This article is from the public number:Touch (chuappgame) author: Martyn Carroll, the compiler: Wait
“My father often drags me to the bank and tells the manager that I am a child prodigy, so that the other party can increase the overdraft limit, it is as simple as that.”
One day in November 1987, at 6 am, in a room in County Shipdlow, England, 17-year-old programmer Martin Weber (Martin Webb) is sitting in front of a computer. His father, Dennis Weber (Dennis Webb) and the owner of the game publisher US Gold, Geoff Brown (Geoff Brown) Also, three people have been there for a whole night.
US Gold was one of the UK’s leading game publishers in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly distributing American games in Europe and later acquired by Eidos Interactive, developer and publisher of Tomb Raider. , withdrew from the historical stage.
The night before, when U.S. Gold made the Commodore 64 master for the arcade racing game OutRun, the tester found a problem. They couldn’t be repaired at the factory, so they rented a room temporarily, allowing Martin to find a solution in a quiet environment.
No one spoke, but Martin knew it was very important: OutRun was the hottest arcade game of the time. In order to get the license for the home computer version, U.S. Gold prepaid £250,000 to Sega. Two publicThe company has signed a cooperation agreement and has been advertising since a few months ago, and Martin is responsible for developing the most critical C64 version for the game.
Two adults went out to buy breakfast, and Martin stayed alone in the room. At that time, he was so sleepy. “I haven’t slept for a few days, so I am particularly tired. In that case, you are easily upset and want to give up. However, I also know that the consequences of failure are more serious. You must fight hard and not let everything work in vain.”
Martin recalled: “Although I was only 17 years old, I already have this awareness.”
An OutRun Arcade
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OutRun is a racing game developed by Sega that landed in the arcade in 1986. The reason why Martin had the opportunity to make a computer transplant for it was entirely coincidental. On one occasion, Martin and his father Dennis drove north from Kent to the U.S. Gold headquarters in Birmingham to sell a game they made to the publisher.
“I never like to drive with my father.” Martin said, “I like to listen to the radio, but my dad prefers to speak. We set off early that day, I just want to sleep all the way to the destination, but my father always followed me. Talking about the game and the code made me exhausted.”
The 17-year-old Martin is already an experienced programmer who has developed more than a dozen games – most of which are for Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computers, which sell original works primarily through mail order. In the TI-99 computer user circle, Martin’s father’s company Intrigue Software has established a good reputation.
“I started making money. I am good at making TI-99 games, which is helpful for the company’s development, so my father is very happy. Whenever I finishAfter a game, the order will follow.
Martin’s father is responsible for image processing. He puts the abbreviation of himself and his son’s name into the game
However, the TI-99 market is too small, and with the gradual dominance of C64, Spectrum and other computer products, the market share of this computer has become smaller.
“We started to make less money. My father often dragged me to the bank and told the manager that I was a child prodigy and let the other party increase the overdraft limit.” Martin remembers the scene at that time, “just It’s that simple. My father will say that I am making a new game, listing some sales data, and then I can borrow money from the bank.”
Martin felt that long-term loans were not the solution to the problem. They should abandon the TI-99 market and turn to develop games for more popular computers. So he chose C64 and spent about a year learning to use the 6502 assembly language and then created a simple fighting game called Karate Chop. The next question is: How to sell?
“The C64 and Spectrum markets have matured and some large publishers have appeared. If you make a game, you need to spend thousands of pounds to launch full-color ads, which means we have no way to Other companies compete. We need to sell the game to a software publisher for a prepayment. So I begged my father to take me to a big software company.”
Martin acknowledges that it is not easy to convince his father to change his strategy. “My father will come up with the idea of making a game. I am sitting in the bedroom and writing code. He runs the company in another room and urges me to finish the game at the age of 17. I am a perfectionist, but now I can’t imagine the situation at the time. How hard it is. In addition, adolescent children may have difficulty coexisting with their parents.I had a conflict with my father. Afterwards, I often ran to the countryside of Kent, and my father drove around to find me. In addition to the verbal arguments, sometimes the situation gets worse.
The game image on C64 is very simple, but it runs very fast
As financial pressures increased, family relationships became more and more tense, and Dennis accepted Martin’s advice. The father and son took “Karate Chop” to visit Ocean Software in Manchester, but the latter is making a computerized version of the arcade fighting game “Yie Ar Kung-Fu” without cooperating with them.
However, another publisher, Melbourne House, bought the game for £5,000. Subsequently, Martin developed the game “Max Torque” which is similar to the Sega motor racing game “Hang-On” and successfully sold it to the publisher Bubble Bus Software.
The launch of the game made Martin interested, and soon he began to “clone” Sega’s “OutRun.” “I have written code for the Max Torque track. It’s quite easy to change a motorcycle into a car, so there’s a new game!” In order to avoid copyright issues, Martin used a Porsche-style car in the game. Not Ferrari. “I asked my father to take me to the Porsche garage in Maidstone and take a photo of a Porsche 911 from different angles… I even remember that my father had a quarrel with me. He said, ‘I can paint a car for you’.
At the US Gold headquarters, the father and son showed off their demo version – an “OutRun” cottage made for C64. They didn’t know that they had just bought the “OutRun” computer from Sega. Version authorization.
“The father is very excited and seems to feelIt is very important to have the next meeting. The office building of U.S. Gold is a huge glass building, and the parking lot is full of luxury cars. We met CEO Geoff Brown and I showed him the demo of the racing game. There are still three or four programmers sitting in the room. When I showed the Porsche sports car in the game, it attracted everyone’s attention all at once… They all know that Geoff’s purchase of OutRun from Sega is a bet. Yes, but I don’t know.
