For years the mystery of the cryptic "GCC" lettering on the backs of the trucks in the home computer conversion of the 80's classic arcade game "Out Run", has baffled computer historians. Today I can finally reveal the truth. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have clearance. This is one secret that's about to be de-classified. Forget Nixon, forget the Bay of Pigs. This is the real deal. Ready? OK.
Here's the scoop....."GCC" was a tribute by the programmer of Out Run (Commodore Amiga and Atari ST versions, circa 1988) to the Glasgow Computer Centre, the company that gave me my first break in the IT business. At it's height, GCC only employed about 6 people and traded for about 3-4 years from the mid eighties. So how come a tiny minnow of a company was able to pioneer in game advertising in one of the biggest and most successful video game titles of all time?
Quite simple really, the programmer (I can only remember his first name, "Ian" - drove a red Mitsubishi Starion - "Starion" was actually the cheat code in the game) who was tasked with converting the arcade code to lowly 16 bit 80's technology was Scottish, lived not far outside Glasgow and regarded us guys at GCC as his homies and was a regular customer. In the eighties first generation computer stores were very different to their polished, employee of the month staffed equivalents of today. Our customers were hackers, enthusiasts and the kinds of people who cared enough to endure all that early technology had to throw at us. I was one of those people. When I got my job at GCC it was a real honour. I got to stand behind the counter. I was the man. GCC was a cool place, it was more of a club than a computer store. People used to just turn up on their day's off and spend the day hanging out at the store. If you've seen the movie or read the book High Fidelity then GCC was a carbon copy of Championship Vinyl for computer geeks. We were computer snobs, but in a cool way. If you wanted to make the effort to learn stuff then you were accepted, play it dumb and ignorant and you were shunned.
I worked at GCC for 10 months from summer 1988 until spring 1989. Two of the people I worked with there, John Campbell who ran the technical side of the business and David Wright who worked with me behind the counter were both best men at our wedding two years ago. That's how strong the bonds are that we made back then.
Why am I telling you this? Well I Googled for "Glasgow Computer Centre" the other night and it returned one hit. GCC was respected in the UK for it's expertise in the area of video graphics and produced several ground breaking demonstrations which were distributed all over the place as examples our skills with video technology. The only hit that Google returned pointed to one of those demos, a short 4 second clip from Space Ace, a Laserdisc arcade game from the eighties. I reckon that the memory of GCC deserves a better entry in Google than a single entry on a site full of hacker demos. So this is it. I found a few other remnants of GCC and got them running in an emulator to grab these screenshots.
So, let the record show that GCC existed and I'm pleased to have finally put to rest the mystery of the "Out Run" truck advertising.....
So, if you've just dug this post up by searching for GCC in Google, welcome. Drop me an e-mail, John Campbell's address is in the sidebar in the section marked Nice Words.