We spoke with Andrew Morris and Shaun Southern, the creators of Super Cars.
We love top down racers here at Spillhistorie.no, and one of our old favourites from the Amiga days is Super Cars II. This eminently playable game doesn’t just feature fun racing, but adds weapons and other dirty tricks to the mix.
This game from 1991 was developed by British duo Shaun Southern and Andrew Morris, better known as Magnetic Fields, and we were lucky enough to get them to answer a few questions for us. So without further ado, here’s our interview:
What was the biggest inspiration behind Super Cars? How did you come up with the concepts?
ANDREW: Probably the game Super Sprint, but there were top down car games before that, so it was an established genre, and Super Cars had much more going on.
SHAUN: For the racing sections, Super Sprint in the arcade. I used to both go on holiday to and then when I got a car, drive to Rhyl in North Wales to play the arcade games there and it was always fun to play multiplayer on that, chasing each other around the various tracks. The other parts, the characters, some were based on, or at least looked like people we knew. The car salesman was another programmer and I think one of the girls in the shop was a colleague’s sister. The daft questions – have you seen the highway code that you have to know when you do a driving test? Some of them are difficult, but some are very obvious !
In Super Cars 2, everything was bigger and better and the missiles and the like were like arcede shoot-em-up power-ups, and once you knoew the price for things you could make a killing buying and selling things too. All of these added depth to the game.
At what stage in development was the music for Super Cars 2 created? Was it early on or after most of the game was finished?
ANDREW: Music usually came along towards the end. I’d write a list of sections where I wanted something and the musician would do something appropriate.
SHAUN: I’m not sure, Andrew would know better. In the Lotus games you had a ‘car stereo’ so there was always a choice of music to race to. Music tended to be given to use near theh end of the project.
Are there any fun anecdotes or challenges you encountered along the way?
ANDREW: There was an incredibly tight deadline for this because we had to do a sequel to Lotus after it. The game was produced before scanners, so I photographed various landscapes and textures to give the game a realistic look.
SHAUN: Super Sprint had the entire track on one big screen but we wanted more detail so we had to get the game scrolling and for two players that took up most of the processor time. On the Atari ST version we had to pre-rotate a lot of the graphics as it didn’t have the blitter on the Amiga, and the graphics had to be converted to 16 colours. Getting the opponent cars to follow the track, especially on the parts with jumps was a challenge. I had to draw multicoloured maps with each colour signifying a direction [for the computer players] to try to face, and you had to get them to turn before the corners. Then with Super Cars 2 we had to have upper and lower maps, and there were a lot of them to draw. It’s always fun, though, when the game comes together and you have to stop actual development and play it for a while…
The «questions» in Super Cars 2 can be quite challenging for younger players, even native English speakers. What were your thoughts about the game’s target audience during development?
ANDREW: The conversation scrips were designed to be humorous and fun, but they could be learned. Some characters were easier and others. I hadn’t though much about how (or if) they were translated for other countries.
SHAUN: The questions and their answers were more things to learn than an English test. Some were obvious. Some you had to guess at, some only appeared after you had been playing a while so there was always something new. I don’t really think being a certain age gave you any advantage.
Our colleague Martin considers Death Rally to be a sort of spiritual sequel of Super Cars 2. Do you know of Death Rally, and if so – do you agree it’s a worthy spiritual sequel?
ANDREW: I’d never heard of it, but having looked at a couple of videos, yes, it looks like it takes far more than the general top down concept. It looks very similar, particularly with the interim sections. As with Jaguar on the Amiga being influenced by Lotus Turbo Challenge (perhaps more of a rip off than a sequel), I try to be flattered.
SHAUN: I’ve not seen Death Rally before but it does look like a modern version of Super Cars. Although there was Super Cars International which was on the PC, we always wanted to do a proper sequel…
Super Cars 2 was released when it was very common to pirate copy games and probably fell victim to that. What were your thoughts on pirate copying and were you happy with the sales at the time?
ANDREW: Pirating killed the Amiga. It limited what we could do as the money was so poor. On a hit game, after everyone else got paid, we’d be lucky to see £20,000 each. It was a depressing inevitability after spending long days, over months, creating something, only to make nothing out of it. All I can say is Super Cars and Lotus were the reason we were invited to do the PC rally games, where we finally did make some money, so that was the belated payback.
SHAUN: We had good enough sales for all the Lotus and Super Cars games, and always tried to protect the games to an extent, but sometimes the pirate copies were out before the games were in the shops. I always figured enough people would buy the games to keep us in business. It was definitely a different time – games had to be bug free before they were «mastered» and once the game was paid for, that was it. Now games are released full of bugs and mainly free, and you pay to upgrade. Back then there was advertising and good will – if you liked Super Cars I you would be eager to play Super Cars 2, and buy it… But maybe the pirating was like today’s notion of viral growth – free advertising in a way. For every person who pirated the game, maybe two more learnt about it and wanted the original copy… We can but hope 😊
Do any of you have (the) THEA500 Mini, and have you tried to play Super Cars 2 on it?
ANDREW: Yes, I’ve tried it. Super Cars International was probably the best version of the game – an update of Super Cars II. In some ways, it’s a shame that wasn’t used, but that was PC-only.
SHAUN: We were sent one as Super Cars 2 was included on it. It still seemed fun.
How do you view the game’s legacy today?
ANDREW: It’s a game I’m proud of and it’s well remembered. We had many ideas for another sequel. I’d hoped to do it at the time, but the Turbo Challenge games too over, then the Amiga died. If the right opportunity came along, it’s still possible now.
SHAUN: Although the Lotus games on the Amiga also have a great legacy, the Super Cars ones were individual fun games that we created from scratch, without an expensive licence attached.. an IP that people still fondly remember today. Maybe we should do an updated version!
Thanks to Andrew Morris and Shaun Southern for answering our questions!