Brothers have been a recurring theme in the story of the popular games of the 1980s. As games slowly moved from being a thing mostly made by individual people to a thing mostly made by teams, having a ready-made unit of two related people was often a helpful step along the way. The Stamper brothers at Ultimate, the Kerry brothers at Thor and Gremlin, the Carver brothers at Access. And of course the Pickford Brothers, whose #1 success for Mastertronic I covered last week. The Pickford Brothers weren’t the brothers most central to the story of Mastertronic, though. That was the Darling brothers, though they soon became be much better known for what they did afterwards.

David and Richard Darling spent their childhood across several countries including Canada and the UK. They initially learned programming at school in Vancouver, using punch cards. Their father, Jim Darling, was a contact lens designer, saw the potential for computers to help out, and bought a Commodore PET that he asked David and Richard to program equations for lens curvature into. Soon they were exploring programming and computers more widely, further encouraged by their grandfather, who had been a TV designer. They designed their first game, a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired text adventure.

The Darling brothers continued making their own games, sharing them with a friend and fellow programmer, Michael Hiebert. When the brothers moved to the UK, they and Hiebert continued by posting games to each other. Having built up a collection of games for the Commodore VIC-20, the Darling brothers decided to try to sell them, encouraged by their father, an entrepreneur and “Alan Sugar-type guy”, per David. At this point David was 16 and Richard 15. They saved up their pocket money to invest first in a machine code monitor cartridge for their VIC-20, and then in taking out adverts in Popular Computing Weekly, calling themselves Galactic Software. 

As recorded in Britsoft: An Oral History, David recalled that their initial ad said ‘14 great games from North America’, with the North American angle a key part of their marketing. I haven’t found one that quite matches, but the Popular Computing Weekly issue of 9-15 June 1983 does have a Galactic advert with “Software from America” as the headline, and “Now for the first time in the UK…” further down. Rather like Ocean predecessors Spectrum Games a couple of months prior, their advert listed several games with familiar sounding arcade concepts. Once was Frogger, which they appear to have subsequently renamed Froggy to make its rip-off nature very slightly less blatant. 

  • Froggy (Galactic, 1983, VIC-20)

The Darling brothers’ move into selling games went well enough that soon they needed to do a deal with a local record company to help them with duplicating the number of cassettes they were sending out. They took out further adverts, moving away from the American angle (which was a bit of a geographical stretch) and emphasising individual games more. This included an ad a couple of months later for Neutron Zapper (a kind of Space Invaders with some very basic Asteroids mechanics), which luridly promised “Ultra Froody sound” and “colours that range from infra dead to ultra violent”.

  • Neutron Zapper (Galactic, 1983, VIC-20)

Over the next year, a few things changed. Jim Darling put some of his business contacts to use and got Galactic’s games into shops and not just mail order. The brothers produced their own Games Designer package for making games with, which made the top 10 in Popular Computing Weekly’s VIC-20 chart (which was based on sales in Boots). And around the same time, Galactic’s games also attracted the attention of the founders of Mastertronic, who were at the planning stage and asked the Darling brothers to produce games for them too. They enthusiastically took that up, with their father apparently telling Richard’s teachers at one point that he was missing school because “they have to finish a game”.

Mastertronic reissued some of Galactic’s games as well as selling their new games. The brothers would go on to be crucial to Mastertronic, and to have a 50% stake in the company. Their most successful game for Mastertronic was BMX Racers, initially made in their own Game Designer and then revised. It has you riding a bike along a path from a top down view, dodging oil patches and stick-wielding grannies. It made it to the combined formats top 40 by the end of 1984, and stayed there for a very long time, eventually rising to #6 in January 1986. It sold more than 300,000 copies and was Mastertronic’s third best selling game ever. All despite reviews which ranged from middling to being called “the biggest flop with the C&VG review team since hedgehog flavoured crisps”.

