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Title Micro Machines
Game Type Driving
Publisher Code Masters
Players 1 or 2
Compatibility All
HD Installable No
Submission Nikos Andreou

Review
If you think that a racing game must have mega-fast 3D graphics and cool
rock tracks playing in the background, then I suggest you play
micro-machines. It is the playability that makes this game really
enjoyable and extremely funny.

Micro Machines is a top racing game where your sprite moves in any
direction on screen. You do not drive a Ferrari, but small vehicles that
some kids are driving through remote controlers. You play the role of one
of those kids. The game offers a wide variety of vehicles to drive. Jeeps,
Boats, Formula cars, Buggies, Helicopters, and Tanks(!) are some of them.
Each vehicle has different handling characteristics; it is a detail that
adds to the realism of the game.

The aim is to complete as many courses as possible and finish the game.
In each race you compete with three other opponents. The first two
finish the course succesfully but the third and the fourth lose a
life. Of course finishing in the first two positions is not an easy task
as the levels become gradually more difficult. However, there are some
bonus games (if you win three races in a row) that help you to win extra
lives. The two-player mode is similar to the one-player mode and the
screen does not split-up in two but you run at the same screen. If one
of the players is left behind and the other player manages to reach the
end of the screen that both vehicles are in, the player who's
stuck behind loses a life. Your aim is to make your opponent lose all
of his/her lifes.

As I said before the game is realy enjoyable and funny. The two-player
mode is fantastic and I guarantee that you will spend days in front of
your computer playing Micro Machines head-to-head with your friends.
Even the one-player mode is brilliant because of the excellent
difficulty curve. This game is an absolute must and deserves a place in
your games' collection. Overall 90%.

ormat: NES
Release: 1991 (US), 1992 (UK)
Publisher: Camerica/Codemasters (US), Codemasters (UK)
Developer: In-house

Formed by the Darling family – father Jim and siblings David and Richard – in the latter half of 1986, Codemasters originally acquired a modest reputation as a purveyor of cheap, cheerful and oft-forgettable ‘budget’ software for home computers. During 1989, however, the company began to undergo a quiet metamorphosis. Like the Stamper brothers at Rare, the Darlings wished to turn their attention to the fantastically successful NES market. A gifted employee called Ted Carron began work on two devices that would change the company’s fortunes: the ‘Power Pak’, a peripheral that would allow players to enter cheat codes for NES games and, apropos of Codemasters’ intention to avoid Nintendo’s hideously expensive licensing program, a prototype NES development kit.

“At the time it wasn’t easy to get a licence and we didn’t need one, so we went ahead without it,” explains creative director Richard Darling. “We produced our own development systems and began development of our own games. The hardest part was finding a way to get around the protection system on the NES, so that our games would not be treated as ‘counterfeit’.”

In April 1989, coder Andrew Graham – then working on a computer science degree at the University of Strathclyde – was commissioned to port an old Oliver twins game to the NES. “I had been doing some conversions for them on the C64, Amiga and ST in my spare time at university, and they asked me if I wanted to do an NES game,” he recalls. “I converted Treasure Island Dizzy using Codies’ home-made development system. Ted Carron had made a rather Heath Robinson development system which consisted of a PC connected to a Commodore 64 connected to a box full of wires and electronics, all hooked up to a consumer NES. They mailed the whole lot up to me in Scotland. It was a miracle it all worked when I put it together. His subsequent NES dev kits were altogether more compact. They were given code names from characters in Blade Runner. I think one of them was called Leon, or something.”



Looking back, Graham suggests that his port of Treasure Island Dizzy might have been – by design or through a later change of heart – something of a dry run for Codemasters’ NES ambitions. Indeed, it only received a release years later, as one of four games on a package called Quattro Adventure. However, Graham’s efforts as a freelance led to an offer that would prove extraordinarily fruitful for the Darlings: they asked him to take a year out to write an NES title.

The young programmer began work on his first original game – California Buggy Boys, an NES racing game with a top-down perspective – during October 1989. “A lot of the graphics were done – you were racing along a beach and across the dunes,” Graham recalls. “The cars were the same kind of buggies that appeared in Power Drift – I loved that game. I just liked the whole kind of sunshiney happy-happy fun theme to it. They were specifically looking for something that would go down well in America, hence California Buggy Boys, I guess. We had a number of games in development. Gavin Raeburn, now a very successful studio head at Codies, did an arcadey racing shoot ’em up called Ultimate Stuntman, and the Oliver twins put a lot of work into what was probably the biggest and best of their Dizzy games, The Fantastic Adventures Of Dizzy. There were others as well.”

