Denton Designs

30 Rodney Street, Liverpool, L1

When Imagine software went bang in 1984 it's ex-employees scattered across Liverpool; some went to Odin, some to Software Projects, and six went off and set up Denton Designs, their own development house. Steve Cain, Ally Noble, John Gibson, Karen Davies, Graham Everitt, and Ian Weatherburn were the original six. Karen Davies later told CRASH: 'We just sat down and rang round the major software companies offering our services... We were surprised at the reaction we got from companies -it was invariably favourable. Business wise people were naturally a bit wary at first, because of the Imagine reputation, but as programmers and artists we had a good grounding and reputation, and people had heard of us through the Imagine name." (June 1985 page 30)

Imagine was wound up on 9th July and Denton Designs was registered with Companies House on 27th July, just over two weeks later. Their first game released was Gift from the Gods, via Ocean, but their first assignment was probably Shadowfire, for Beyond, which is mentioned in the press under the working title Shadow Squad; POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (27 September- 3 October 1984 page 5). The game was described as a graphic adventure and would be ready in the new year: "The player controls six screen characters, each with individual weaknesses and strengths, sent to a 'Deathstar-type place on a diplomatic mission, The adventure uses English text commands, with different graphics for each screen. The player must co-ordinate all six characters to complete the mission." The game also proved to be an early fault line as the team told SINCLAIR USER: "Denton Designs was split six ways between the original team, with everybody having an equal share. But Ian Weatherburn was unhappy. 'For Ian, Imagine was heaven on earth,' says Steve. 'He wanted Denton to be just like Imagine. When we signed the contract to do Shadowfire, Ian said we had to do it his way or he would leave'. So we sacked him. Actually, he's now working for Ocean." (July 1985 page 58) Ian Weatherburn's departure is ironic because Shadowfire has it's roots in an idea he proposed at Imagine for an icon-driven adventure. The idea seems mundane now but it was revolutionary in 1985 on 8-bit home computers. The change from a text driven game, as described in the PCW article, to one controlled by icons made the game and was a major selling point: "We've designed an adventure and destroyed the text," was the strapline on adverts. Icon controls were the must-have feature in 1985 and Shadowfire and The Fourth Protocol, by The Electronic Pencil Company, were in a race to be first. Shadowfire won, but was beaten into the shops by Ski Star 2000, the last game from Richard Shepherd Software. The ironic thing was, mice didn't really exist at the time, so these icon driven games were still controlled from the keyboard or joystick.

"You now have a thirsty cat"

Gift from the Gods also had it's roots in Imagine. John Gibson worked on Bandersnatch one of the fabled Megagames, and the game engine he designed made its way into Gift from the Gods "which was very much more of a Bandersnatch clone. This actually led to threats of court action by Psygnosis but ultimately it was all hot air and sour grapes," was how he explained the situation in an unpublished 2001 interview. Bandersnatch finally became an Atari ST game called Brataccas and when you see that playing and compare it to Gift from the Gods it's possible to see the resemblance. Although, arguably, they both draw inspiration from Imagine's 1983 game Alchemist, by Ian Weatherburn. Gift from the Gods came out around Christmas 1984 and was followed by Shadowrun in spring 1985. The reaction to both was positive, although the best summary came from Angus Ryall, CRASH's vituperative strategy games correspondent who wrote, "now how come these people never produced anything classy while they were at Imagine?" (April 1985 page 124).

Shadowfire was published by Beyond. Gift from the Gods by Ocean. Both companies treated Denton Designs incredibly well. Steve Cain in SINCLAIR USER again, "Beyond agreed to take two games from us, fund our development and premises. They wanted us badly but weren't prepared to take an almighty risk." Those two games would be Shadowfire and a sequel Enigma Force. Steve Cain went on to explain that David Ward, head of Manchester software house Ocean, told the company: "Write one [game] for me and I'll give you a contract for three and buy your old equipment from the receiver at Imagine." After Gift from the Gods, the other three were Roland's Rat Race, Cosmic War Toad and, most significantly, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

"Your pain will be halved."

