Virgin Games

I briefly worked for Virgin Games during its Virgin Interactive Entertainment regeneration. This was the second of my three grazes along the side of the UK games industry (for graze number one, see Graftgold). I never met Richard Branson because the company split from the Virgin mothership in 1993, before I joined, and used the brand name under licence. However, my time there was exactly the glamourous never-ending parade of celebrities you'd expect. Dave Prowse once passed through the office and signed a copy of Tie Fighter. The company receptionist was Simone Hyames, Cally from Grange Hill. I saw Feargal Sharkey a couple of times. And, I was once nearly in the same room as Chaos and X-Com designer Julian Gollop. That's right, look impressed.

However, that's all in the future. The increasingly complicated corporate structure of Virgin Games breaks neatly into three chapters. There's Virgin Games which operates from 1983 to 1988, and is followed by Virgin Mastertronic  from 1988 to 1991. Virgin Games was reborn in 1991, following the sale of Virgin Mastertronic to Sega, and was renamed Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993 and operated in one form or another until 2006. With that in mind let's travel back in time to 1983. A tumultuous time in British history. The England football team was on track to win the 1986 World Cup and end 20 years of hurt; the band Sweet Dreams carried the hope of a nation into the Eurovision Song Contest; and TV movie The Day After gave us a glimpse of a future worth fighting for.

61/63 Portabello Road, London, W1

Virgin Games was created on 21st February 1983 to "develop software for the Atari, BBC, Vic20 and Commodore 64, Dragon, Oric 1, Sinclair Spectrum, and TI 99/4A machines," according to POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (24 February to 2 March 1983, page 5). The piece is filled with the sort of bombastic quotes you'd expect. Nick Alexander, who had been lured over from Thorn EMI to run the new company, is quoted as saying: "We will bring new, aggressive, professional marketing and merchandising techniques to an industry that has yet to use them in its growth from the mail-order columns and into the high street." POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (12-18 May 1983 page 1) gave a little more information as the June 14th launch date approached but the more interesting news story is on page 5. Now it's computer graphics and pop music details how singer-songwriter Chris Sievey had written a 16K ZX81 programme to go on the B side of his single Camouflage. Chris Sievey, his alter-ego Frank Sidebottom, and Virgin Games would all meet up properly in 1985.

Virgin's marketing was indeed aggressive and professional. This two page colour spread from HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY (June 21-27 1983 page 8) is bright and eye-catching. There's an offer to join the Virgin Games gang and win t-shirts, posters, and possibly £500 of computer hardware or software of your choice. With each game you also get a specially mixed piece of music to "play while you play". The music was by Steve Hillage, a name I now associate exclusively with this scene from The Young Ones. There's also, what was fairly standard at the time, a request for people to submit games for "any of the popular home computers," although this one does go on to add "other than the ZX81". However, the quality of the games was neatly summed up by CRASH: "In the main, Virgin's first batch of games were pretty poor and madly overpriced (£7.95)" (February 1984 page 54). A few good games did trickle out, Falcon Patrol on the Commodore 64 and Sorcery on the ZX Spectrum, but by the Autumn of 1984 it seemed like Virgin was apologising for it's own existence. The mea culpa tour starts on page 80 of YOUR SPECTRUM (August 1984 page 80) "we got quite a pasting because we were expected to come up with something different," a less bombastic Nick Alexander said before the tumbrel cart rolled on to POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY ( (30 August-5 September 1984 page 1) which quoted Nick saying:" We are now going for quality rather than quantity." "We have changed with the market... the shot-gun approach won't work any more," Nick continued in CRASH (October 1984 page 40). 

61/63 Portabello Road doesn't exist any more. It's been demolished and replaced with a pair of houses but you can just see it in this photo from 1997; it's the brick building with the odd twin doors with the blue angular lintels.

2-4 Vernon Yard, Portabello Road, London, W1

August 2022

Some time towards the end of 1984 Virgin moved further down Portabello Road into Vernon Yard, which was also the headquarters of Virgin Records. It's a solidly residentially area these days, so I took a picture from the entrance of Vernon Yard looking down towards numbers 2-4 which are the white buildings on the corner. It was the Virgin Records connection which drew Chris Sievy to the games company, as he told CRASH (April 1985 page 88): "...because everyone else would have turned the game down!! Only joking, it's because of my involvement in the music business and because I know Virgin as a record company and how they operate. Virgin know how to market music as well as computer games, whereas if I signed to a games company they wouldn't know how to market the music. Virgin know how to market both at the same time and do a good job.” The CRASH interview was probably written by John Minson under the pseudonym Leslie B. Bunder. Minson also later reviewed the game in POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (4-10 April 1985 page 14) (where the proofreader needs a good kick for not spotting "Portabellow Road" in the review header). The interview gives an indication of the long gestation period for The Biz as it evolved from a pen and paper game to a ZX81 title, "I kept on running out of memory. There was so much information and detail I wanted to put in, that I had to look around for a machine with a larger memory." That machine was the ZX Spectrum, and then there was another 18 month delay as the program was refined and the legal details were worked out to allow the game to be released with eight songs by Chris Sievey and the Freshies. This delay probably cost The Biz its chance to be the first computer game concept album. Automata's game Deus Ex Machina beat Chris Sievy by a matter of months with it's specially composed soundtrack and performances by Ian Dury, Jon Pertwee, Frankie Howerd, and more. However, as Chris points out in the CRASH interview, he probably created the first budget game because the Camouflage single (with bonus computer games) was on sale in 1983 for £1 when games routinely cost £5. Chris' alter ego Frank Sidebottom also appears in an eight minute interview with Chris which you can listen to here. Other gems from the CRASH interview; Football Manager is, "the only game I play... I enjoy watching the highlights of the match, it’s such an addictive game," good news for Kevin Toms of Addictive Games; and the reveal that Chris had written, "another 3 machine code games," which sadly never appeared. Reaction to The Biz was positive and the consensus tended to be that the game was good, but not great. It was written in BASIC at a time when this was seen as old fashioned, but the static nature of the game means The Biz now works surprisingly well on mobile devices. I've flattened at least one phone battery on a long train journey while trying to get my going-nowhere band on Top of the Pops.

