Home Videogame Design Artwork Links
 SAINT 'N' GREAVSIE'S FOOTBALL TRIVIA QUIZ GAME
Published
December 1989
Publisher
Grandslam
Developer
Core Design
My Role
Atari ST Programming, Graphics and Design
Commodore Amiga Programming, Graphics and Design
Commodore 64 Graphics and Design
Sinclair Spectrum Graphics and Design
Amstrad CPC464 Graphics and Design
PC Graphics and Design

Saint & Greavsie's 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 videogame 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. 

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… thanks guys...
 

As Greavsie would have said himself, it's a funny old game...

Additional Credits
Dave 'Ken' Pridmore Music, Amstrad and Spectrum Programming
Chris Shrigley Commodore 64 Programming
Greg Holmes PC Programming
Kevin Norburn Surviving typing in 2000 hardcore soccer trivia questions...
TEXT © SIMONPHIPPS 2005
www.simonphipps.com