Pro BMX Simulator
Competitive BMX racing across obstacle-filled tracks, developed for Codemasters as a successor to its earlier BMX games.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1988
- Platforms
- Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga
- Genres
- Sports, Racing
- Developer
- Richard Darling and James Wilson; The Oliver Twins (CPC/Spectrum conversions)
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: Richard Darling and James Wilson; The Oliver Twins (CPC/Spectrum conversions). Publication: Codemasters.
The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.
Making the game
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.
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.
A year later the game was tweaked and recompiled for a single cassette release at £2.99 called BMX Simulator 2.
Original documents
Archived Pro BMX Simulator document (PDF)