Despite the positive reaction to Denton Design's first couple of games, it's hard to overstate how cynical everyone was about Frankie Goes to Hollywood. POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY broke the news in October 1984 to the delight of record company ZTT: "We have nothing to say to your magazine whatsoever." The expectation was that the game would be a cash grab. COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES used the headline "Frankie Says Play Games!", YOUR SPECTRUM was more blunt and went with, "The Power Of Cash." Angus Ryall summed up the mood in CRASH: "It's always been the case until now that games licensed from films or TV have been marriages more of convenience than made in heaven -games like The Fall Guy tend to concentrate on a miniscule part of their subject matter and make it the major (if not the only) feature of the game. Even Ghostbusters really only used two of the subject ideas from the film, and it's been hailed as a masterpiece of thematic conversion. It makes me wonder really if software houses view name licences as anything except a licence to print loads of bread from the gullible viewing (and listening) public. I mean, what on earth are Ocean trying to do with Frankie Goes to Hollywood? I'd guess it will be a straightforward platform game with a few naughty bits thrown in for the giggling rebels. But simply the fact that Ocean reckon they can sell a computer game with the name 'Frankie' on it, with no initial plot or game idea laid down at all. indicates the poor esteem in which most companies hold the material that they draw their licences from, and their total lack of regard for all the creative work that went into the piece in the first place."

And then issue 17 of CRASH arrived. I'm writing this just a few days after the sad news of artist Oliver Frey's death, and I want to pay tribute to his work and spend a little time talking about the cover. I'd been reading CRASH since issue 13, so this was only my fifth purchase. The cover to issue 13 was strange but oddly alluring ("weird" was my aunt's verdict, but she owned a Dragon 32), as Lloyd Mangram later described it, "Oliver was keen on painting an almost abstract subject, the wondrous thrill of a newcomer to the Spectrum." The next three covers were on safer ground (a funny one, then a monster, and then a robot in space), and then there was this. The most controversial band of the previous year depicted as naked cherubs flying over a body with a knife in it's back. I don't think anyone saw that coming. It's imaginative and technically excellent and I feel I could write for pages about the way the picture flows. If you start at the CRASH logo your eye is drawn down the page, and if you start at the unfortunate corpse you follow the picture up. Even small details like the houses are carefully thought through. An interior and exterior view sit next to each other and this should look messy but both are separated at the knife. The interior view also has a strong line in the picture rail which mirrors the roof line opposite, so if you just glance at the picture they appear to be one structure; plus both lines are angled down slightly which draws the eye naturally back to the knife and the body. Then there's the porcelain ducks breaking free of the interior wall and flying up the page to the top where they fly over the magazine logo (and this is in the days when art is edited with scalpels and glue, so someone had to cut those ducks off the image and stick them back on top of the logo). And just when you think you've spotted everything, Thatcher, Regan, and Gorbachev are there as flying devils (for a little bit of politics). It's a brilliant, surreal, piece of work. 

"A pistol was no use here."

Ally Noble told CRASH, in the June 1985 issue: "We didn't want to turn out the game I'm sure everyone expected... a platform game with the group jumping around the place." Steve Cain added, "David [Ward of Ocean] walked in and said he wanted a game with no Frankies walking about in it." You can get some idea of the development timeline from the CRASH interview; although if you want an in depth article about the production of the game go to EUROGAMER. CRASH includes a comment that, "this was quite a bit before Christmas [1984], when Denton's started to think seriously about how to go about the game," and follows this with Ally Noble joking, "Ocean announced that the Frankie game would be previewed at the  LET show [February 1985 Leisure Electronics Trade show], so we thought we would pop down to see what it ought to look like!" there's a third comment that by February, "Frankie wasn't ready for the LET, indeed the ideas hadn't even fully gelled by then." So the game seems to have been pulled together between February and June 1985 when it started being previewed. John Gibson's game engine is at Frankie's core and there's additional inspiration from the 1984 Macintosh - not icons this time, but windows. When these windows open they sometimes contain information about objects -on collecting a Pleasure Pill (which looked like  a yin-yang of two head to tail sperm) the player is informed "pleasure will be doubled." Now imagine playing this game on the big telly downstairs with your family watching. The windows also tell you the results of actions, "the cat's bowl is full of milk," when you gave the cat a drink (for some reason the red Herring didn't do anything). The messages also gave clues to the murder you are trying to solve (this provides a loose frame for the game's collection of mini-games), "Miss Mundane has a son in the RAF," "the killer has no children." My copy of the game had a bug which stopped me from naming the murderer and thus proceeding to the Pleasuredome, this was frustrating. Most significantly the windows allowed you to walk into the various mini-games as part of your quest. This was considerably more imaginative than just having you walk through a door or be automatically transported to a new area. The process of playing the game became part of the game itself when you had to choose whether to walk into a new window, or not. The minigames took inspiration from multiple sources. Frankie Goes to Hollywood videos- Talking Heads was a Breakout clone with Regan and Chernenko* spitting at each other to break down the a wall and hit the person on the other side; Liverpool history -Raid Over Merseyside had you shooting down Luftwaffe bombers. And, inevitably, The Beatles, with a game called Sea of Holes. Commodore owners got a better deal than their Spectrum and Amstrad rivals with two additional games, Flower Power, and Cupid's Arrows. The resulting stew of a game didn't feature Frankie Goes to Hollywood anywhere except on the cover but somehow the game felt like it was about the band and drew on their Liverpool roots and history to create a sense of place. The game could have been a disaster but it was sophisticated and postmodern. You play a game in which you play a game to become a better person in the process. 

