We spoke with Andrew Morris and Shaun Southern, the creators of Super Cars.
We love top down racers here at Spillhistorie.no, and one of our old favourites from the Amiga days is Super Cars II. This eminently playable game doesn’t just feature fun racing, but adds weapons and other dirty tricks to the mix.
This game from 1991 was developed by British duo Shaun Southern and Andrew Morris, better known as Magnetic Fields, and we were lucky enough to get them to answer a few questions for us. So without further ado, here’s our interview:
What was the biggest inspiration behind Super Cars? How did you come up with the concepts?
ANDREW: Probably the game Super Sprint, but there were top down car games before that, so it was an established genre, and Super Cars had much more going on.
SHAUN: For the racing sections, Super Sprint in the arcade. I used to both go on holiday to and then when I got a car, drive to Rhyl in North Wales to play the arcade games there and it was always fun to play multiplayer on that, chasing each other around the various tracks. The other parts, the characters, some were based on, or at least looked like people we knew. The car salesman was another programmer and I think one of the girls in the shop was a colleague’s sister. The daft questions – have you seen the highway code that you have to know when you do a driving test? Some of them are difficult, but some are very obvious !
In Super Cars 2, everything was bigger and better and the missiles and the like were like arcede shoot-em-up power-ups, and once you knoew the price for things you could make a killing buying and selling things too. All of these added depth to the game.
At what stage in development was the music for Super Cars 2 created? Was it early on or after most of the game was finished?
ANDREW: Music usually came along towards the end. I’d write a list of sections where I wanted something and the musician would do something appropriate.
SHAUN: I’m not sure, Andrew would know better. In the Lotus games you had a ‘car stereo’ so there was always a choice of music to race to. Music tended to be given to use near theh end of the project.
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