Codemasters

Okay.

Well, talking about the path, you know, I, I've noticed, you know, um, through my, some of my, through my cursory research here that you, you kicked off with some, you know, some writing roles, and then you found your way to Codemasters.

How did you, how did sort of...

Tell me about those sort of e- early days and getting your start into games.

Yeah.

Uh, one of the projects I did for PC Games was a short book about the history of video games, so just to look, sort of look back and bring that all together, and then think about where that, where that points.

And again, I was lucky at the time that Codemasters, run by Richard and David Darling here in the UK, an institution, a company who'd had a lot of, uh, really exciting, uh, sort of early work, but starting to mature at that point and looking to grow and expand and do new things, and were looking for game designers in a fair- fairly open way.

Um, and I was able to talk my way into that.

It's quite a fascinating system because you could go in there, flick through a catalog.

That's how I got a lot of my Codemasters games.

Actually, my friend got them for his Spectrum that way.

And I would actually buy them on the Dizzy Collection.

And so they're firing on all cylinders and then EA kind of just shit cans the entire set of licenses and, you know, institutional knowledge degrades fast in these spaces.

And so Codemasters who made the best rally games historically are now the only people making F1 games ever.

when they've never really been the foremost open-wheel racing sim studio, I don't want to undersell what they've done.

If you played their campaign game, the Breakpoint campaign in

Yeah.

So, well, the Oliver Twins were, weren't they? It was always just the two of them banging out, like in the Codemasters and all that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You'd walk into a shop and look at all the colourful cassettes and then you'd roll the dice.

And it might be brilliant if it was a...

Usually you'd go with Codemasters, wouldn't you, back in the day on the 8-bit ones? Because you'd see a Codemasters cassette and go, they're usually alright and they're only two quid.

You can have one of them.

Alistair Brimble.

This is a Codemasters slash Team 7 game from 1990.

This track is such a banger.

It's so good.

Oh, man.

Codemasters.

That was an early Codemasters game.

I played that.

I wanted that game so badly when I was a kid.

I appreciate it originates on the Amiga, but even after that, playing it on Mega Drive or whatever else, you can play it with one button.

I play it regularly on Evercade now they've got a version of it on the Codemasters cartridge they put out and it's just so simple to get into as all good sports games should be I think because like my approach to this console is very much like I want games to cover a certain amount of categories and they're games I'll never get bored of.

So for sports, every console needs a good sports game.

This is my pick, but Super Tennis on SNES, also amazing.

So, yeah, I'm absolutely a sucker for Sensi.

I don't know what's going to happen to it going forward.

I know it's under the Codemasters umbrella now.

So, yeah, what happens going forward? TBC.

And I think again, it would sell loads of copies, and perhaps we can do that one for charity, because that would be fantastic.

Um, yeah, I mean, to get the Code Masters one, again, I don't think that would be a, you know, too much out of the realm of possibility.

Uh, and especially as Blaze know how popular Sensible Soccer is.

So yeah-

applicable to Retro Magazine, yeah.

Right, and right now I'm in the middle of the main article about Codemasters.

It's been 40 years for Codemasters, so going back from the very beginnings, how did it start, having interviews with the people that were there at the beginning, and little snippets about each of the games that they made, or at least some of the standout games.

I'm like, this is, how did I not know this was available? I've been missing out on this.

Why have I been missing this? And so that's been one of my favorite things is just to be able to, and I can go back several issues on that too.