June '88 March '89
"This is the first simultaneous four player Amstrad game! Using a joystick and the keyboard you can have twice the excitement as four people race against each other. Three totally new race meets - Quarry Racing, Dirt Biking, and Desert Riding - each with five exciting circuits. Fifteen incredible courses make this the biggest, best BMX game yet!"
What the press said
Codemasters launched in September ’86 with David Darling’s Red Max game and his brother Richard’s BMX Simulator both for C64. BMX Simulator was a smash hit and as Codemasters prepared to launch the Plus range (£4.99 double cassette games) Richard, and friend James Wilson, updated BMX to Professional BMX Simulator as one of the launch games.
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We took the code and line by line on paper converted every instruction from 6502 to Z80 assembler and typed it all back in. It took about a week, and all the time we were thinking, is this going to work? Where graphics routines were used we swapped in Panda Sprites and where inputs were required we swapped in routines from previous Amstrad and Spectrum games. The music and code were provided by the very talented David Whittaker. Eventually, we were able to hit the compile and see the errors spew out.
A few days of fixing all the errors and managed to get it all working. It took about 2 weeks in all to complete both Spectrum and Amstrad versions and you’ll find the game is as close a conversion as is possible.
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A year later the game was tweaked and recompiled for a single cassette release at £2.99 called BMX Simulator 2.
Courses from the Spectrum Version
On returning from CES in Las Vegas in the first week of January ‘90, we were excited to start working on NES games. Codemasters supplied us with a development kit and we immediately got onto writing BMX Simulator as we knew this would be fairly quick to do and was one they wanted. Whilst it was a great first game to develop for the NES, it took several years before it was eventually published as part of the Quattro Sports cartridge.
