Geoff Crammond

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geoff Crammond (or Geoffrey J. Crammond) is a successful game developer from Great Britain who specializes in racing simulations .

He has a degree in physics , which explains the high degree of reality of his simulations . The best known are certainly the games from the Grand Prix series , Stunt Car Racer and The Sentinel , a unique game that is often referred to as a mixture of chess and puzzle in 3D .

Career

One of his first simulation games was Aviator , a flight simulation of the Spitfire - the aircraft from the Second World War . The game was sold by Acornsoft for the then extremely successful BBC micro - computer . Although the game only supported monochrome graphics, it already had some similarities to today's modern flight simulations on significantly more powerful computers. It offered a unique simulation for the time; it was even possible that the wings broke off during too daring flight maneuvers. There were extra points for flying between city blocks and under bridges, especially the wrong way round.

While Geoff Crammond is best known for his Formula 1 simulations, his first car racing game, Revs ( RPM ), simulated the British Formula 3 Championship at Silverstone . The game was also released for the BBC Micro in 1984. Revs can definitely be called the first racing simulation ever; The surroundings were shown in 3D and the driving physics of the racing car were realistically simulated - including ignition and clutch . The included AI - opponents gave Revs a tremendous depth of play.

In 1986 the C64 version of the game appeared, which included another race track , Brands Hatch . Shortly thereafter, Revs Plus appeared for the BBC Micro, which contained a total of five racetracks with Donington Park , Oulton Park and Snetterton Circuit .

Also in 1986 appeared with The Sentinel ( The Guardian ), measured by the prevalence of computers in the home at the time, probably the most successful game by Geoff Crammond. It is a 3D puzzle game with 10,000 levels in which the player has to maneuver a robot through a 3D landscape with cliffs , trees and stones in order to defeat the menacing Sentinel. The game was highly praised by the critics and the invention was compared with that of the game of chess. The game was extremely successful and has been converted to various platforms . In 1998, The Sentinel Returns , a successor with music by filmmaker John Carpenter for PC and Playstation , was released, but it received little attention.

After that, Crammond concentrated again on racing simulations, with the Stunt Car Racer published in 1989 being a very special game of this genre. It comes with souped Rennbuggies a track built on stilts, like a roller coaster , with huge ascents and descents and steep turns to drive and jumps. There are no track limits, so the difficulty of the game was not to fall off the track. While all of this sounds like an action racing game, Stunt Car Racer had a great physics engine . For example, the damping was simulated realistically; too daring jumps resulted in damage to the car. Another special feature of the game was that it was the first car racing game with a multiplayer function . Two players could connect their computers via null modem cable and compete against each other.

Since the early 1990s, Geoff Crammond has exclusively developed Formula 1 simulations of his award-winning Grand Prix series. It was around this time that Amiga Power Magazine began to refer to Crammond as Sir Geoff , a running gag that spread so quickly that some still believe it to be called "Sir Geoff Crammond". In cooperation with the British development studio MicroProse , Formula One Grand Prix (F1 GP) was released in 1991 ( sold as World Circuit in the USA ) for the Amiga and a year later also for the PC. The successor Grand Prix 2 followed in 1996 and was the best Formula 1 simulation on the market at the time. After a long period of development, the third part of the series, Grand Prix 3 , was released in 2000 . In 2001 Crammond developed Grand Prix 3 2000 , an add-on for Grand Prix 3 . Grand Prix 4 was the last part of the Grand Prix series and was launched in 2002.

After the end of the Grand Prix series, there were rumors that Crammond was working on a remake of Stunt Car Racer . The rumors were later confirmed, along with an announcement that the game would be co-developed with Lost Toys. Lost Toys was closed in late 2003 due to financial problems. In 2005 it was finally announced that development of the game had ceased.

Games

Released

Development stopped

  • Grand Prix 4 (XBox)
  • Stunt Car Racer Pro (PC)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Development of Stunt Car Racer Pro discontinued , Speedmaniacs from February 22, 2005; Accessed October 27, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Crammond, Geoff
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British game developer
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century