Keeping with all the hype of the ex-world champion, Gremlin bought the rights to produce the game based on the famous British driver.
Similar to other F1 games on the C64, Gremlin still decided to do a C64 version because of their long absence from the scene and so to do a final hurrah before moving on to pastures new. The other versions came out well, and luckily Nigel won the 1992 championship to make Gremlin look good.
Gremlin decided to print a small form for readers of Commodore Format to fill in Issue 20, saying that they will buy the game when its released. The response was overwhelming for Gremlin, and so the game was decided to be their final hurrah.
Not much was ever known about the game’s development, until Darren Melbourne got in touch with GTW and shed some important light on the game. It was found that the game was indeed in development, and was being coded by Andrew Bowen, with graphics by Paul McKee. The game was shaping up well and featured some of the most impressive road routines ever seen on a C64. Smooth corners and undulating hills were working extreemly well on the C64, and pushed it to the limit.
Sadly, too much development time was spent on doing this road engine, that the title was running late. Gremlin decided sadly that time was running out for the C64, and that they should ditch the game, rather than give it the extra 6 weeks it needed to be completed. 6 weeks away from a potentially fantastic send off for the C64… a huge loss.
Spectrum and Amstrad versions made it, and sold well… and also performed very well too. Although very impressive, they chugged along quite badly and were crippled by Multiload. Otherwise it was a fantastic conversion.
It now asks the question of whether we can save anything of the C64 conversion now we know the names of the developers. It is very possible, and we hope that we can salvage the remains of what sounds like the the beginnings of a fantastic conversion. It will be hard, but we must try and now find these developers. Can you help?
World champion, but not on our screens…
Contributions: Patrick Furlong, Darren Melbourne
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