Games That Weren't^®

1982-1983 Paul Hope

Platform: Commodore VIC-20

It is surprising how emotions can run high, and the warm fuzzy memories flow when playing games from your childhood – and playing Chariot Race by Micro-Antics on the Commodore VIC-20 is no exception. I have always had a real soft spot for the Commodore VIC-20, and Chariot Race was a mind-blowing title for an unexpanded machine, but ferocious fun too.

Our article is a tribute to this wonderful game, but crucially its vastly talented, and sadly late, author Paul Hope. We also celebrate the completion and release of a fully preserved collection of Micro-Antics titles, after over a decade of trying to track down all the missing and unpreserved games, and reveal an unreleased game at the end too.

First of all, lets take a look at the game which put Micro-Antics firmly in people’s hearts and minds, followed by a brief history of the company from the Hope family, and how Paul Hope once conquered the Commodore VIC-20 during the early days of home computing.

If this is the first time you have heard of Chariot Race, then fear not – we have you covered. Featuring very large chariot racer characters, you control Sinister and Dexter, and must navigate your way through a sea of vertically scrolling chariot traffic. Although the game always starts as a simultaneous 2-player game, you can play on your own too – the second player just crashes out pretty quickly. allowing you to continue.

To progress, you have to bash the other riders from the sides into the barriers, to make them crash out, whilst ensuring you don’t yourself get caught up in the carnage. They will also try and do the same to you, and you also need to ensure you don’t get stuck behind someone for too long, otherwise your horses will collapse in a heap.

Taking it slow isn’t going to win the race in this case. If you try to play it too safe, then you will get fireballs shot at you from behind, so it is in your best interest to speed up gradually and keep up the pace. Though the better you progress and smash out the others, the faster and more erratic the other chariot racers become, making life that little bit more unpredictable.

If you manage to survive all the way to the end, you will be greeted by a congratulations ditty before being able to race again to try and improve on your score. It may sound simple, but it is an extremely addictive title, and quite rightly up there amongst the greatest VIC-20 games of all time.

The game didn’t even require any memory expansion, which makes the game that little more incredible. But what is really incredible is just how well the game did for Micro-Antics compared to its earlier releases – all from a small living room.

Warm fuzzy memories

In 2006, I became good friends with Retro Gamer’s long time contributor and writer, Paul Drury, where we learnt of a mutual love for Chariot Race, and ended up having a few battles between us and Vinny Mainolfi at the old RetroVision gaming events that used to be hosted in Oxford around that time. We fought like gentlemen, and there was hardly any swearing at all (honest guv!)

Just a few years later in 2011, Paul Hope’s son Toby would surface on the Denial VIC-20 forums, after his sister had discovered there were people out there talking about Chariot Race. I had not long before found references to two other Micro-Antics games in the shape of Chicken Challenge and Brain Pain whilst doing research in old magazines such as Home Computer Weekly. Neither had been seen or preserved, so it was initially assumed that the titles were never released for some reason, but now we were able to find out.

Thanks to Toby, it was confirmed that both had indeed been released, but were both obscure and hard to find compared to Chariot Race due to much lower sales. Toby revealed that his father had also released another game (his very first) in the form of Road Race, which had even lower sales figures still.

All three games preceded Chariot Race, which was the title that made everything go a little “crazy” in the Hope household. But they were missing, and so all three needed to be tracked down via the likes of Ebay and other auction sites to try and save them. I reached out to Toby to see if we could perhaps preserve the titles through him and to learn more about them too.

During our conversations, Toby revealed that his father was very unwell, and sadly not able to talk and share his history personally about his Micro-Antics days. Since 2009, Paul had been battling a rare, degenerative brain condition that had left him very weak and unable to talk to anyone.

Something needed to be done to try and celebrate Paul’s achievement with Chariot Race. Paul Drury was always keen to try and feature the VIC-20 where possible in Retro Gamer, so I reached out to him to see if there was perhaps a possibility to do something special on Micro-Antics in the magazine.

After an introduction, arrangements were made where Paul visited the Hope family and interviewed them, producing a wonderful tribute piece on Chariot Race in issue 92 of Retro Gamer back in July 2011. Paul got to meet and thank Paul Hope personally, and even enjoyed a game or two with the family, where they also shared very warm memories of their Micro-Antics days with their father.

Paul met in the lounge and on the actual sofa where the family (son Toby, daughters Sam, Jo and wife Margaret) together helped their father pack all of the tapes, often after school. Particularly his youngest daughter Jo, who was the most dedicated to this task, setting an enthusiastic and efficient pace on the factory line they had created on the living room floor. The living room also doubled as a development studio for Paul Hope and an assembly line for the finished products.

