THE MAKING OF LOCO
It’s the summer of 1984 and Tony Crowther and his family are promenading along Blackpool seafront, when the 19-year-old Tony decides to turn it into something of a busman’s holiday. Having coded Bug Blaster and
Bat Attack the previous year, clones of Centipede and Galaxian respectively, he slips into an arcade to see if there are any coin-op titles which might inspire him. He stumbles upon a train-themed game he’s not seen before and begins to watch it intently. Not play it, you understand. Just watch.
“I wasn’t keen on spending money on them,” laughs Tony, “plus I wasn’t very good, so I’d watch other people play. I watched for about ten minutes or so before my mum said, ‘Come on, we’re going,’ and then went home to Sheffield and did my version! I thought I knew everything about the game – even the music, which I was sure was Jean-Michel Jarre.”
Tony is reminiscing about that fortuitous summer holiday sat in the canteen of Sumo Digital, the Sheffield-based developer where he has worked since 2011. The game that caught
