In 1983, Mervyn J. Estcourt made the cult classic Spectrum motorbike warfare game Deathchase (also released in America under the title Cyclepath). He followed that up with the hit Spectrum motorbike racing game Full Throttle, which I wrote about among 1984’s UK #1 games. Having identified a successful specialism, Estcourt carried it on. The final game he made, before quietly leaving games behind for reasons I can find no record of, was a Commodore 64 take on Full Throttle’s motorbike racing, and Speed King would go on to be an even bigger success. Eventually.

While the creators of prominent BBC Micro games like Elite and Thrust programmed their games’ Commodore 64 ports themselves, it was rarer for anyone to do the same with Spectrum games. The greater difference between the architecture of the two computers made replicating games a bigger challenge. Speed King is instead a recreation from the ground up. The name change may have been out of necessity because Estcourt took it to a different publisher, but either way it genuinely is a different game in some crucial ways too.

  • Speed King (Digital Integration, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Speed King (Digital Integration, 1985, Commodore 64)

You race in the same twenty competitor set-up, on mostly the same tracks, but the method of control is a good deal more sophisticated. Unlike Full Throttle with its simple acceleration and braking, in Speed King you have a six-speed manual gearbox and using it well is essential to your success. In fact, since the fire button is accelerate and up and down on the joystick are for changing gears, there isn’t even a control to brake, so you have to judiciously use downshifts for that purpose. Your opponents also move with a bit more of a sense of real weight than on the Spectrum, although hitting them remains just as disastrous for you (and not them).

New label Digital Integration, who had seen some fair success with flight sims like 1984’s Fighter Pilot, released Speed King in August 1985, and it got some decent reviews. “The bike has a wonderful ‘feel’ as you hoof it round the track at breakneck speeds” wrote Julian Rignall in Zzap! 64. “What is really convincing is the way the bike and rider under your control lean into the bends” said Your Computer, suggesting that perhaps “the UK will soon be echoing to the crunch of Speed King players falling off their chairs as they succumb to the realism.”

  • Speed King (Digital Integration, 1985, Commodore 64)
  • Speed King (Digital Integration, 1985, Commodore 64)

For all the game’s technical improvements, though, the Commodore 64 at that time was a much more competitive environment for racing games compared to the Spectrum a year earlier. Commodore User’s review of Speed King started by asking “Why do people continue to bring out racing simulations with the likes of Pole Position and Pitstop II about?”. Even the more positive Commodore Horizons review described it as “basically Pole Position on a Suzuki”. Namco’s classic Pole Position had made it to British C64 players in early 1985, and Epyx’s Pitstop II in May 1985, when it reached #2 in the UK charts. Speed King only got as far as #19 on the Commodore 64 specific chart in 1985.

  • Pole Position (Namco/Atari, 1983/1985, Commodore 64)
  • Pole Position (Namco/Atari, 1983/1985, Commodore 64)
  • Pitstop II (Epyx, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)
  • Pitstop II (Epyx, 1984/1985, Commodore 64)

A year later, that all changed, and Speed King spent four weeks at the top of the UK combined formats chart – basically the whole of August 1986. There appear to be three explanations for this. One is something which happened around the same time as the Digital Integration release, but would have taken a little time for its full effect to be felt. Sega released an innovative arcade game whose success turned motorbike racing specifically into the in thing. Hang on a week for more information on that one, since it will be even more relevant to the subject of next week’s post. The other two both relate to a fact that Speed King got a new release in 1986 by another different publisher, Mastertronic. 

  • Hang-On (Sega, 1985, Arcade)
  • Hang-On (Sega, 1985, Arcade)

Mastertronic was set up in London in 1983 by Martin Alper, Frank Herman, Terry Medway and Alan Sharam. With some having a background in video cassettes and their distribution, and none in coding, they identified an opportunity for a different approach to the computer software business. One thing they focused on was building up a distribution network, offering favourable terms to sometimes reluctant retailers of many kinds, with Mastertronic retaining the risk if the games didn’t sell. They went as far as running their own warehouse to consistently be able to meet their guarantees of delivery, as well.

