When Richard Smith peeled the wrapping from a Commodore 64 on Christmas Day 1983, he didn’t realise it was an event that would change his life forever. It inspired a lifelong love of computing and game making that would see him spend time at Codemasters and Rebellion in senior programming roles, before co-founding his own indie studio, Red Chain Games.
His time at Codies working on the LMA Manager games saw him at the very centre of a burgeoning industry, when game making was simultaneously a creative wild west and rapidly growing industry. It was a time when football games were thriving – as told in Bitmap’s own A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games.
Richard certainly has some stories to tell, and he knows how to tell them – so Bitmap Books sat down with him to hear some of his best, starting with what happened after he graduated from the University of Bath’s Computer Software Technology course.
How did you find your way into games, and your role as a programmer at Codemasters?
When my four years at Bath were coming to an end, I decided to apply to eight of the biggest game developers in the UK: Bitmap Brothers, Bullfrog, Codemasters, Core Design, Gremlin, Psygnosis, Rare, and Team17. Of those, the one I didn’t really want was Codemasters because they were in Leamington and my parents lived in Coventry – I didn’t want to be too close to home.
I created a demo disk to show-off what I was capable of. It contained projects that I had written at university such as a Depth First Search for chess solutions, an animation I had created in Deluxe Paint 4 (and added sound to with my own program), and a Space Invaders clone written in C.
I remember posting seven of the eight packages but not really wanting to send the one to Codemasters, but my girlfriend – now wife – posted it.
I waited, and waited. After what felt like forever, I got a letter back from Liverpool. I was very excited. It was from Psygnosis. Easily one of my top choices. The letter was a very polite rejection. At least they took the time to reply. I didn’t hear from any of the others, except…
Some time later I received a letter from Codemasters inviting me to an interview. Given the lack of options, I accepted. I remember the interview going well and then someone said that the starting salary would be £15,500. They were going to pay me to make games. I signed the contract on the 8th June, 1998.
I was so overjoyed to have got my foot in the door, when they told me I would be a programmer on the ‘Football Management Team’, I was not about to argue. The team was known internally as ‘Top Lab’. Our Project Leader, Producer, and Studio Head was Simon Prytherch, and our Lead Programmer was John Atkinson, who had written Premier Manager 1, 2, and 3 on the Amiga.
What made LMA manager distinct or special, at a fairly competitive time for football management games?
I didn’t really follow football games, particularly not football management games – although I did like Kick Off 2 on the Amiga. However, it was very clear that we were aiming to be the first football management game on consoles. We succeeded. Championship Manager didn’t appear until 2002 on the Xbox, by which time LMA was on its third outing.
What made LMA special though was the team we had working on it. Not only did we have the pedigree of John as our lead programmer, but we had some of the best QA people you could hope for. You have to remember; back then you couldn’t patch a game – whatever was on the disc was it. One such person was the incredible Neil Corbett. Not only was he great at finding bugs but he was able to explain to the programmer exactly what he was doing – and had been doing – prior to the problem. I was disappointed when he left to go and work up North. However, imagine my absolute delight when, several years later, during the intro of a little game, whose name should I spot?
What did you learn as a programmer in those early years of your career – in terms of the practise, craft, and creativity of coding?
Before I started at Codemasters, I assumed that there must be ‘tricks of the trade’ that only the professionals know. I was keen to get on the inside and learn the dark arts. I was stunned to learn that there is no such thing. You solve the problem; you make it run ‘fast enough’, and then you move on.
However, I learned so much from John. I truly believe I would not be as good as I am were he not my mentor. We had regular code reviews and he would always explain why doing things a particular way was better. For example: anyone who has written code in C will be familiar with this:
if( x == 3 ) { /* Do something */ }
John explained to me why I should write that code like this:
if( 3 == x ) { /* Do something */ }
Because if you accidentally put = (the assignment operator) instead of == (the comparison), the first way still compiles without error, but the second way will fail and you will immediately be told you made a mistake.
You mentioned not being a wild fan of football games when you started. How did you find the experience of devoting so much of your time and talent to a sport that wasn’t really a passion for you?
I like to think that, due to my lack of interest in football, I could be far more objective than some of the team. For example, John Atkinson wrote the AI for matches that you didn’t watch in 3D. Now, I don’t want to suggest that he programmed any kind of bias into the game; but Carlisle always seemed to have a slightly better chance of winning than most. I’m sure that John being a Carlisle supporter is purely coincidence.
On LMA 2 I worked with the brilliant Dr Ian Griffith on the 3D match artificial intelligence. He taught me so much about AI and the importance of perceived intelligence. I had to learn the rules of football – like the offside rule – and implement them. Coming at it without any prior knowledge made it far more scientific for me.
