 Looking Glass Technologies began developing British Open Championship Golf in 1995 . The project was led by Rex Bradford , designer of the influential 1986 golf title Mean 18 . He had also worked on earlier Looking Glass games , such as Terra Nova : Strike Force Centauri . Bradford decided to revisit the golf genre because he felt that other games did not recreate the structure or capture the atmosphere of golf tournaments ; he complained that golf titles took place on " The Lonely Planet of Golf " . The team sought to fill this perceived void by more accurately simulating the tournament experience , with a particular focus on crowds , commentary , atmosphere and the caddie . Bradford believed that these elements recreated " the television @-@ style ambiance of being in that moment . " Graphically , a focus was placed on buildings and animated objects , in order to make up for the less spectacular nature of links courses . The game 's environments were generated with the same <unk> techniques used to create the landscapes in the company 's earlier Flight Unlimited . The team 's reproduction of the Old Course at St. Andrews was the first ever authorized for a video game . 