That was the behind the scenes difference. The very obvious difference to members of the public buying their games was the price they had to pay: £1.99, several times cheaper than the norm for games when Mastertronic started. As former Mastertronic financial controller Anthony Guter writes in his history of the label: “Budget pricing was proved to be perfectly viable provided that most titles achieved good sales, and in the fast growing market of 1984–6, at the “pocket-money” price point of £1.99, they did.” 

  • Speed King (Mastertronic, 1986, Commodore 64) [image from lemon64.com]
  • Speed King (Mastertronic, 1986, Commodore 64) [image from lemon64.com]

By January 1985, Mastertronic were reporting their millionth sale, and in 1986 they released Speed King from a position as a key player in British games. Other companies had also started their own competing budget labels, including, as I mentioned in my post on Thrust, BT’s Telecomsoft. Not long afterwards, Mastertronic’s pull and impact on the charts was highlighted by a dispute around which shops’ sales counted towards the chart. As Popular Computing Weekly reported it in their 1986 end-of-year roundup: “Gallup admitted WH Smith to its weekly chart, and found its whole nature suddenly changed. As WH Smith didn’t stock Mastertronic titles, the budget company’s domination of the Top Twenty disappeared in one fell swoop. Within two weeks, WH Smith was taking Mastertronic’s product.”

The low price was one key new attraction of Speed King, but the final factor in its belated success was that it was no longer just a single format game. Mastertronic’s version of Speed King never got higher than #3 on the Commodore 64 charts, but they added several versions which reached #1 on the charts for other formats. Those computers may have been less popular, but they could collectively add up to a lot of sales, even without a Spectrum version (Mastertronic put out a Spectrum version before the end of the year, but called it Speed King II). Ed Hickman programmed versions of Speed King for the Amstrad CPC and the MSX. The other version which was even more central to Mastertronic’s approach was the one for the Commodore 16.

  • Speed King (Mastertronic, Amstrad CPC, 1986)
  • Speed King (Mastertronic, Amstrad CPC, 1986)
  • Speed King (Mastertronic, MSX, 1986)
  • Speed King (Mastertronic, MSX, 1986)

Commodore released the Commodore 16 in 1984 as a less powerful, more affordable alternative to the Commodore 64. Other companies that lacked the networks and price point of Mastertronic weren’t as quick to see its potential, and Mastertronic established a particularly dominant position in Commodore 16 software. A lot of those games were the work of Mr. Chip Software, and specifically Shaun Southern. A teenager from Shropshire, he had gone to study physics at university but dropped out after four months because it was getting in the way of writing games.

Southern wrote a successful Commodore 16 racing game for Mastertronic, called Formula 1 Simulator (not to be confused with Codemasters’ later Grand Prix Simulator, although it’s notable that Codemasters’ founders were also mostly making games for Mastertronic at this time). Then, in Southern’s own words from his website, “I think we took our F1 sim, put a bike in it and sold it to whoever was doing the Speed King brand/licence”.

  • Speed King (Mastertronic, Commodore 16, 1986)
  • Speed King (Mastertronic, Commodore 16, 1986)

Ken McMahon in Commodore User wrote of the results that “Though the graphics are by no means poor, I would describe them as spartan. The course itself is marked out in the grass with tent pegs.” Zzap! 64 gave it a one line review in a C16 round-up and a score of 56%. Speed King spent five weeks at #1 in the Commodore 16 chart. I will be meeting Southern and his racing games again in future posts, though by that time Mr. Chip Software will be Magnetic Fields.

So, two years on from Full Throttle and one year on from Speed King’s initial release, everything converged to rev it up anew. Motorbike games were on a high more generally, it had a newly attractive price and wide distribution. It also had some new interpretations for different formats that were, at least according to chart rules, the same game. With all of that working in its favour, Speed King reached a whole new level of success, and new audiences. And Mastertronic hadn’t reached their peak yet.

  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 09 August 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 16 August 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 23 August 1986, Popular Computing Weekly
  • Gallup combined formats chart for week ending 30 August 1986, Popular Computing Weekly

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