Martech

Bay Terrace, Pevensey Bay, BN24

DATELINE 1985, PEVENSEY BAY. I like to imagine a group of designers and programmers from the Electronic Pencil Company walking along the seafront arguing over the hierarchy of Zoids. Their forthcoming game Zoids: The Battle Begins required the player to recover the scattered pieces of the mighty Zoidzilla and your personal Zoid becomes more powerful as each piece is found. Obviously the player must start as a lowly and weak Spiderzoid before climbing the ranks to become (the mighty) Zoidzilla, but what comes in between? More importantly, what were Zoids and why are they in an East Sussex village?

August 2021

An advert for Martech Games, publisher of Zoids: The Battle Begins, sits in the Sinclair Supermarket section of THE FIRST SINCLAIR USER ANNUAL (1983 page 114). Nestled among classified adverts which are the primordial soup of the UK software industry. There's a football pools program; a horse racing program; another football pools program; oh and another horse racing program; and... what's this advert for Hunthurst Ltd's ZX81 game, "bored with aliens, galactic wars and flight simulation? At last! A truly amusing 16K moving graphics game for adults only." The mind boggles.

Martech's business address really demonstrates how these are the early days of the bedroom coder; 9 Dillingburgh Road, Eastbourne, which turns out to be an unremarkable semi-detached house. That aside, the small advert for Conflict and Galaxy Conflict stands out because it's a degree more sophisticated. There's an actual company name rather than a suggestion you just write to Frank George, sorry, Professor F.H. George, enquiring after his mother and his "well-known football pools forecasting program." There's also some copy on the Martech advert although the "tiring a little of the games on offer" blurb strikes an unfortunately similar tone to the advert for Hunthurst Ltd's mucky filth. Unlike any of the other adverts on the page there's an actual company logo which rather sweetly would last all the way up to 1988 and Martech's final games. 

Martech keeps ticking over after the release of Conflict and Galaxy Conflict. COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES issue 25 (November 1983 page 102) carries an advert for three games; Harrier Attack for the Oric-1 and Spectrum (not to be confused with Harrier Attack by Durell Software, presumably -UPDATE 8/8/22 No it is the Durell version. See here for a little more information); Blastermind for the 48K Spectrum; and Quest of Merravid on the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. 1984 brings Gisburne's Castle for the BBC Micro, and then suddenly the company bursts forth with a major change of direction. What are described as 'personality' games in an interview in CRASH issue 28 (May 1986 page 48). Companies like Ocean and Elite would bid for the biggest names from the arcades, or film and television. Martech took a more low key and uniquely British approach. They snapped up licences to release games based on Brian Jacks, Eddie Kid, and Samantha Fox. Names which would generate recognition and sales in mid-1980s Britain but mean next to nothing overseas or now, outside of the unique cultural bubble which allowed newspaper topless model Sam Fox to become a TV star and pop singer. Which brings us back to the Zoids.

Imagine a clockwork dinosaur, armed with laser weapons, that kids have to assemble. It's educational, probably. Split the Zoids into two groups, red and blue. Now make them fight. Zoids were a big deal in Britain in 1985, and they were about to get bigger with the March 1986 launch of the Marvel UK comic Spider-Man and Zoids. It was a smart move by Martech to acquire the licence and they did a better job with it than Ocean and Denton Designs did with the Zoids big rival Transformers. 

Martech needed to expand and move out of Dillingburgh Road. I'd already decided not to include a picture of 9 Dillingburgh Road. It's a residential address and the current owner deserves a degree of privacy; although it's on Streetview if you want to look, and thanks to the awesome data collating power of the internet I can also tell you its estimated value, last sale price, and date of last sale. Instead I decided to follow Martech founder David Martin who shifted the company along the coast from Eastbourne to Pevensey Bay, to the first floor of business partner and brother-in-law John Barry's legal practice which is still there today. Which is why I drove to Pevensey Bay on an overcast August Bank Holiday.

Pevensey Bay is a small coastal village between Hastings and Eastbourne, with a disappointing beach. Who, apart from me would want to go there on a Bank Holiday? The world and his wife apparently. The car park was very full, and I was a little flustered because I'd just performed a seven-point three-point turn in front of the Barry & Co building. Why? Well the A259 bends like a banana just after the junction with Sea Road (car park) and Bay Terrace (Barry & Co). On the ground Google Maps' instruction to "turn left" off the A259 means you should keep going straight into Sea Road, but I interpreted it as an instruction to turn into the road passing me on the left, which was Bay Terrace.

I walked the short distance back to Bay Terrace after correcting my mistake, driving round the busy car park, despairing about finding a parking place, driving round a bit more, then parking and paying. Bay Terrace is a narrow road, which is why I made such a meal of my earlier three-point turn. To get the Barry & Co office nicely in shot I had to pick my way between the concrete blocks the owners of the Beach Tavern have dumped across the entrance of their car park. Photographing a Solicitors' office felt weirdly illicit. I was suddenly glad it was a Bank Holiday and no one would come and demand an explanation, or call the Police and get me arrested under some obscure offence. "You are charged with wanton and grievous conspiracy to create a graven image in breach of the Lithograph and Kalidoscope Act, 1753" 

Mission accomplished. I scuttled back to the full car park and on the way out warned the wild-eyed driver who was regarding my space that I wasn't 100% certain it was a legitimate place to park; but, as I've mentioned, I did pay in full for my stay. I'm still mildly surprised a Pevensey Bay Solicitors is still based in the same office and trading under the same name 36 years later. It probably says something about the nature of the legal profession, or life in Pevensey Bay where, judging by the wire mesh around the chimney pots, soot-covered seagulls bursting in on your clients is a more pressing day-to-day concern. The hollyhocks out the front were growing well.

The hierarchy of Zoids established by the Electronic Pencil Company was; Spiderzoid < Scorpozoid < Trooperzoid < Tank < Great Gorgon < Supreme Zoid combat leader the Mighty Zoidzilla.