Steve Davis Snooker – “Colour wanted”

In 1969, the controller of BBC Two, one David Attenborough, had a bit of an issue. He had a few colour cameras, and a desire to put something unique on his channel that would maximise the use of this new technology, but no good idea for what that should be. Enter BBC head of sport Bryan Cowgill, who had previously created Grandstand. Cowgill suggested that snooker, with its bright green table and different coloured balls, would be perfect for colour TV, and Attenborough liked the idea. They created a special tournament with the leading snooker players competing at a short form of the game, and called it Pot Black.

Plenty of Brits still didn’t have colour TVs for some time after, and had to do their best with helpful commentary like Ted Lowe’s famous “for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green”. Pot Black took off, though, and stayed popular for many years to come, bringing the sport to a much wider audience. Among Pot Black‘s early keen viewers was a snooker-playing pre-teen called Steve Davis. As he later told the BBC, “when it started I always used to tune in with my father – it was really the first time you could watch snooker on television.”

When the ZX Spectrum launched in 1982, its name reflected the exciting new possibilities of going beyond the black and white display of the ZX80 and ZX81. Just like colour TV, some people saw how this could lend itself to snooker, and Visions and Artic both published Spectrum games called Snooker in 1983. Though the fact that the Spectrum’s basic colour palette included only one green and no brown meant developers of both games had to take some inventive approaches to those balls.

Around the same time, a young man called Mike Lamb bought a Spectrum, played an arcade pool game at university, and decided he could program something like that. With a white ball, three red balls and three blue balls, his Pool suffered a lot less from the system’s limitations, and Lamb did a good job of getting its physics to look realistic by 1983 computer standards. He sent out his game to various publishers including CDS, where it landed on the desk of Giles Hunter. 

Hunter had worked as a retail manager for WHSmith in the ZX81 era, before being employed by two of his customers, Ian Williams and Carol Howlett, as a manager for their software company. CDS were looking to build on their initial Spectrum releases like Leapfrog, which was, yes, a Frogger clone. Hunter correctly identified that Pool was a game with a bit more potential. Home Computing Weekly called it “a joy to use” and Your Computer found it “easy to control and pleasant to look at”; it reached #8 on the MRIB combined formats chart.

By the time of this rush of Spectrum cue-and-ball games, BBC Two had expanded its snooker coverage from Pot Black to include the longer-form World Championship, showing daily live coverage from 1980’s tournament onwards. Leading among a new generation of players was Steve Davis. Across the 1980s, he reached the world final eight times and won six of them. In 1984, the championship frequently attracted British TV audiences of more than 5 million as it built up to Steve Davis beating Jimmy White in the final. 

Steve Davis was the biggest star of a sport which was going places, and Giles Hunter at CDS had an idea. He asked Mike Lamb to use Pool as the starting point for a snooker game, and signed up Davis to lend his name to it. Lamb has reported the concept of Steve Davis Snooker as having been inspired by the success of Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. The timelines don’t quite match up, since CDS were promoting Steve Davis Snooker within a couple of weeks of Daley Thompson Decathlon coming out, but they could have been inspired by early hype for it.

As Mike Lamb told the Arcade Attack podcast in 2022, the biggest challenge in developing the new game compared to Pool was having more balls on the table at the same time. He “had to shrink the balls down a bit” and “everything had to run a bit tighter because it had to run faster”. He managed to work those out, though his game still faced the same colour issues as its snooker predecessors, with his green ball being a white outline and brown ball being a chequerboard of red and green pixels. Both Lamb’s skills and the fact it was his second go at the basic concept show in the results, a refined and impressive snooker simulation complete with working spin. Though not the option to play against a computer opponent, which would only be added in later ports.

“The game is not at all bad” wrote Chris Bourne in Sinclair User. One Crash reviewer called it “as far as features go, probably the best snooker game about” while another wrote that “I found the game enjoyable to play and I don’t like snooker at all”. Home Computing Weekly called Steve Davis Snooker “a fine implementation, with very realistic and predictable movement of the balls, first class sound […] and excellent graphics” while also writing that “the only thing that spoils it is the dreadful shimmer of the Spectrum’s green, which tends to make everything more difficult to see”.

The man himself did more than just provide his name. Home Computing Weekly detailed that Steve Davis would be making “three personal appearances at chain stores” and Crash reported on his appearance at the Personal Computer World Show at Olympia in London in September 1984. He was quite a draw, apparently, and was seen “carefully lining up tricky shots on the Spectrum and Amstrad versions of the new CDS Microsystems game, Steve Davis Snooker. It was nice to see how long it took him to line up his shots, nudging the cursor this way and that for an age until satisfied”. Even if he then missed.

Mike Lamb, again in his Arcade Attack interview, recalled that Steve Davis took an interest in his game and in computer games more generally, and that Davis was happy when he got to stay in hotels with Galaxian machines. That interest in technology fits with the post-snooker Steve Davis who has happily talked to music magazines about going down a modular synth rabbithole, and enthused about getting to play a DJ set at the same festival as artsy electronic musician Holly Herndon.

