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Famous
for the fantastic Crazy Comets and Mega Apolcalypse, it was a
honour to finally meet Simon Nicol
at 2003's BIT5 Brighton event.
Aswell
as talking about Mad Planets to Simon, Simon started conversation
about a Car game which he was writing for
Virgin Games in the 80's, which featured a road effect
like no other.
Simon
talked about seeing Mark Kelly's road effect created for Turbo
Outrun, and Simon instantly said "You
call that a road?, now this is a road.." and created
his own amazing road effect.
Virgin/Martech
are assumed to have liked this what he created, and got Simon
to produce the game for them.
A
friend of Simon's recently had this to say about the game...
"His
road routine was impressive, fast smooth and very hungry (CPU
& RAM as far as I can remember). He spent about 3 months fiddling
with it while working for Martech, then came and worked with me
for a bit.
Martech were not best pleased, they were expecting
a game out of him... and were paying him 2k per month then - he
was riding the crest of Mega Apocalypse at the time (hell of a
starfield that one...). I don't know that the game really got
any further than the road - there was another programmer Dave
Martin (Martech) imposed on Simon to help him (make sure he did
something) - can't remember his name, sorry."
Not
much else is known apart from this at the moment, no real title
or anything. Hopefully Simon will help GTW find out someday soon.
It
is rumoured that Simon has all his source disks, and may be willing
to pass on anything there is of his Car game, which would be a
fantastic privilage to see. We will have to wait and see on that
one though.
A contributor called Robert Wilson got in touch recently with the following:
"I have a small article in a C64 magazine relating to an Outrun style racing game written by Simon Nicol (Mega Apocalypse) back in the late 80s for Martech. The article contains a screenshot and some information about the game which was being worked on.
It was said that it featured a very smooth running road system - the best anyone had seen on the C64. However, it was pushing the memory limits of the C64 and Simon Nicol had apparantly used around 40K of memory just on getting it took as good as it did.
Rumours had it, that he used multicolour bitmap mode to move the roadside graphics through the screen to achieve the effect, rather than using the standard character bitmap mode method, which always looked jerky, i.e. Space Harrier, Afterburner, Outrun.. etc. The code may be lying around somewhere unless Simon Nicol deleted it back then.. I will try to dig out the magazine again and try to get you the screenshot of the game - it's somewhere in the loft collecting dust!"
Hopefully we can dig out the magazine article and get a screenshot added to the site very soon.
However more recently we found that mentioned in an interview in CCI 87 December, there was a game being developed by Simon called Derek Bell’s Le Mans for Martech . Also it was mentioned that Simon did another game, but would not admit what it was - apparently was a favour!
So was this the same game?... Simon seems quite busy at present to talk about his past works, but we hope he may change his mind soon!
Time
will tell on this game...
Frank.
(Additional
source credits - Simon Nicol, Said, Robert Wilson)
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