The family revealed that between 1982 and 1983, Micro-Antics produced four titles in total for the un-expanded VIC-20. The final being the most of impressive of them all in the shape of Chariot Race.

Margaret revealed that Paul had first come home with a VIC-20 back in 1981 when it had just been released. Originally, it was brought just to play games (especially adventure games), but soon Paul wanted to start making his own. The very first thing he did though was to use his VIC-20 to control disco lights at children’s parties.

At the time Paul was employed as an engineer at Honeywell, and had always been an inventor and was always keen to play with the latest technology. The Retro Gamer article revealed that at the age of two, Paul had been dismantling the telephone and grandfather clock to see how they functioned. At University, he had even collaborated with fellow undergraduate Sir Patrick Michael Head (later famous chief engineer at Williams) to design a go-kart that would run for 24-hours.

Taking a look at Road Race, Toby pulled out a pile of invoices and it was revealed that they had supplied Beatties in Wolverhampton with 10 copies, retailing at £6.99, which they would get £4.34 for each copy sold. Unfortunately, only around 20 copies sold overall.

Next was Brain Pain, a pair matching card game. This sold several hundred copies, and received decent scores – including a 4 star review in Home Computer Weekly. Even more successful was the game after that – Chicken Challenge.

Paul’s daughter Sam reported that everyone at school was playing Frogger on their ZX Spectrums, and asked why the family couldn’t have one of those machines instead of a VIC-20. Paul defended about how much better the VIC-20 was compared to the “gimmicky Sinclair” and wrote Chicken Challenge in response, swapping the frog for a chicken. According to Toby, the game sold around 2000 copies, many through VicSoft magazine.

The best was still yet to come though, and Chariot Race would be a showcase of just how far Paul had come and pushed the VIC-20 to new levels. Now in a larger clam case, the Hope family knew that there was something special with the game, and spent more on advertising, packaging, artwork and pushing the game into shops and into gamer’s hands.

Margaret recalled some great sales tactics – going to Boots and asking them if they had the game in stock, telling them that it was “a great game by all accounts”. She would then ring them the next day and say they were Micro-Antics and had a new game called Chariot Race. In the end, the game would sell almost 15,000 copies, putting Micro-Antics well and truly on the map. So, what was next on the cards for them?

Perhaps surprisingly, this would be Micro-Antics very last game. Paul had felt that Chariot Race was the pinnacle, and that he had pushed the VIC as far as it could go. He moved onto something else, and that “something else” may have been the Commodore 64, albeit very briefly. One magazine reported that a C64 edition of Chariot Race was coming soon in 1985 – having a grand-stand view of the action and a 3D effect.

Toby doesn’t recall anything about a Commodore 64 edition of the game, or anything ever being started, though did confirm that the family had a Commodore 64. It may therefore have just been an idea on paper and nothing more. However, the seed of an idea for a sequel may have come from a fan letter that Paul had once received in 1984, sharing their love of the game, but also suggesting a sequel with a Pole Position style view-point. Sadly, we’ll likely never know.

Coming back to the Retro Gamer article – the Hope family were thankfully able to share an early copy of the article with their father Paul, to show just how appreciated and loved his game was by many. Sadly, Paul would pass away not too long afterwards in June 2011, just before publication of the article.

Preserving Paul’s work

Although memories of Chariot Race will always live on, what didn’t feel right, was that not all of Paul Hope’s work had yet been preserved, or even experienced by that many people. Quite understandably, Toby was not keen on posting out the only copies of his father’s work out in the postal system, so we began keeping an eye on Ebay over the years to save all the titles instead.

Between myself and Mat Allen, we managed to recover both Brain Pain (in 2016) and Chicken Challenge (in 2013), and put the files on the Denial forum for people to enjoy. We also passed on copies and scans to Toby, so that he and his family could enjoy them once more via simpler means on a PC and via an emulator.

Brain Pain was a simple, but fun pairs puzzle game for the un-expanded VIC-20, where you could even design your own pairs of cards. Chicken Challenge was Paul’s own interpretation of Frogger, which we later learn started off under a different name (and talk about a bit further on).  You could see the level of progression that Paul was making with every game leading up to Chariot Race, as he got more and more to grips with the VIC-20.

Road Race however remained elusive and did so for many years. It was looking like a trip up to Toby might be the way to go to preserve his father’s first published game, but then something magical happened in early 2024. Andy Hewitt contacted us to flag up that Road Race had surfaced on Ebay, but also that the seller had a series of what seemed to be prototype tapes with other Micro-Antics games on them – possibly unreleased.