Mike Lamb was initially put off by the arrangement whereby Steve Davis got significantly higher royalties for each copy sold than Lamb did for actually making the game (of the £7.95 price of each cassette, he recalled, £1 went to Davis and 40p to Lamb). CDS persuaded him with the argument that the game would sell so many extra copies with ‘Steve Davis’ on that it would be a net positive for Lamb, and he later concluded that they had been correct.

On its release, Steve Davis Snooker only hit #15 on the Gallup combined format chart in November 1984, but it kept on selling well for years. CDS got Lamb to make conversions to various other formats (“each less successful than the last”), as well as, it seems, getting others to do some of the ports. CDS then proposed expanding the formula to a golf game, perhaps to be Seve Ballesteros Golf, but Mike Lamb couldn’t make it work. He left to join Ocean and work on games including Renegade.

In 1988 Your Sinclair reported that Steve Davis Snooker had sold 100,000 copies in total. That update came as part of a news item noting that CDS were about to reissue the game on their budget label Blue Ribbon (“which we fort was a choccy bar”). This time Steve Davis Snooker, complete with a new title screen, went to #1 on the combined formats chart. It hit #1 on all the main formats and stayed at the top of the Commodore 64 and Amstrad charts for some time. Reviewing the reissue, ACE wrote that, among the many computer snooker games available, “this one — despite its age — is still the best, just like SD himself”.

The game’s quality and new £1.99 price tag likely accounted for much of its appeal, but things had indeed also worked out very well for CDS in terms of Steve Davis’s career in the intervening period. In 1985, the year after the game’s original release, the World Championship reached a whole new level of popularity. Steve Davis suffered an agonising last minute defeat to Dennis Taylor in the final, and by the end more than 18 million people tuned in on BBC Two — the channel’s largest ever audience, and the UK’s largest ever post-midnight TV audience.

Defeat seems to have helped endear Steve Davis to the British public further. The following year, he made light of it on a song by Chas and Dave, “Snooker Loopy”. It became a top ten hit. Davis went back to winning championships, and in 1987 he was the runner up in the public vote for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, before winning it the following year. All of which did no harm to the game with his name on. Just like with Daley Thompson, signing up Steve Davis for a computer game had proved a smart and forward thinking move in 1984. By 1988, with the game becoming CDS’s biggest success ever, it looked even better.

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Sources:

• The Making of RoboCop & Batman – Mike Lamb Interview – Ocean Software Legend, Arcade Attack Retro Gaming Podcast, 2022
• The Game Publishing Pioneers, Shaun McClure, Retro Gamer No. 286, June 2026
• Pot Black returns, BBC Sport, 2005, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• Baizing a trail – how snooker went loopy, Oliver Brett, BBC News Magazine, 2009, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• BBC Snooker: Pot Black and beyond, Eloise McNaulty, BBC Archives, 2015, accessed via the Wayback Machine
• A History of Snooker on TV: How the baize got on the box, Simon Mahon, BBC Genome Blog, 2017
• 1985: The black ball final, BBC Sport, 2003
• Interview with Mike Lamb, World of Spectrum, 1997
• Dev Story: Mike Lamb, Antstream Arcade, 2019
• Michael Lamb, Peter Ward, Retro GamesMaster, 2016
• Mike Lamb, Neil Reive, Arnold 2: Amstrad CPC – The Developers Q&As Uncut, 2021
• Computerised classics – Pool, S.E., Home Computing Weekly No. 32, 11-17 October 1987, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• ZX Spectrum Software, Your Computer Vol. 3 No .11, November 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• BARB Top 10 (BBC2) for the week ending 06 May 1984, What We Were Watching
• The 1984 Personal Computer World Show, Centre for Computing History
• News – Steve Davis stars on your screen, Home Computing Weekly No. 88, 13-19 November 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• News – Snookered, Crash No. 10, November 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Steve Davis: From snooker table to mixing desk, BBC Arts, 2016
• I Went to the Masters Snooker with Steve Davis and We Talked About Techno, Josh Baines, Vice, 2016
• Snooker legend Steve Davis on how he ended up going down the modular synth rabbit hole, Ben Rogerson, Music Radar, 2024
• Spectrum Software Scene – Steve Davis Snooker, Chris Bourne, Sinclair User No. 35, February 1985
• Fast and Furious – Steve Davis Snooker, D.M., Home Computing Weekly No. 94, 08-15 January 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Reviews – Steve Davis Snooker, Crash No. 12, January 1985, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Frontlines – Interesting…, Your Sinclair No. 30, June 1988, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Sports Sims – Steve Davis Snooker, ACE No. 10, July 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive 
• Pool, Steve Davis Snooker, chart histories at Computer Hits.
• Snooker Loopy, chart history at Official Charts

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