 My life divides neatly into two halves. During the week I make interactive media; computer games, world wide web sites, CD-ROMs and so on. At the weekend, I ride my motorcycle. I also ride the bike to and from work, which helps to keep me sane, but that apart, the two spheres of my life very rarely overlap. Keeping ‘Business’ and ‘Pleasure’ distinctly separate is probably a Good Thing for people working on Shoot-Em-Up games. The team from Sony in Japan who produced ‘Gran Turismo’ (a sportscar racing simulator for the Playstation) wrote off three of their own cars while working on the game, which is also taking things a bit far. But in general, the developers of a game will have a keen interest in their chosen genre. The Gran Turismo team loved fast sports cars. Rally game designers are mad keen on rallying. Presumably, the people making flight-sims are plane nuts. But where are all the bike games? I can only think of two arcade games and two console games that are worth considering. Compare this with the glut of car racing, helicopter flying and aeroplane duelling simulations that line the shelves of every games shop. When it comes down to thrills per mile, motorcycles win every time in the real world; when was the last time a car-driving colleague looked forward to the evening journey home? So why aren’t bike-sims outselling Mario and Lara Croft in the pre-Christmas games rush? Well, I think there are three reasons. Firstly, it’s much easier to simulate the car driving experience. All the action is viewed through a window in front of you, and the controls are much simpler; turn the wheel left - the car goes left, turn it right - the car goes right. Console visuals are nearing the ‘on car’ camera quality of broadcast TV, and a screaming engine soundtrack does wonders to reinforce the sensation of speed. On my bike I’m outside taking part in the environment rather than watching it through a sheet of glass, and I have the pull of the wind to remind me how fast I’m going. No one has ever managed to completely explain to me the dynamics of steering a motorcycle (Body lean? Counter steering? Rolling radii changes? The more you find out, the more complex it becomes) let alone translate them to a couple of buttons on a joypad. Secondly, there’s more adrenaline involved in negotiating a diesel smeared roundabout on an XT350 than in pretending to be Jaques Villeneuve avoiding Schumacher’s advances on a Spanish race track. Ever wondered why motorway service stations have driving games for your entertainment, but the pub on the Cat and Fiddle pass doesn’t? Knowing that tarmac bites concentrates your thoughts in a way that trying to beat someone else’s high-score never can. And the third reason? The people who should be designing Kocinski versus Fogarty games are sat at their desks dreaming of sunny summer evenings, the kiss of knee-slider on tarmac, and the taste of merguez and frite at Spa-Francorchamps. There are a lot more of us working to buy motorcycles than there are buying motorcycles in order to work. To set myself up with the latest model of PC, a 3D accelerator card, joystick, speakers and two or three of this season’s top games, I’d be looking at spending well over two thousand pounds. For the same money I could pick up a GPZ900 or an RGV250 (both modern classics), especially at this time of year. If I had a hundred and fifty pounds to spend on the latest games console, I’d rather blow it on a session at a race school. Even if I could only scrape together the seventy quid that Mario 64 would cost me, it’d either go on a new front tyre or a track day next spring. In a month’s time there’ll be black ice and freezing fog outside, and that’s when I’ll dust off the Playstation, untangle the controllers and shell out for a copy of Formula1 ’97. Right now it’s a crisp autumn morning, possibly one of the last of this year, so I’m going out on my bike. Martin Gelder ( redleg@online.rednet.co.uk) has been supporting his motorcycle habit for the last fifteen years by working in interactive media, most recently for Real World Multimedia and Psygnosis. He once spent four days of TT week playing Super-Hang-On after blowing his bike up within 40 minutes of arriving on the Isle of Man. Back to the index... |
© 1998 Martin Gelder