A North Yorkshire spa town seems an unlikely place for one of the UK's best known video game companies to establish a satellite outpost but that's exactly what the Bitmap Brothers did two years ago

IT'S rather easy to miss the Northernmost outpost of the Bitmap Brothers empire. Hidden away on the third floor of a typically Harrogate sandstone office building, only a small chrome plaque next to the front door gives the game away that exciting things are happening inside.

Set up by managing director Mike Montgomery two years ago, the tight-knit team that constitutes Bitmap Brothers (North) has been beavering away diligently ever since on one of the most eagerly awaited PlayStation games for years.

Speedball 2100 went on sale at the beginning of this month and the company is now waiting to see if the expectation among veteran games players translates into hard cash.

Speedball 2100 is a 32-bit up-date of Speedball 2, a legendary title that graced the Amiga and Sega Mega-Drive nearly a decade ago. Set a hundred years in the future, it's a sports game in the mould of Rollerball, a manic cross between football (both British and America), hockey and the ultimate fighting championship.

Two teams of nine compete in an enclosed arena with a goal at each end. There's no ref because violence is positively encouraged (duffing up a member of the opposition so badly that they have to be taken off is rewarded with ten points). The winner is the team with the most points.

A visit to the Bitmap's studio is an eye-opener. While big fish like Electronic Arts have embraced corporate culture with swish new offices (costing upwards of £20m in EA's case), Bitmap's operation is leaner and meaner.

While living in North Yorkshire means there's no tediously long journey to work each morning, the office itself is a far cry from the glass and steel of EA's new "campus". The walls are painted almost black, there are no windows and although there is some subtle lighting, most of it comes from the screens of the permanently switched-on computers.

Of course, such a focused environment means there are no distractions.

Pete Tattersall, studio manager and the ace coder responsible for persuading Montgomery to set up shop in North Yorkshire ("Not everyone wants to live in London"), is typical of the team.

Speedball 2100 may have been his job for the past couple of years and he probably knows every line of code inside out, but he's still itching to pick up a joypad to show off.

"We're not saying Speedball 2100 is Speedball III, it's more of an up-date of a popular classic for PlayStation owners," he says.

That's why the game looks so familiar. Speedball 2 really pushed the Amiga hardware. Speedball 2100 doesn't represent a similar graphical achievement on the ageing Sony machine but it does look polished and very smooth.

It's now in 3-D (albeit from the familiar top down perspective that made the original game so good) and the view can be zoomed closer or further away depending on a player's preference for carnage.

Another future sports game - Dead Ball Zone - attempted to update Speedball for the PlayStation generation a couple of years ago using FIFA-esque 3-D figures. It didn't work and Tattersall, for one, is grateful.

"To be honest, if they hadn't shown that it couldn't be done we'd have probably gone down the same route," he confesses. "That's why we haven't strayed too far from the original formula."

They went to great lengths to make sure Speedball 2100 plays the same, even to the extent of fiddling with the ball physics to give the same "feel".

Balls thrown diagonally in a 2-D game like Speedball II move faster than they would if modelled in real life. Early play tests revealed a desire amongst users for this feature to be added to the game, so it was duly reinstated even though the result isn't true to life.

It's hard work too. Anyone who thinks games designers spend all day playing is way off base. Montgomery says he didn't have a day off in three months when they were finishing Z a few years ago.

Now Speedball 2100 is on the shelves the four man team is already looking to new challenges. Tattersall has already finished a report on the merits of Speedball moving to the PS2, a Dreamcast version may not be out of the question and a couple of his coders are helping their compatriots in London finish Z2, another eagerly awaited Bitmap sequel.

Having tackled such an awesome first project, anything Montgomery cares to throw the way of his North Yorkshire studio in future will be in safe hands.