Vaguely, this is a Porsche-style racing car
The demo shown by the 17-year-old programmer is the prototype that U.S. Gold needs. It was probably Easter (Mid-April), and US Gold needed to finish the game before Christmas 1987, which means they still have a few Months of time.
“Giof took me into another room with an “OutRun” arcade. He asked me: ‘Martin, you can develop this game, right? You can make C64 for it. Version? ‘I was frightened. About an hour later, the lawyer signed a contract with my father, and the other gave us an advance payment of about 20,000 pounds. In 1987, it was a big sum.” /p>
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Martin believes he has the ability to overcome technical challenges and bring OutRun from the arcade to the C64 platform. “Of course, this is a big gamble.” He recalled, “Father has to risk signing, the project has a deadline, but I have already done a Porsche racing game that can run, and accumulated some experience.” /p>
Martin first designed the initial interface of the game, the broadcast screen (the player can choose the soundtrack)And the high score screen, because these are the elements that U.S. Gold wants to add in the game, and only know how much free memory is left after finishing. Then, Martin encountered two real challenges – the hills and huge graphics.
Martin took only a few hours to overcome the first challenge (by using a raster timer to move the horizon up and down), but The huge image beside the road brought him a problem: Would you like to prioritize speed or pay more attention to graphic details?
“Speed really tested my skills. “OutRun” has a strong sense of speed on the arcade. I know that the computer version must be fast, so I chose a larger, faster moving graphics instead of Smaller and more refined graphics. It’s like a gamble, depending on personal preference. If I recreate the game now, I might use a different approach, but when I test the game, I feel that everything is flying from the side. It feels great.”
After 30 years, “OutRun” appears on the Switch platform again
The game development is going well, Martin is a few weeks ahead of schedule, but the publisher suddenly made more requests. “At first, US Gold only asked us to design a few tracks, but when I finished in October, Geoff asked me to port all the tracks to the C64. It was a daunting task, we only have The arcade version of OutRun didn’t have any design files, so I had to use a Super 8 recorder to record each track and then make a master. During that time, I played the game numerous times.
Compared with the original on the arcade, the OutRun C64 version lacks some gameplay, and most media mentioned this in the comments. “Zzap!64” praised the game’s “extraordinary speed” but thought it was missing”Playability and talent”, only played 68 points (out of 100). If Metacritic was in that era, then the Out64 C64 version had a media score of about 68.
But on the other hand, the market performance of OutRun made the publisher and Martin happy. Although it was officially released on December 10th, it still became the highest-selling game in 1987. According to data released by U.S. Gold, during the Christmas holiday of 1987, the total sales of all versions of OutRun reached 250,000. Webb and his son also earned a considerable income, so they no longer have to borrow money from the bank.
“In January 1988, we received a royalty income of £17,000. The income for the following months was also good. Until the 1990s, my father still received royalties because OutRun was included in many games. Concentration… I don’t know how much the game has earned for us, but I guess it may be between £70,000. When I got the first royalty check, my father gave me a sum of money, I changed A better car.”
Only the sky is the limit of Martin. Later he traveled to Chicago to participate in the development of OutRun’s NTSC “Enhanced Edition” (Mindscape release). “In Chicago, someone took me to share dinner with a Nintendo boss. I think he is what people are talking about now, but when I was too young, my father wouldn’t let me go.”
After Martin returned to the UK, US Gold commissioned him to port the Atari arcade arcade “Span class=”text-remarks” label=”Remarks”> (Road Blasters) to the computer. on. Martin can re-use the track editor he developed for OutRun, so he quickly completed the game.
These products with the mark of the times confirm the popularity of OutRun in the past
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However, Martin’s relationship with his father has become more and more tense, and the rift has never been closed.
“My father often trains me at home, but as long as he attends the computer fair, he likes to brag about me. FatherPro will tell everyone who plays our games, those games are all I do He looks very proud. However, when we go home, once I have not finished my work, the situation will be very different… Later I learned that my father’s friend once advised him not to impose it on me. Too much pressure. But in my father’s opinion, those suggestions are a waste of time.”
In the next few years, Martin made several small games, but he made up his mind to leave home and stay away from the game industry. “When I stopped making games with my father, I had a lot of trouble, but I didn’t want to talk about those unpleasant experiences.” He was not willing to talk about whether he had reached a settlement with his father.
“Now I live with my mother in Brazil. She knows what I have experienced… 30 years have passed and the scars are still there. When I was very young, my father forced me to work hard, a bit Too much. But I don’t regret it. To some extent, I respect my father because he is willing to rely on a child to do things. But sometimes I also think that if I continue to make games, I can do more in this industry. Achievement, that’s even better.”
Martin Weber
June 2017, atOn a warm night, the 25-year-old “technical magician” – Martin’s son Thomas (art name Tom London) boarded the talent show “United States On the stage of the Talent Show, the judge Simon Cowell (Simon Cowell) asked him: “Who is your role model?” p>
“My father,” Thomas replied. “From small to big, I always wanted to be a father. If you don’t have him, I won’t be able to do anything I want to try.”
This article was compiled from: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-10-13-the-boy-behind-the-biggest- Coin-op-conversion-of-the-80s
Original title: “The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s”
This article is from the public number:touch (chuappgame), the original author :Martyn Carroll, Compile: etc.