to make these kinds of games.”
Rather than simply replicate BMX Racers,
the Darlings looked to go further. “We wanted to develop more of an overhead racing game – more of a simulation and something more realistic,” he says. While, in truth, that was always going to be difficult on an 8-bit machine, the brothers nevertheless popped themselves back into the saddle, with Richard designing and coding what would become BMX Simulator.
Earmarked to form part of a catalogue of 12 games, the aim of the game was to get Codemasters off to a good start and, with the benefit of hindsight, it became a hugely important release for the pair. “BMX Simulator
was the company’s first game and there was a lot riding on it – probably about $1.2 billion,” David laughs, nodding to the sum involved in the recent takeover of Codemasters by EA. “At the time, though, we were just trying to make the best games we could and we weren’t really looking too far into the future.”
One of the first decisions was to ditch the idea of creating a scrolling racer. Instead, BMX
Simulator would become a top-down racing game along the lines of Atari’s Super Sprint – a game that had been released in April 1986 as a successor to Gran Trak 10. The Darlings had seen this game – Codemasters, after all, was not launched until October that year. But BMX Simulator was never designed to be a rip-off of that instant classic.
“We weren’t particularly inspired by Super Sprint,” counters David. “We were more inspired by the success of BMX Racers and wanting to create a new, original BMX racing game. That said, Super Sprint proved that you could make top-down racing games work from a game mechanics point of view and I’m sure we would have noticed that at the time.”
David worked primarily in the background during the development of the game, helping Richard with any questions but largely being content to leave his sibling to it. The brothers, however, were very much agreed that greater realism was needed to back up the word ‘Simulator’ in the title (“at least within the limitations of the Commodore 64,” David says).
“The aim was to produce something that was fun in an arcadey way but the reason why we ended up calling it BMX Simulator is because we sought to have a proper 3D simulated environment where there was gravity and forces like friction which worked as you went around the berms, just like in real life,” David continues. This manifested itself over a series of seven mud tracks strewn with obstacles such as ramps and tyres that became progressively more tricky to navigate.
Since the courses were singlescreen affairs, the obstacles were pretty small. So too were the players’ bikes.
Yet this combination made for a more intricate game, allowing gamers to easily see what was ahead of them, note their rival’s position and negotiate the splashes, turns and bumps with a greater level of finesse.
By timing those berms right, you’d get an extra, slight but satisfying burst of speed which could ease players through to the next course. Ride over the rough and you’d slow down. The trick was to learn the effects of the ground and this would mean experienced players would always have an advantage. It felt like a game of skill but it was also mightily frustrating at times.
Part of this was due to a set of unforgiving controls and the fact that, after crashing, a player would end up facing the wrong way which could often lead to another collision. A decision to add a timer also meant the races were not merely a case of beating the opponent. A player had to complete the laps within a given time to qualify for the next track and, even when competing against another human, the pressure was on at least one of the two players to achieve this.
Even so, it remained fun and that’s because Richard designed the game primarily to be played with a friend. “The game worked because it wasn’t really intended to be played alone,” affirms
David. “I felt strongly about the multiplayer at the time and I was strongly pushing that aspect of it.”
Nevertheless, it was deemed important to have a computer
BMX SIMULATOR WAS THE COMPANY’S FIRST GAME AND THERE WAS A LOT RIDING ON IT DAVID DARLING
opponent in case the player did want to enjoy the game on their own. For this, a rudimentary system was created in which the developer played as the computer-controlled bike, recorded the keypresses and used them as the basis for the ‘AI’ opponent.
A similar system of recording keypresses was also used to replay a race once it had been completed, ensuring the heart-pounding moments or close finishes could be relived. In this case, the human player’s keypresses would be recorded. Gamers were then allowed to hold down S to slow the action replay down for extra drama.
All of this was laid down within three months, with the work being carried out at Codemasters’ first HQ at the Beaumont Business Centre in Banbury. “It was quite a tiny space but there was a reception area and Richard and I each had an office,” says David. Richard worked on the game in his own office and he’d often be accompanied by James Wilson who produced the graphics.
“James was one of our best friends and we used to go to school with him,” David says of the talent behind the game’s visuals. “He’d become Codemasters’ first artist and part of the core team but, shortly after working on BMX Simulator, he sadly died in an accident aged just 20, making the game one of the last he worked on.”
Adding to the drive for realism were in-game sounds that sought to mimic both the tyres on the ground and any (inevitable) crashes. In truth, they sounded anything but real but there was at least a cool, ear-friendly music track during the intro sequences, with all of the audio coming courtesy of the talented musician, David Whittaker.
David had become interested in computing around 1981 and he’d cut
his teeth on the
VIC-20, writing games in machine code and saving the results out to tape. He found he was able to earn a decent living creating music and FX for games even though he had no formal training as a composer. He’d simply tinker with a keyboard to produce something which he felt sounded good and he’d generally spend around a day on a game’s audio.
“David was a contractor and we’d discuss the game with him, describing the music we wanted and the kind of sounds effects we wanted,” says David. “We’d tell him how much memory we had available and the technical requirements and he’d go off and work his magic.”
Before long, the Commodore 64 version was near completion and the Darlings decided that the game was good enough to be ported to other platforms. This, they surmised, would generate extra cash and so they hired Tim Miller to carry out a conversion to the ZX Spectrum.
“We’d realised it was a great game and so we wanted to see it on other machines,” David says. “Tim made a great version for the Spectrum which didn’t look quite as good but it played really well.” The game was also ported to MSX and the Amstrad CPC with 16-bit versions on the
Amiga and Atari ST following. The brothers felt they had a winner on their hands.
As well as promoting the game by sending copies to the computer magazines of the day, Codemasters hired a small booth at the PCW show which took place in 1986 at the Olympia exhibition complex in Hammersmith, London. It was there that they met Philip and Andrew Oliver who would go on to port Richard’s Commodore 64 sequel Professional BMX Simulator to the Amstrad and ZX Spectrum. This game was essentially more of the same, albeit with the ability to play against up to three others.
“As far as we knew Professional BMX Simulator was the first game on the Commodore 64 where you could use two joysticks and have two people on the keyboard so four players could play simultaneously,” says David who cites its fourplayer ability as proof Codemasters would not scrimp on the development of games even though the titles were being sold at pocket-friendly prices.
“I don’t know how many people ended up playing with a combination of joysticks and keyboard because we didn’t get much feedback back then, but we always intended BMX Simulator to be a multiplayer game and we always thought multiplayer was important. We played it to death!”
ETIM MADE A GREAT VERSION FOR THE SPECTRUM WHICH DIDN’T LOOK QUITE AS GOOD BUT IT PLAYED REALLY WELL DAVID DARLING
ven so, the sequel didn’t quite match the initial impact of the original BMX Simulator and nor did it create the foundation on which Codemasters would go on to make its millions. “The first game was an immediate success in the charts and, of course, it launched Codemasters,” says David, with BMX Simulator selling more than 100,000 copies in the first year.
“We followed it up with lots of other successful games in the first year which gave us a really good platform to start building the company,” David continues. “We tapped into the demand for high-quality games at budget prices because there were a lot of games that people couldn’t afford because they were too expensive. Lots of budget games were not of very good quality either, so when you made a high-quality game at a low price, they seemed to sell in quite big volumes. That was certainly the case for BMX Simulator.”