On the other hand, I remember Chris Coates and Sean Kennedy – they were the two people who were responsible for putting all of the team data, player data, manager data, etcetera into the game. They were the proper, hardcore, football fanatics. They were keeping the data up-to-date right up until the very last second. They’re the ones who taught me that most goals are scored in the first and last five minutes of a half.
This was a time when making a game was quite a wild ride of thinking on your feet and doing what was needed to get the game done. Do you have any wild stories from that time?
I really hope that Stu will not mind me sharing this story. There must be a statute of limitations on this sort of thing right?
Stuart Radforth was a fellow programmer on the team who had joined around the same time as me. We were very close to the deadline for submitting the ‘gold disc’ to Sony for LMA 1. It was my responsibility to burn the disc and hand it to our producer. After I burned the disc, a very worried Stu came to me and asked if there was any way I could grab the latest version and burn a new disc. When I asked the reason, he explained that he had left in a message which he had added in a fit of rage, and it contained some language that Sony would probably not appreciate. Suffice to say, the first disc that I burned met with an accident and appeared to get scratched, forcing me to burn a new one.
In 1999, Simon was going to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Jose. He was going to take our lead programmer with him, but John couldn’t make it. I was next in line and he offered it to me. An all expenses paid trip to America? And all I had to do was attend some conferences, workshops, and talks that Simon wanted me to take notes on? Of course, I said yes.
I was lucky enough to be sent to the unveiling of the SEGA Dreamcast behind closed doors – actually in a hotel next door to the convention center. I even got a free laser pen! I thought it was fascinating that each Dreamcast disc had a copy of Windows CE on it!
One of the workshops that Simon sent me to was on ‘The Future of Controllers’. During a round table, one person suggested a separate controller in each hand. I chose to question that idea – at which point there were sharp intakes of breath, followed by deathly silence for what felt like an eternity. I just wondered what would you press against? I stayed quiet for the rest of it. As people were leaving, I turned to someone and asked ‘what just happened?”. He said to me: ‘don’t you know who that is?’. ‘No’, I replied. ‘That’s Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris’. ‘Oh,’ I replied.
As it turns out, it was a good idea.
How did LMA connect you and the team with the real world of professional football? Any interactions with famous players or managers? And how did they take to a bunch of game makers?
Alan Hansen recorded the commentary for the game. One day, when we were working on LMA 2, he visited the offices. He visited every single team member, spoke to them, and signed copies of LMA 1. He was wonderful. However, on this day, my esteemed colleague Andy Bastable decided he would wear a very particular football shirt. He was wearing a shirt from the Euro ‘96 match between England and Scotland. Mr Hansen was not impressed. I seem to remember him saying something along the lines of: ‘are you trying to be funny?’ before moving to the next programmer’s desk.
I still have my signed copy of LMA 1.
What kind of studio is Red Chain, and what is the intent or vision in terms of the games you make there?
Red Chain was founded by me and Dean Baker – a fellow ‘Codemaster’. ‘Red Chain’ is an anagram of ‘Rich’ and ‘Dean’. Dean, who was the designer of Colin McRae Rally 2 and WRC World Rally Championship, came up with the idea to make a golf game. I can tell you that I feel the same way about golf as I do about football. However, we ended up signing a five year exclusive deal with Foresight Sports and provided them with their FSX software. When that contract came to an end, Dean decided to step away and I took over the company.
Until now, I have only ever worked on projects designed by someone else. After doing this professionally for 27 years, I have the luxury of creating anything I choose.
I was working on a VR project, adding the ability to sit in a vehicle. After adding a car I decided to add a plane. I had a very detailed model of an F18 that I had purchased on cgTrader. Seeing that model in VR immediately got me thinking about the reason I wanted an Amiga. I wondered: ‘why has no one made a game like F/A-18 Interceptor?’. Don’t get me wrong – you’ve got incredible flight sims out there: DCS where you practically have to read a manual before you can start the engines, and Ace Combat where the flight model is very simplified, but there was nothing ‘in the middle’.
So I started to write a game design document. The first one I had written from scratch:
For the past three years, I have been working on Supersonic Fight. I have read countless books on aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, the physics of flight, game design, narrative structure, pilot autobiographies, air combat manoeuvres, and other things.
I am trying to create the game that 13-year-old me had in my head when playing on the Amiga
As a solo dev, it’s simultaneously very exciting and incredibly scary. As a control freak, it’s wonderful. I already have the next three games I want to make in my head. I just need to bring them into existence.
Thank you so much to Richard for giving us his time, and sharing those stories from his time making games. Do check out Red Chain Games, and if his stories have given you a taste for the incredible stories behind iconic football games – or soccer games, for our American readers – A Tale of Two Halves: The History Of Football Video Games might be the book for you. It’s a rich visual history of football games, packed with vibrant art and screens, fascinating developer interviews, and expert writing.
