Ubisoft Ltd

Spaces - Guildford Units A-J, Austen House, Station View, Guildford GU1

Look at that. A 2025 game, Assassin's Creed: Shadows. I never expected that to happen when I started this blog. The most up to date I've previously been was using the 1998 cover of Starship Titanic for The Digital Village. I had plenty of choice when I was looking for an Ubisoft cover. The company has been going since 1989. Yes, I know. I know Ubisoft is a French company and they've actually been running since 1986 but this blog is called Where Were They Now? not Où Étaient-Ils Maintenant? If you want coverage of those first three years and a picture of 14, Rue Erlanger, 75016, Paris then start your own blog or send a photo to me at whereweretheynow@gmail.com

Mizar Computing

104 Bradwell Road, Bradville, Milton Keynes, MK13 7DH

There's an Peanuts comic strip where Lucy very reluctantly reads a story to her brother Linus. "A man was born... he lived and he died! The end!" That's the story of Mizar Computing. I feel bad for being glib but that's pretty much all we know. Mizar were founded in 1984 by Robert Waller and Richard Woodward. The company released one game and closed. The end. They failed. As did so many companies. It's the circumstances of their failure I find interesting because the short story of Mizar and their game Out of the Shadows is also the story of CRASH magazine, one year old and newly confident, and thinking they could make a game a hit by sheer force of will. And learning they couldn't.

Future Publishing

Valeside, West Street, Somerton. Somerset TAJ I 7PS

But the biggest news of the moment was that ZZAP! was to be moved from its base in Yeovil to Newsfield's mega-stylish giga-tower block HQ in Ludlow. In the process of moving, a few things were lost such as Gary Penn's Tears For fears tapes, some biros and our erstwhile newshound Ed Banger through an unfortunate accident on the M4. Oh, and Chris Anderson and Bob Wade who decided they prefered Amstrads to Commodores.
(ZZAP!64 Christmas Special 1985 page 96)

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa's Software

8pm, 13 December, 1984. BBC2 aired The Battle For Santa's Software. The penultimate episode of documentary series Commercial Breaks. It is brilliant. A 30 minute time capsule of eighties excess, corporate culture, and success and failure. It would have been a real ripped-from-the-headlines watch at the time because the fallout from Imagine's liquidation continued into 1985. The production team must have been simultaneously delighted and stressed out when the company they were documenting imploded, spectacularly, and right in front of them. Copies of The Battle For Santa's Software. have been available on Youtube for years but on 13th June 2025 the BBC Archive channel uploaded a copy in pristine high definition. It looks lovely and understandably has grabbed a lot of attention; at the time of writing on 22nd June it's already racked up 64,000 views. Obviously I want to surf this zeitgeist but how? What can I say that hasn't already been said? How about if I just watch it and write about whatever comes to mind. Welcome to The Battle For Santa's Software the slightly annotated version.

The Hunt For Artic House

Artic House, Main Street, Brandesburton, Driffield, YO25 

Right from the start, Artic was a company forever being put on and then taken off my to-do list. The problem was simple. Artic only had two addresses; one was a house and the other couldn't be located in the real world. This is suboptimal for a blog dedicated to tracking down and photographing the offices of old software houses. I kept a draft page on standby in case I turned up anything relevant. It sat in the background of this blog for a couple of years until one Sunday around the middle of 2024 I was in a ruthless mood and culled it and a load of others on the grounds they would never be used. So long, The Sales Curve. See you in hell, Aardvark Software. No room for you, The Electronic Pencil Company. Goodbye, Artic. And that was it. Deleted. Done. Dusted. I'd never follow Artic up now. Then I got an email. Most of what follows is Neil's fault.

Artic

396 James Reckitt Avenue, Hull, HU8 0JA

Artic Computing is a classic success story. It was founded in 1981 with £20 of pocket money by an 18-year-old schoolboy called Richard Turner. Since then it has developed into a software company with an annual turnover of around £750,000, and plans for worldwide expansion.

The RamJam Corporation

 

Just off Carnaby Street near the Old Coffee House Pub

A software publisher who quickly turned into a development house. The RamJam Corporation only released one game under their own name, the quirky and surprisingly difficult to spell Valkyrie 17. It came out at the end of 1984 when the UK market was maturing and it was becoming increasingly tricky for smaller software houses to get games into shops. The Ramjam Corporation ended up signing a distribution deal with Palace Software (a subsidiary of Palace Pictures) which generated the kind of amusing PR photos that magazines love to use to generate copy.