  • BMX Racers (Mastertronic, 1984, Commodore 64)
  • BMX Racers (Mastertronic, 1984, Commodore 64)

As their success with Mastertronic built, the Darlings were thinking bigger still. In March 1986, they decided to sell their share of the business and invest it into forming their own company. They set up an office in Banbury next to a coffee factory, worked on some more games, and identified other people whose games they could publish. The plan was to aim at the same budget market as Mastertronic, using freelancers to produce large numbers of games quickly, and with an emphasis on high quality of packaging as well as games. On the advice of operations director Bruce Everiss, previously of Imagine Software, the brothers also set about promoting themselves. They took a wide range of media opportunities to make them the whizz-kid faces of their company, and of British games more generally. They launched the company in October 1986, and called it Code Masters. 

For Code Masters’ first game, the Darling brothers came up with an idea to build on the success of Mastertronic, and not just their own. One of the only two Mastertronic games to have sold better than BMX Racers was Formula 1 Simulator, and Mastertronic didn’t have any ownership over the word ‘Simulator’. So the Darling brothers combined the two concepts into BMX Simulator. It repeated the top down view of BMX Racers but applied it to a more formal, racing based version of BMX, the kind which had taken off in Britain earlier in the 1980s. As part of this, they added a familiar intro call at the start of each race: “Riders ready… pedals ready… go”.

  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, ZX Spectrum)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Amstrad CPC)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Amstrad CPC)

There is little about BMX Simulator that is specific to the actual process of riding a bicycle. The player’s input nominally corresponds to pedalling, as opposed to pressing an accelerator, but there’s nothing in the mechanics of the game that make much difference from car racing games like Atari’s then-recent Super Sprint. In the same way, you race on small circuits, each contained within the size of the screen and viewed from the top down. The tracks include obstacles and banked corners, as well as a competitor to race against. There is enough of a sense of uphill resistance from banked bits to make it work to use them for slowing down as part of taking the quickest possible route, which gives at least a bit of the feel of being a biker taking on rough terrain.

You also have one competitor, and avoiding crashing into them is fairly crucial. You see them crash sometimes themselves, a show of weakness that does a lot of work in providing a sense of fairness. That works even as you really mostly race the clock and a target time rather than really competing against the other rider. If you want to watch a particularly fine bit of racing again, you can in an action replay, which is a nice touch and certainly a level of sophistication well above BMX Racers.

  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Commodore 64)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, Amstrad CPC)
  • BMX Simulator (Code Masters, 1986, ZX Spectrum)

“A great game for the price, very entertaining” declared Computer & Video Games. Zzap! 64 concluded that “though limited in scope, it’s still pretty good fun”. And Bill Scolding in Commodore User called it one of the best BMX games around, which is more impressive than it initially sounds. Mastertronic had followed BMX Racers with BMX Trials (a revision of the Darling brothers’ BMX Stunts), Llainlan released their own BMX Trials, and Reelax Games had released BMX Jungle Bike. Although that was nothing to the rush of games that would come after BMX Simulator’s big success, including Firebird’s BMX Kidz and Alternative’s BMX Ninja, as well as Code Masters’ own BMX Simulator 2 and BMX Freestyle.

BMX Simulator spent more than a month at the top of the charts and was to prove the first of many very successful games for Code Masters. What drove the Darling brothers to improve the level of BMX game they could make by so much, so quickly? Here’s another theory on brothers, from a source close to them: “We were all in that bedroom scenario where you want to better your brother and say ‘I’m cleverer than you’.” “But it was half collaborative as well, because when you couldn’t do it your brother helped you and said ‘Ah! This is the way I’m better than you,’ but then you’ve learned”. That quote is from Andrew and Philip Oliver: the Oliver Twins. I’ll be returning to them, and Code Masters, before the end of 1987.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 25 April 1987, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 23 May 1987, Derby Evening Telegraph
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 06 June 1987, Popular Computing Weekly

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