CHASING THE HORIZON
HOW THE ESSENCE OF GREMLIN’S GAMES LIVES ON
■ As coder Ashley Bennett says, “Top Gear is still very, very big in Brazil.” No surprise, then, that Brazilian developer/publisher Aquiris Game Studio looked to pay tribute to the game when it released its own racer, Horizon Chase – a spiritual successor.
With a similar look and feel, albeit with modern presentation, the game made its debut as Horizon Chase: World Tour in 2015 for Android and IOS. It was then released on Nintendo Switch, PS4, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Mac and Linux as Horizon Chase Turbo in 2018. Three DLC packs have been created since including the October 2021 update, Senna Forever. As if to underline the past connection, Barry Leitch, who composed the music for the Lotus series and original Top Gear game, has also been strongly involved. He created the soundtrack for both World Tour and Turbo and his remit was to make it sound like the tunes he had produced 24 years earlier but re-imagined. “I just started composing, letting the music write itself,” he said.
If you fancy having a listen (and you really should), an album of official soundtracks can be listened to and purchased on Barry’s own website at bit.ly/barrystunes
Franklin and Paul Green were credited too. The backgrounds were improved, the cars felt chunkier and it continued to run at a blistering pace. There was some competition in the racing stakes from Super Mario Kart at this point but Top Gear 2 was a more than capable opponent. Most other racers were being left standing.
Little wonder, then, that another game was commissioned shortly after Top Gear 2 was released in August 1993. What’s more, by November 1993, KEMCO had realised there was great value in the franchise so it sought to register Top Gear as a trademark. The move was opposed by the BBC in 1996 and the verdict ruled in the broadcaster’s favour three years later.
The third game in the series was to be called Top Gear 3000 – the number relating to the year in which the game was set. Having a futuristic vibe where players would travel from one planet to another to race meant the developers could unleash their creativity in a way they perhaps couldn’t before. Yet
Ritchie didn’t work on this game. “In late 1992, a group of us went from Gremlin to the Nintendo conference in Seattle to check out the new FX chip to see if we wanted to use it in future games,” he says. “Coming back, there was a desire to create a second Top
Gear sequel and another Mansell game. Ash went to Top Gear 3000 but I ended up doing Newman/ Haas Indycar Featuring Nigel Mansell.”
It left Ashley as the main coder with assistance from Matthew Donkin. Michael Hirst produced the graphics and extended his skills to the track design but Ashley says Top Gear 3000 felt much more personal to him. “There’s a lot of me in Top Gear 3000,” he affirms.
For this third game, Gremlin simply wanted to do something different and the futuristic setting allowed the developers more leeway in their design choices while allowing them to move even further away from the limitations of realism. “We didn’t want to do the same game again,” says Ashley.
“We wanted to make the third game look and feel different and there were some cool innovations too.”
In came weapons such as a warp device, tools that allowed cars to jump and a magnetic attractor that would give speed by attracting your car to the one in front. There were also crazy upgrades such as a nuclear fusion engine. Jumping over cars was partly influenced by the feel of Stunt Car Racer but the overall design was also heavily shaped by the movies at the time. “Even so, development wasn’t quite straightforward mainly because there were so many additions and change in style,” recalls Ritchie.
“THERE’S A LOT OF ME IN TOP GEAR 3000” ASHLEY BENNETT
“The FX chip was also tricky to work with because it would only run at full speed during the vertical blanking period.”
The big tech innovation was a four-player Versus mode that required use of the Super Multitap peripheral. It split the screen into quarters – “so people played on these tiny, tiny little screens,” Ashley says. But it wasn’t easy to pull off. “We needed to use a custom Digital Signal Processor (DSP) because the base hardware couldn’t work it all out,” says Ashley. “Nintendo had used a DSP to help with Mode 7 scaling and rotation effects but you could program them yourself. We got all the kit we needed to do this and moved a lot of the maths for calculating the road into the DSP because it was light years faster. The resulting DSP-4 chip allowed the track to split into two, with one route forming a shortcut. “Whether it was worth the effort and the extra money per cartridge that Ian had to spend to get a custom DSP is debatable,” says Ashley of a chip that only got used in one SNES game.
Even so, the drive to create a fourplayer split-screen (one that ran at a blisteringly fast pace) had an inadvertent consequence: the creation of an over-the-top user interface which began with an elaborate intro about illegal intergalactic races occurring once every 1,000 years! “That was because we didn’t have the equipment to create a custom DSP for the first couple of months of the project so we just built a really fancy front end,” Ashley says. There was also time to have pre-rendered cars. “A talented two-man 3D graphics team rendered cars with 30 polygons and Michael worked with what they produced. Theoretically, it looked better, although I’m not sure it really did!”
Even so, Ashley and his team had a blast. “The game was the least successful of Gremlin’s three Top Gear titles but it was probably the most fun to write,” he says, of the title first released in February 1995.
Sadly, however, it marked the end of Gremlin’s involvement in the series, even though Top Gear continued for 11 more years (right through the period when the BBC revamped its show in 2002, too.) Ritchie says Newman/haas Indycar Featuring Nigel Mansell ended up being the final straight-line iteration of the Top Gear engine. Yet had Gremlin remained in the driving seat and continued to refine it, who knows which direction the series would have taken next?