Mat Allen is a bit more of a serious VIC-20 collector than myself, so I flagged the auction to Mat, and he was already on it and keeping an eye. Meanwhile, I got speaking with the seller to find out more about the prototypes, and if he had by any chance backed everything up beforehand. He hadn’t sadly – and it was looking like they would be auctioned at a later date. There were fears that the games would end up in the hands of a collector who had no intention of preserving.

It was during these conversations that the seller kindly offered us first refusal on the prototypes (Road Race was already at auction at this point). So, an offer was quickly made and thankfully accepted. Mat then shortly afterwards won the auction for Road Race. All titles were now in safe hands, and we’re in great debt to OldKit1975 for making this all happen.

The seller told us that the tapes came from a computer purchase made sometime ago. He asked the original owner where they had come from, and the response was vague, but was recalled that the seller’s sister owned a computer shop and lived close to Paul at the time. They were either from the computer shop or were ‘swapped’ at school.

When shown photos of the tapes, Toby confirmed that these were created by his father and featured his hand-writing on them. So, these must have been copies that Paul had produced and given to a friend/contact. Maybe they were indeed copies to run in the shop that the Ebay seller mentioned?

Taking a look at the tapes, two were copies of released games (Brain Pain and Chicken Challenge) – though the other two were something rather different. In particular Super Frog stood out like a sore thumb, and was found to be a different incarnation of Chicken Challenge. It is practically the same game, but with frogs to tie in even closer with Frogger.

The Hope family had no recollection at all about a game called “Super Frog“, though there were suggestions that Chicken Challenge did once exist under a different name at the start. Our theory is that Paul created this version originally just so that his daughter Sam had a version of Frogger to play, but then reskinned it afterwards for commercial release to try and avoid any potential legal issues down the road.

The final tape was strangely labelled as “CHARRIOT 3.5K VERSION”. Unfortunately, it seems that data is missing on the tape, and it isn’t complete. Just to make sure, we passed a copy over to Andy Hewitt (of hewco.uk fame) to cast a developer’s eye over it all.

Andy felt that the game was not properly saved onto the tape, and guesses that Paul may have saved the game out from the VicMon monitor cartridge (or similar) that he was writing the game with. The file saved to tape could well just be a snapshot in time of when the game was being worked on.

As Andy continued to dig through, he found certain patterns with memory locations, suggesting that Paul may have been developing on a 3K expanded VIC (with a multi-cart extension) and with a VicMon cartridge. Another possibility was that he used a software assembler in the first part of a 3K RAM expansion, which might explain why the program starts at $0A00.

Although some of the graphics data is present, a good chunk of the character set and code is missing compared to the final retail release version. It is likely just to be the same as the final edition, but we may only know for sure if the code is patched up with parts from the retail version where data is missing. It’s an interesting curiosity none-the-less, and if anything more is discovered – we’ll update this article.

To celebrate Paul Hope’s work, we are proud to finally present all of the Micro-Antics games as TAP images below, including the prototype tapes that have been saved. This includes the previously unreleased Super Frog, seen for the very first time in over 40 years. Included are high-res scans and photos of the inlays too.

In addition to this, Paul Drury and Toby Hope have kindly dug out various photos of Paul Hope’s VIC-20 set up, Paul himself from back then, a photo of the original Chariot Race artwork and annotated code that Paul had printed and was working on at the time. We hope to add more in the future.

Finally, over the years – we had gone through many magazines to find game charts, reviews and adverts for various Micro-Antics titles to pass onto Toby and his family. We have added these here too in a separate gallery. If you discover any other articles, reviews from back in the day about Micro-Antics and their games, then please do get in touch and we’ll be happy to add to the gallery.

We leave you with some final words from Paul’s wife Margaret about his work and the legacy left behind:

“I know the Vic 20 was much more limited than other maker’s models, which often had more capability built into them. So, it was really very skilful for Paul to do the games that he did. That was why all the reviews loved what he had got out of the unexpanded machine. He had pushed it to its limits.”

With a huge thanks to Mat Allen for loaning his Road Race purchase for preservation, Paul Drury for his input and kindly providing details from his interview with the Hope family, Andy Hewitt for the heads up about Road Race and also looking at the Chariot prototype tape, Toby Hope for all his help, photos and input, Margaret Hope for her final words to conclude the piece and OldKit1975 for kindly selling the prototype tapes to ensure they were fully saved.

In memory of Paul Hope, who sadly passed away in 2011.

Download

• The Micro-Antics-Collection

Main gallery

Press gallery