[*Konstantin Chernenko was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 13 February 1984 to 10 March 1985. He appears in the Two Tribes video, which is why he also features in the Frankie Goes to Hollywood mini-game Talking Heads. However, Chernenko had died and been replaced with Gorbachev by the time Oliver Frey painted the cover to CRASH issue 17; which is why Gorbachev appears on the CRASH cover -Where Were They Now? the blog that takes pictures of old software house offices and also teaches you about Politburo succession.]

The CRASH interview is revealing in the way Ian Weatherburn is airbrushed from history. Readers are told that Steve Cain, Ally Noble, John Gibson, Karen Davies, and Graham Everitt were "the Founding Five." It also explains that outside of the imaginative games design work there was more day-to-day programming and converting games, "we try to squeeze them in between big projects because they pay the wages, Karen Davies said. Spy Hunter for US Gold was one such job, as was Roland's Rat Race, for Ocean. The SINCLAIR USER article also touched on the same subject: "Commodore freak Dave Colclough joined Denton after Ian left, and more programmers have come in since. They are mostly ex-Imagine people -from Thor, set up by Imagine director Mark Butler, or Concept, a similar outfit to Denton but responsible for the Argus Mind Games series, A sense of deja-vu creeps in. Wasn't it this that went wrong at Imagine -growing too fast? "We had to expand or go bust," says Steve, simply. "People say we shouldn't but we had to. Contract work demands it -you cannot afford to turn people down. If you haven't got enough programmers you have to hire some more. That's the theory, anyway."

In 1986 Denton Designs split again. The cause was the rapid expansion and the result was the departure of four of the founding five six; Steve Cain, John Gibson, Karen Davies, and Graham Everitt. John Gibson explained what happened in his unpublished interview: "Despite generous funding from Ocean, we all had to take a big pay cut and work very long hours to get the company on its feet. Eventually, there was too much work for just the 5 of us so we started to take on employees. Later on, these employees asked for a share of the company which we all agreed was right and proper, given the contribution they had made to its success. The problem was, they wanted an equal share. Both Steve Cain and I resented this. The original 'Famous Five' had worked hard to build the company up in the early days and in recognition of this we felt they should have a greater share of the company than those who had joined it later. Eventually, I said I would leave if the company shares were going to be divided equally. And that's exactly what did happen, so I left." It's a measure of the mark Denton Designs made on the industry that this split was big news. The new team of six, Ally Noble, John Heap, Andy Heap, Stewart Fotheringham, Dave Colclough, and Colin Parrott, were interviewed for CRASH in issue 36; off the top of my head this is the only time the magazine profiled the same company twice. 

The Great Escape, released later in 1986 showed Denton Designs hadn't lost the ability to be innovative. The clever twist in this game was, your character automatically followed the timetable of the prison camp and when you wanted to do something you intervened and took control directly. Where Time Stood Still followed in The Great Escape's footsteps, in 1988, and marked a gradual move away from 8-bit computers towards the Amiga and Atari ST. Rage Software acquired Denton Designs in 1995, and sadly we lost a PC sequel to Shadowfire in the process. Weirdly, according to Companies House, Denton Designs continued after the takeover and in 1996 its name changed to Jolly Products. Now, I can't find any record of Jolly Products releasing games but they existed until 2005 which is two years after Rage Software went bankrupt. 

