In April 1908, Newcastle upon Tyne man Gladstone Adams was driving his Darracq-Charron motorcar back from the FA Cup final between Newcastle United and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Newcastle had lost and, to make matters worse, Adams’ journey home was being delayed by snow. That is, it kept covering his windscreen and he had to repeatedly stop and get out of the car to clear it.Some kind of innovation was needed.
There had to be something that would help people see where they were going.As it turned out, there was; a few years later Adams invented his own windscreen wiper.
He patented the design and became one of several people from around the beginning of the 1900s credited with conceiving of similar devices, although his version of the windscreen wiper never made it into production.Nearly a century down the track, Newcastle upon Tyne developer Reflections had found itself riding high on a purple patch of PlayStation success, propelled by the popular Destruction Derby series it had developed for legendary British publisher Psygnosis.
3D driving games had quickly become Reflections’ specialty, but the team knew you couldn’t tread water in a genre long famous for being on the cutting edge of video game technology.