Inadvertently, it was Ted Carron’s Power Pak that led to the demise of California Buggy Boys. Renamed the Game Genie by David Darling – as players could insert three codes, or ‘wishes’, at a time – Carron’s project led to an opportunity for Codemasters, and, in turn, a change of direction for Graham’s racing game. “We had started working with Galoob Toys in San Francisco when they licensed the Game Genie from us,” explains Darling. “Their biggest line of toys was the Micro Machines range, and so it was an obvious match. We really liked the idea of adapting the game to be based on the toys, as this gave the game a really unique feel – being based on miniature cars racing in everyday real-world locations.”

“It made sense to exploit this well-known brand, rather than launching the totally unknown California Buggy Boys,” concedes Graham. “I remember it took a while to get used to the idea that my game was now about these plasticky little toys, rather than full-sized buggies on beaches, though.”

“Since [during development] we had to go inside to the [Codemasters] main building to make coffee, Andrew and I used to play the prototype game to see who would have to make the freezing trek. That’s how I knew it was going to be a great game: we would play it all the time for fun.” Paul Perrott

Working from a prefabricated hut in a field outside the main building – “Codemasters had made up for lack of office space by building a little village of cabins in a field behind their house,” remembers Graham. “We had to tiptoe across wooden boards with our cups of coffee when it was raining and the field was muddy” – Micro Machines began to take shape early in 1990: the year in which Nintendo would famously seek an injunction to prevent Galoob’s sale of the Game Genie. Paul Perrot was assigned as lead artist with a little assistance from Toby Egglesfield, with John Menzies writing the front end.

“Codies was a cool place to work,” enthuses erstwhile Codemasters staffer Egglesfield, now living and working in New Zealand. “You knew everyone there pretty soon. Most of the guys were pretty young and some had sports cars, while lots of the ones who didn’t had posters of them. One of the really nice things was how hands-on everything was.”



“The atmosphere was great,” agrees Perrot, who now plies his trade in post-production for TV and films. “We felt we were taking on the big companies and stuffing one up them at their own game. There was a general friendliness and sense of fun, and most of the senior guys weren’t averse to a party or three.”

Lending weight to the argument that a happy workforce is a productive workforce, the development of Micro Machines saw Codemasters step up a gear. Whereas its releases for home computers had been invariably derivative, and more often than not of questionable quality, Micro Machines would become the company’s most innovative and polished game by far. One stroke of genius stands out in particular: the decision that the racing would take place on magnified representations of real-life environs, from breakfast tables to baths, lending it a highly individual look.

Where did this idea come from? “There was some input from the boys above but mainly I think it was Andrew (Graham) and I throwing ideas around,” answers Perrot. “Some, like the school desk, were so obvious that I don’t think anyone could lay claim to it – maybe it was Andrew. I remember the pool table was an option while we were playing pool at the pub at lunchtime.”

Fine as the concept was in principle, the relative shortcomings of Nintendo’s hardware necessitated certain compromises. “The NES had limited character-based graphics with which we needed to create recognisable household environments, so there tended to be a fair bit of repetition,” explains Graham. “I guess that’s part of the whole Micro Machines ‘look’, where you have a table with 15 cereal bowls, and five boxes of cereal on it. You just accept it, like you accept the fact that Tom and Jerry have just run past that table for the 50th time.”

With California Buggy Boys’ art assets discarded, Perrot had to start from scratch, working with the unfamiliar NES hardware. “There were four palettes of three colours and a background colour and transparency layer,” he says. “It was all done in DPaint 2 or 3, I think. I’d send through the graphics on a floppy and Andrew would shove them in the game. Then, with a stern look, he’d let me know which ones hadn’t worked and I had to check each pixel to fix them. There was a 256 character limit for backgrounds, and drawing nine rotations of sprites for each vehicle was pretty damned boring and annoying.”

With the tracks taking shape, the next step was to introduce code-controlled competitors. Graham opted for a simple solution, one that veterans of races with Micro Machines’ highly methodical AI might find amusing. “Basically, the whole world was covered with invisible arrows pointing in the direction the car should drive,” he reveals. “The car would just rotate to face the direction of the arrow that it was sitting on top of. Editing all those arrows down was just a matter of hard work for me or for Paul.”

Although this technique effectively made races ‘time trials’ in all but name, it was a technique that worked and, more pertinently, was far from CPU-intensive. “It was a good robust system for the hardware available at the time, given that you could drive as far off the track as you liked,” agrees Graham. “No matter how lost the AI cars would get, they just followed the arrows and they would lead them back to the track – there was very little CPU power required. If you found that the cars were repeatedly banging into a cereal box or something, then it just meant that you had the arrows pointing into the box, and you needed to edit them.”



