Games That Weren't 64

SIR speaks about work on Nigel Mansell...

"I drew some of the early c64 graphics for Nigel Mansells Grand Prix, including the loading screen. I'm not sure if any of my graphics made it into the game in the end.

At the time I was working full time for Andromeda in their offices in Hendon. They were pretty good at getting various projects and licences (I also worked on Kevin Tom's Football Manager), but quite bad at managing the projects, so a lot of them got canned.

The only version of the game I saw was an early demo, which just had my car on the screen, a track, some music and a static control panel.

I remember that the programmers had a lot of trouble getting the music into the game. The musician had use the Rainbird Music Studio to do the music, which was a bit short sighted as there was no stand-alone player for it! The producer wanted a theme that was similar to the BBC F1 theme tune, but obviously it couldn't be the same, but it was pretty good from what I remember.

After we'd completed the demo (to show it was feasible to do the C64 version), I, the producer and the programmer travelled down to Martech's offices in Pevensy Bay to talk to the company about the game. They showed us the Amstrad version (Which was very impressive). I'm not sure what happened after that - there seemed to be very little progress made. The C64 version you show on your site seems much more advanced than when I stopped working on it."

SIR.