PUBLISHED
December 1989
PUBLISHER
Gremlin Graphics
DEVELOPER
Me!
MY ROLE
Programming, Graphics and Design (Atari ST, Commodore Amiga)
Graphics and Design (Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, Amstrad CPC464, PC)
Saint & Greavsie was a short ‘filler’ project (10 weeks from start to finish). It was the conversion of a soccer trivia board game that featured soccer pundits Jimmy ‘Greavsie’ Greaves and Ian ‘Saint’ St. John who, in the late 80s graced the UK’s television screens every Saturday lunchtime with their own unique brand of soccer punditry.
The board game simply consisted of a square board around which players moved answering soccer trivia questions until each had answered twenty-two questions. It was our task to ‘revitalise’ the game for home computers.
There is little more to say about this landmark in video game entertainment, except that the 2000 soccer trivia questions were painfully typed in by hand by Kevin Norburn, the then Operations Director of Core. These were then compressed using Dave Pridmore’s ingenious 5-bit ‘Quibble’ format that squished the masses of text into microscopic units for the 8-bit formats – this, at a time when every single byte counted (especially on the Spectrum, which I recall had to have the questions split up into a number of packs that had to be loaded separately from tape cassette since the 2000 questions couldn’t all fit into memory at the same time!)
All the thrills of TV football trivia brought to life on your computer…
My most enduring memory of this project was the question ‘Who are the Shrimpers?’ (question number 1 of 2000) that dogged my screen for months and was perpetuated for many years thereafter by the copy of the board game that the boys at Core gave me for a wedding present (I was married the day after we finished the final build of Saint & Greavsie’s)… thanks, guys.
As Greavsie would have said himself, it’s a funny old game…
FURTHER INFORMATION
More information on this gaming landmark can be found on Moby Games.