It is Micro Machines’ multiplayer mode, though, that elevated it from being a pleasingly stylised and solid racing game to a classic of its era. Its simple premise – that players attempt to ‘scroll’ their opponent from the edge of the screen but, by racing ahead, have their efforts hampered by a reduced view distance – was something of a masterstroke. “Since we had to go inside to the main building to make coffee, Andrew and I used to play the prototype game to see who would have to make the freezing trek,” says Perrot. “That’s how I knew it was going to be a great game: we would play it all the time for fun.”

“The single-screen system was something I was keen to try from early in the development,” explains Graham. “Split-screen would never really have been a viable option on the NES, and would be very cramped on an overhead scrolling race game. I was very happy with the multiplayer mode. It was clearly the best part of the game, making the singleplayer mode look a bit boring in comparison. There were always people coming into the building for a game, even when we only had one test track, and that’s pretty encouraging. I remember with pride when Richard Darling was enjoying a twoplayer game and said ‘This is the best game we’ve ever made’. I was well chuffed.”

Graham actually had another multiplayer mode planned, one that was sadly (though understandably) discarded. “At one point we had a multi-deck version of Micro Machines working; you could join multiple decks together and have people playing a game across a network,” he reveals. “That was pretty ingenious, given the technical limitations, although from a gameplay point of view it didn’t really add much. We demonstrated that at the CES in Las Vegas.”

Micro Machines was completed, after a number of unpleasant all-night sessions – some consecutive, Graham tells us – in September 1990, in time for its designer and coder to return to his degree. “It was clear to us that it was a fun multiplayer game, but it was a matter of whether we could get people to play it for long enough to realise it for themselves,” he says. “There is a bit of a learning curve, especially with those people who couldn’t handle the ‘driving down the screen’ thing.” But first, Codemasters had to actually get the Micro Machines cart into American stores…

With Nintendo taking an extremely dim view of companies bypassing its licensing system, there was always a chance – however slim, with hindsight, it might have been – that Micro Machines could have been caught in a perpetual wheelspin at the start line, its impetus robbed by lengthy and expensive litigation. “We were always aware that there was a risk that Nintendo would make a claim that we had infringed their rights and try to prevent our games from being sold,” admits Darling. “This is why we had to make sure that everything we did in the design, development and manufacturing of the games would not infringe any of their rights.”



“Its not a secret that Nintendo was actively trying to stop us marketing the Game Genie and the unlicensed games,” says Graham. “There was no contact with or support from Nintendo. We had no access to official Nintendo development documents, and what technical information we did have came from reverse engineering the hardware. At the time we were told to be careful of strange people who might be collecting evidence for the evil and mighty Nintendo. We were young and paranoid.”

But 1991 was little short of a miracle year for Codemasters. Judge Fern Smith ruled in favour of Galoob in the Game Genie case (leading to a reported 500,000 immediate orders from retail), and the decision was upheld after a Nintendo appeal. It was a momentous decision. “They all loved it. Godzilla in Toyland had gotten beaten,” says Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln in David Sheff’s Game Over. Less newsworthy, but significant nonetheless, was the launch of Codemasters’ first NES games: The Fantastic Adventures Of Dizzy and, yes, Micro Machines.

Not only did the company avoid a near disaster during the first production run of Micro Machines chips due to a QA oversight, it and US distributor/partner Camerica also managed to escape the overt wrath of Nintendo. Codemasters had been very careful in its design of its 256K cartridges so, legally, Nintendo could not prevent their sale. Behind the scenes, however, there were allegations of retailer intimidation, with fellow renegade NES publishers American Video Entertainment and Color Dreams suggesting chains were being dissuaded from stocking ‘unofficial’ cartridges by aggressively ‘persuasive’ Nintendo sales reps.



Although a success for Codemasters, Micro Machines was not the stellar performer at retail that it perhaps could have been. “There were plenty of good reviews, but in the end I don’t think Micro Machines on the NES sold in spectacular quantities,” laments Graham. “In the US there were too many legal complexities, and we were relying on others to market the game.”

In a longer timeframe, though, who would hazard to put a price on the value of the Micro Machines franchise to Codemasters? With an estimated five million copies of its various guises sold worldwide before Infogrames (through its association with Galoob owners Hasbro) appropriated the licence for its mediocre PS2 and Xbox releases, it played a integral part in making the Warwickshire-based outfit the company it is today: that rare beast, a successful independent UK software house.