"Mr Dull has always voted Tory."

December 2022

CRASH described Rodney Street as Liverpool's Harley Street, and noted Denton Designs sometimes got letters from medical firms addressed to Denture Designs. Rodney Street runs north from the cathedral to Liverpool John Moores University and I thought Denton Designs might prove to be untraceable without a building number because Rodney Street is pretty long and there didn't seem to be much point knocking on doors. Fortunately the company was recruiting after the 1986 split and I found a couple of job adverts which gave their full address. It's a luxury apartment now and you can stay the night if you've got a spare couple of hundred quid. 

I wanted to track down the various locations for the photos used in the two CRASH profiles (issue 17 and issue 36). Issue 36 was easy. The weird pyramid is the tomb of William MacKenzie, an engineer and gambler who was reportedly sealed inside seated at a card table and clutching a winning hand of cards. This story is probably not true. MacKenzie's tomb is on Rodney Street, a short distance from the old Denton Designs office and you can virtually see it from their doorstep. The pictures from issue 17 proved much more challenging. 

The second picture is obviously near the Anglican Cathedral. I couldn't work out exactly where, from clicking around on Streetview, but I was pretty sure I'd find it on the day. The first picture, which forms the background to the interview, completely foxed me. It obviously had to be in the Rodney Street area, but where? I couldn't work out the geography of the picture. It was clearly somewhere cut into the side of a hill, judging by the way the ground raised up some 20-30 feet beyond the retaining wall in the background, and the Catholic Cathedral is on a street called Mount Pleasant -so it must be nearby. I travelled miles round that bit of Liverpool virtually on Streetview, and all I kept doing was eliminating places. It wasn't in the grounds of the Catholic Cathedral. It wasn't the ruined church at the junction of Berry Street and Leece Street. It didn't seem to be near MacKenzie's tomb. I got quite excited when I found the old Irish Centre at 127 Mount Street, but it wasn't right. I just couldn't find a locked tower-like structure up against a retaining wall at the back of a street level plaza. Could it be a ventilation tower for one of the Mersey tunnels? Maybe. Was it possible it had been demolished in the 36 year gap since1985? Possibly.

In the end I got to Liverpool with no idea of the location. I'd checked with a Liverpool based friend who, unprompted, said it was in Rodney Street which was promising. Unfortunately I had a packed schedule for the day and it was already 3.30pm when I got to Rodney Street. I didn't know what time the sun set but in December it wasn't going to be late. Should I waste time looking for mystery locations or head on to Thor's old address? By the time I got back it was 4.15pm and it was well into twilight. I headed back down Rodney Street towards the cathedral, mentally abandoning the search for the mystery tower in the process. The Dean Walters building, a circular tower-like thing at the entrance to the paved plaza at the cathedral entrance, had already been eliminated during my online search. The cathedral is built on the side of a hill so the Denton's photo was surely taken on the west side where the hill dropped away towards the river. I was heading that way, so I'm not sure how I spotted the small path leading in the other direction between the side of the cathedral and a Greek temple-like building called the Oratory. I might have seen someone else heading that way in the gathering dark. It was on the opposite side of the cathedral to where I was heading, but it clearly went down!

To avoid making a short story way too long, the steps led down to St. James Gardens. It's a sunken park to the east of the cathedral in an old quarry. It was immediately clear I'd found the location of photo two and I quickly snapped a picture looking up at the cathedral. The park was dark and unnerving in the twilight and made much spookier by the sound of running water, which didn't sound like a fountain or a stream. It is apparently a natural spring and Rodney Street doctors used to recommend taking the waters to cure "loss of appetite, nervous disorders, Lowness of spirit, headache is proceeding from crudities of the stomach, Ricketts and weak eyes." As my eyes adjusted to the dark I noticed a round tower-like structure set back in a paved area with the quarry wall rising behind. It's the tomb of William Huskisson, MP, who was the first reported railway passenger casualty. During the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830 he somehow managed to be run over by Stephenson's Rocket, top speed 30mph. I snapped another picture and went for a triumphal curry when I got home.

Frankie gives you 800 more pleasure units and you're 9% a real person.

I now present to you two of the worst pictures I've ever taken. Frankly, given the light levels and my tired end of day state I'm amazed they came out at all.