Speed King

Speed King

Founded	1984-0?-??
Last Release	1986-??-??

Speed King is a single-player back-view motorcycle race against 19 opponents.

Mervyn J. Estcourt originally wrote it on the ZX Spectrum 48K, and his regular publisher Micromega released it as Full Throttle in mid-1984. The 10 courses exist for real and were supplied by weekly newspaper Motorcycle News.

During the first port, for the Commodore 64, music was added and a few courses were changed: France was renamed to Paul Ricard, and Belgium and Yugoslavia were replaced by Daytona and Brands Hatch. The opponents are down from 39, gear shifted from automatic to manual, and you can crash. Micromega had folded, so the game was taken to Digital Integration and for some reason also renamed to Speed King.

In 1986, Speed King was licensed or sold to Mastertronic, who slightly updated the C64 game, had it ported to remaining popular 8-bit platforms, and published it internationally.