THE MAKING OF BMX Simulator

Having banged out budget games for Mastertronic for a few years, Richard and David Darling pulled on the brakes. They took a few months out and looked to ride on their development success by creating the publisher Codemasters in 1986. They also quickly figured that the best way to get things moving again would be to journey back to their first successful game.

In 1984, the brothers had developed BMX Racers on the Commodore 64 – a game that was, in many respects, the starting point for endless runners. It had players cycling through a series of short, top-down courses avoiding obstacles until they eventually crashed but, while simple, it bunny-hopped on the huge craze for BMX bikes and quickly became Mastertronic’s biggest-selling original game.

“BMX was really popular – all the kids had BMX bikes, they’d go to the BMX parks and they’d race and do jumps and tricks,” says David, part-explaining why the game sold 345,423 copies. “We were quite interested in BMX generally and we knew the theme worked from being at Mastertronic. In fact, we’d learned