Firebird / Telecomsoft

 Wellington House, Upper St. Martin's Lane, London, WC2H

Firebird, or Telecomsoft to give them their more formal name, first appeared in late-1984 with impressive, and presumably expensive, colour double-page adverts in the major computer magazines. Here's an example from COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES issue 38 (December 1984 page 82). The lavish advertising campaign was one way of establishing the cheaper Firebird Silver range as different from its major rival Mastertronic, who didn't advertise at all. The other difference was the price. Firebird Silver games cost £2.50. Mastertronic games cost £1.99. The extra 51p was significant in 1984. There was also a Gold range which sold games at full price. A massive £5.95 for the first two titles Demons of Topaz for the Commodore 64, and Buggy Blast for the Spectrum. The Gold and Silver labels were joined in 1985 by the Rainbird label and with some minor tweaking and rebranding all three survived until Telecomsoft was brought by MicroProse.

August 2021

YOUR SPECTRUM
July 1984 page 89

Firebird were nearly called Firefly Software. There's an advert in the July 1984 issue of YOUR SPECTRUM touting for "writers of games and educational programs to help us launch a new and exciting range of software." At some point between July and November 1984, when the range launched, the Firebird name prevailed. 

Firebird do not immediately spring to mind as a classic software house, although they did release some cracking games; notably their conversions of Elite for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad. So why use them to start this blog? Well the answer as always is laziness. There were two reasons why it looked like the company would make an for an easy start. One, they stayed at the same address during their existence from 1984-89 and thus leading on to two, this would be a single simple trip into central London. Both of these assumptions were wrong.

Upper St. Martin's Lane is tucked away between Charing Cross Road and the Covent Garden area. Lot's of theatres lots of posh restaurants, and what's this? Stringfellows. I was just walking past mum, honest. The street is short and Wellington House is clearly marked on Google Maps. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters I arrived with only 20% charge on my phone. That's on me. Problem two, Wellington House as marked on Google Maps was in the wrong place and, more inconveniently, didn't actually seem to exist in the material world. The building Google Maps calls Wellington House (down to 18% charge...) has a sign over the door that reads Wellington Court but according to Google Maps (15% charge) Wellington Court should be... over there... right on the corner between Shelton Street and Upper St. Martin's Lane. 

Telecomsoft, as you might guess from the name, began as part of the British Telecom empire. I'd previously found a website listing BT Exchange addresses which suggested Wellington House could be found at numbers 6-9 Upper St. Martin's Lane but Upper St. Martin's Lane changes into Shelton Street right after number 10. Trying to be methodical (12% charge) I retraced my steps to the junction of Upper St. Martin's Lane and Long Acre. and started searching for building numbers which is when I accidentally looked inside Stringfellows. Fortunately (mum) the building was closed so I didn't see any of the beautiful women boasted of on their website. Stringfellows occupies numbers 16-19. Number 14 is a door into an anonymous new build. At 12 there's an Indian restaurant called Dishoom, and next door is a wine bar called 28-50; which is a lousy name to be confronted with when trying to track down building numbers. (10%).

Orion House, a suspiciously new-ish tower block, lurks on the other side of the road. Could that be number 6-9? Had Wellington House been demolished and built upon? (9%). At this point I sort of gave up. I took half-a-dozen random snaps of anything which might conceivably be Wellington House or the site where Wellington House used to exist, crossed my fingers, and hurried on to my next destination. (8%).

The Great Wellington House Mystery was solved later, in the most mundane way possible using Streetview's handy archive. Head virtually to Upper St Martin's Lane, point the camera at bar 28-50, and set the date to July 2008. The first Streetview survey took place during construction work on the space which will become St Martin's Courtyard and just to the right of the red phone box is the old entrance to Wellington House. It's somehow folded into 28-50 as part of the refurbishment. I have no idea how people get into Wellington House now. What am I, the doorman? Fortunately one of my hurried snaps of the street included a nice shot of Wellington House as it exists today.

Problem two became apparent while browsing the World of Spectrum entry for Firebird. An advert for Black Lamp in YOUR SINCLAIR issue 25 (March 1988 page 69) shows a different address. The company has made a short hop across central London to New Oxford Street. 

This was going to need a second trip into London.

I should have started with Martech.  

October 2021

First Floor, 64-76 New Oxford Street, WC1A

Pro-tip for London visitors. Don't confuse New Oxford Street with Oxford Street. They are two different roads. New Oxford Street is the small stub which runs between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn. Next week, how to avoid large fares by not taking a taxi from Leeds Station to Leeds Castle. 

64-76 New Oxford Street is just along the road from where Forbidden Planet used to be. I got there shortly before the London Fire Brigade, who arrived with blue lights flashing while I hung around  waiting for the traffic lights to change, so I could get a picture reasonably free of cars and pedestrians crossing the road. The fire engine is down in the bottom right of the picture. I mention this partly to prove I'm actually going to these places and partly in case this breathless reportage of life in the naked city qualifies me for a Pulitzer.

The Google Streetview archive shows the building regenerated in May 2014. You can switch between it's current form (bland modern glass box) and it's previous incarnation (bland eighties brown brick box), which is how it probably looked when Firebird moved to the first floor.

Why did they move? My best guess, British Telecom wanted to put some distance between themselves and their label to make a sale easier. No one would want to buy Firebird if it was still located in (what seems to be) British Telecom office space in Wellington House. It's far simpler to buy a company which comes as a package with its own properly leased premises. Indeed this article from THE GAMES MACHINE issue 18 (January 1989 page 7) quotes Tom Watson of Mirrorsoft and notes there were constant rumours of sales when he "worked there one-and-a-half years ago." That would be around mid-1986 which is when the new address first shows up in CRASH issue 31 (August 1986 page 69), on an advert for Beyond's new Mike Singleton game Dark Sceptre (Beyond having become part of the Telecomsoft empire in late 1985, come on, keep up!) 

Quite why it took two years for BT to put the company up for sale is anyone's guess. THE GAMES MACHINE report mentions a failed management buy-out and the Tom Watson quote mentioned earlier goes on, "we were being closed down every day, we were being brought every day... only 1% [of the rumours] were true." When Telecomsoft was finally sold, it was to rival software house MicroProse in 1989. The Firebird and Silverbird labels were run down, but MicroProse continued to release games on the Rainbird label until 1991.