THE LOTUS CONNECTION

THE TOP GEAR SERIES LOOKED AND SOUNDED FAMILIAR…

■ It is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn between Gremlin’s Lotus and Top Gear series. After all, the graphics are strikingly similar: there are chunky cars viewed from behind which drive down a horizontally-striped track that is flanked either side by red and white stripes. There is also the same split-screen two-player view.

Yet Ritchie Brannan and Ashley Bennett say they didn’t necessarily take their main cues from the Lotus franchise. “There may have been some influence but Out Run was really the main inspiration,” Ritchie affirms, with Ashley adding, “We didn’t actively copy anything other than the things we probably thought were obvious. A lot of how it looked was because that was the only way you could do it.”

Even so, Ritchie says the artists had worked with people who had created the assets for Lotus

(“they may have reworked some of the assets”). What’s more, Shaun Southern, who created Lotus,

also spent some time working in Ritchie’s office at Gremlin. “So there was probably some more influence there. Overall, though, the teams and vision were different.”

The strongest connection was the choice of music in the first Top Gear which included superb remixed tracks from the Lotus series. “The Top Gear audio was done in five days when I was down at Gremlin,” says the game’s composer Barry Leitch. “It took about a dayand-a-half to work out how the dev kit worked and to write the Vegas piece.

“After that, in order to go home at the weekend, I started rearranging pieces from the first two Lotus games. For the SNES, I had to program the music I’d written in a soundtracker on the Amiga into data statements. There were commands to change note lengths, instruments and note values trying to use as little memory as possible. I was trying to make it sound like there were more than four notes playing at a time.”