THE MAKING OF PROFESSIONAL SKI SIMULATOR
Brothers Philip and Andrew Oliver are known to be the most prolific 8-bit videogame developers of all time. They have an entry to that effect in the Guinness World Records, since they designed 35 titles between 1984 and 1992, including a string of number ones.
Given how hard they must have been working (that’s one game every 2.7 months!), you’d perhaps think holidays were out of the question. But no. In the spring of 1987, the siblings were invited to join Codemasters’ founders Richard and David Darling on a skiing holiday in the quaint village of Kaprun in Austria – and they came back with an idea for, you guessed it, yet another game!
At this time, the Oliver twins, as they became known, were on top of the world. “Grand Prix Simulator was riding high in the charts and royalties were coming in from Super Robin Hood and Ghost Hunters,” Philip says. The brothers were also working on a new game that – unbeknown to them – would spawn a series and become their crowning glory. “We were in the process of writing Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure,” Philip affirms. Their careers were not going downhill any time soon.
Work on , however, delayed the development of with another potentially lucrative sport simulation game, this time based on skiing. “We’d seen classic maps of ski runs and they’d reminded us of which was one of our favourite games at the time,” Philip adds. “And that’s how things got rolling, although we didn’t start on the skiing game until June that year.”