There's a statue of Frank Sidebottom in Timperley. It's well worth a trip if you are ever Manchester adjacent. The plaque between Frank's feet reads, "as long as I gaze on timperley sunset I am in paradise." Fortunately the statue faces west, so he sees a sunset every day.

December 2022

1985 saw two games licenced to Amsoft; Strangeloop+ and the well regarded Sorcery+, both on the Amsoft Gold label. Virgin followed the same path as other software houses after this and released Amstrad conversions under its own name. Virgin released the excellent Dan Dare in 1986 which provided an excuse for Eagle fan Oliver Frey to draw a cover for CRASH in the fifties style. Oliver Frey had already drawn some episodes of Dan Dare for IPCs relaunch of The Eagle, although apparently he never rated it very much although I thought it was great; admittedly I preferred Doomlord to Dan Dare.

Issue 84, 29th October 1983

If Dan Dare was the apogee then Virgin Atlantic Challenge was the nadir. A tie in to Richard Branson's second jaunt across the Atlantic in "a little toy boat," (copyright American Merchant Marine Museum, 1986). The game got a very frosty reception. CRASH scored it at 48%, "boring, and for the price [£7.95], it can only be described as a rip-off." AMSTRAD ACTION rated the game a whole 2% higher and described it as "about as exciting as a bad day's fishing." The Commodore 64 version didn't make it to the shops. Richard Branson's Atlantic crossing was an event which "broke barriers of self promotion never previously breached," according to SINCLAIR USER a phrase which could also usefully be attached to Branson's 1987 Altantic balloon jaunt. Inevitably this second stunt by the boss got it's own crawly-bum-lick game, Trans-Atlantic Balloon Crossing, and the reaction was even more hostile. This time there was a Commodore 64 version which ZZAP scored at 23%: "The effort that went into generating public interest in this ballooning non-event was admirable, if not totally over the top. Our local radio station covered just about every minute of the journey and every telly news bulletin showed pictures of the floating Cheshire cat. Now we've been treated to an infantile and unchallenging computer game! There simply isn't enough in the gameplay to amuse a player for more than an hour - all you have to do is protect your balloon from two types of hazard and occasionally change the controls. It's true to say that the player is kept busy - but the action is just too boring and overpriced to be worthwhile". 

Virgin acquired 45% of Mastertronic in 1987. THE GAMES MACHINE (December 1987 page 10) quoted Nick Alexander: "This is a very exciting and substantial move for us We have been looking for a budget market for some time and have been very impressed with Mastertronic's performance." Mastertronic had just become Sega's UK distributor, and as Richard Branson recounts in his biography, "Mastertronic's sales of Sega were soaring but, given that Sega were charging £55 for a console, Frank [Hermann, Mastertronic chairman] needed a partner to finance the sales. Although he could sell the consoles for £99, he needed a large amount of working capital to finance the gap between the £55 outlay to Sega for supplying the console, which was cash in advance, and receiving the £99 for selling it. In June 1987 I was telephoned by Roger Seelig [Virgin's investment banker at Morgan Grenfell] who asked me to come and meet a friend of his, Frank Hermann... " Virgin brought out the remaining 55% of Mastertonic in 1988 and began the second chapter of their history.

Virgin Games was a company which sent out lots of wacky PR pictures. Magazines liked these because they were a good way to fill up any awkward space. Here are four I've been able to track down.

SINCLAIR USER, November 1984. Virgin Games "prestigious new headquarters" sent out to promote their move to Vernon Yard. 

CRASH, November 1985. The Virgin team dress as rabbits to promote their acquisition of Rabbit Software.

CRASH, June 1986. Nick Alexander of Virgin does some hoovering while wearing a hard hat. This is in some way supposed to promote the deal between Virgin and New Generation Software or possibly the deal between Virgin and Leisure Genius. 

CRASH, February 1987. A shark stuck in the roof of the Vernon Yard office. Possibly something to do with the terrible Virgin Atlantic Challenge game. 

Please leave a comment, especially if you are Nick Alexander and would like to explain why you were photographed wearing a hard hat and pretending to use a vacuum cleaner. I'm on Twitter @ShamMountebank. It's not very good.