Geoff Crammond

Geoff Crammond was made famous with F1GP and GP2 but he made several other games before that.

Geoff Crammond is the brilliant programmer who created the racing sims F1GP and GP2. However they were not the only games that he created.

The Englishman's first game was Super Invaders for the BBC which he created in 1981. At this time he was a systems engineer in the defence industry.

In 1984, while working on REVS, Geoff turned a professional programmer. REVS was released for the BBC micro and Commodore 64. Many people agree that REVS was the first proper racing sims. REVS was based on F3 racing at Silverstone.

For REVS Geoff worked with David Hunt (brother of James) who was currently racing in British Formula 3. The game was surprisingly accurate for its time and included practice, qualifying and race sessions. However there were no pits and all the sessions began on the circuit.  The Silverstone track was accurately created and an expansion pack was released (with Oulton Park, Snetterton, Donington Park and Brands Hatch tracks included).

After this, in 1986, Geoff wrote a classic strategy game - The Sentinel.

Next came Stunt Car Racer in 1989. This was for the Amiga/ST and the aim of the game was to race around an elevated circuit - jumping large gaps in the circuit. Apparently the art was getting the right speed at which to hit the ramp - too slow and you fell into the hole, too fast and you cracked the chassis of the stunt car. The race ended when your chassis was fully cracked. The game also had a serial option for two players so you could push the other player off the track. The game was ported for the PC, not by Geoff, but the port was said to be a very poor 4 colour EGA conversion.

Geoff's big break came in 1991 when he released F1GP on the Amiga and ST. The game was the most accurate racing sim every seen and had quite a high polygon count for its time. Due to the popularity of it on the Amiga the game was released on the PC and the success continued. F1GP was based on the 1991 F1 season and relies on the data from the Footwork F1 Team. More data was also taken from reverse-engineering one of Senna's Qualifying laps with an on-screen speed and engine data.

Geoff has not been a life-long Motor Sport lover, in fact he prefers golf, but he became interested when he started the REVS project. His interest in Formula 1 was strengthened when he watched Nigel Mansell's bid to win the drivers championship.

When he was asked to make a Formula 1 by Microprose (F1GP) he didn't turn them down.

Due to the amazing success of F1GP Geoff spent another 3 years working on the sequel - GP2.

When Grand Prix 2 was released, after thousand of rumours, everyone was amazed. Geoff had made another excellent game and made some massive improvements over F1GP. All the data from GP2 came from the Williams Formula 1 Team and code from F1GP.

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This article was written by John Slade.

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