It was all worked out on the walls and floor with bits of paper. 'Speedball was all done from Steve’s house where he’d have this big chart on the wall which was basically the pitch with all the players marked out on that. 'We didn’t get an office until after the Mirrorsoft deal,' says Matthews. It took a while for the Bitmaps to find a publisher but eventually Mirrorsoft took the risk and the fledgling developers never looked back. Five-a-side, two goals and a couple of bounce domes. A simplistic top-down affair on a pretty limited vertically scrolling pitch. Judged by what was to follow, it could be seen as a pretty basic affair. So it was, that in the later months of 1988 that the original Speedball was born. We wanted to invent a sports game that wasn’t so complicated.' Humble Beginnings It all went into the mix, then we skewed it towards the future and added a whole Rollerball thing, a physical violence element with cool characters and so on.'Īs Montgomery adds: 'We just thought there were too many bloody rules in the thing. 'So lots of things came into that basic idea: football, contact sports, the use of goals. 'Real tennis is played on a tennis court but you can hit the ball up and across all these sloping roofs all around you,' says Matthews about the project. It’s a real downer when you’re first starting to have someone promise a load of work only to have it taken away again.' 'Eric did a hell of a lot of research into it and we took it all back to them only for them to change their mind.

'Mastertronic asked us to do a game based on real tennis,' he remembers. Montgomery was one of the three founders of the legendary Bitmap Brothers, and the 'we' in question refers to himself, Steve Kelly and Eric Matthews. 'We all went down the pub one afternoon and designed Speedball on the back of a packet of Silk Cut,' reveals Mike Montgomery. To look at Speedball was to witness a game that had surely spent countless months being debated in development meetings, having had every nuance tweaked and tested until they were perfect. There wasn’t a single thing wrong with it, from pace to control to content. Back in the late’80s, the era known to industry veterans as The Golden Age of Gaming, few games could ever have claimed to be as exquisitely well balanced as the futuristic sports phenomenon that was Speedball.

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