Ocean

6 Central Street, Manchester, M2

There's a running joke in the Mary Whitehouse Experience Encylopedia where Rob Newman gets increasingly frustrated at having to define simple words. I feel this entry for Ocean should read a bit like his definition of Tree. Ocean: "Don't be stupid you know who Ocean are. You know, Ocean. OCEAN! OCEAN! It's Ocean. Jesus..." The company is already well documented. There's a history of Ocean by Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean. Mark R Jones wrote Load Dij Dij which covers his experience working there and captures the excitement of going from an external observer of a company, to an insider. RETRO GAMER has half a dozen articles, there are umpty-hundred videos on Youtube about Ocean's best games and their worst and their history and their rise and fall. The BBC covered Ocean at least twice, in their notorious 1984 Commerical Breaks documentary, and they sent Keith Chegwin there to check it out in 1988. This blog entry might be redundant before its even begun.

Spectrum Games, Freepost Manchester, M3 8BB

Ocean didn't start out as Ocean. David Ward and Jon Woods founded a company called Spectrum Games in March 1983.  They offered three games for sale Monster Muncher, Galaxy Invaders, and Missile Attack; YOUR COMPUTER  page 2. The advert repeats in April 1983 when Galaxy Invaders is replaced with a game called Hopper; "authentic arcade action." These were all, as was standard at the time, copies of popular arcade games, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Missile Command, and Frogger. Except, according to David Ward in Ocean the History, the advertised games didn't exist yet: "...on Monday morning – and remember, this was a mail order only business – we got all these envelopes in the post, and we opened them up. They had five-pound postal orders in them... And this was on the ridiculously naïve assumption that we could get the game done and delivered within 28 days, otherwise you were outside the protocol of the Mail Order Association.... There was no question in my mind that within 28 days we would deliver and it wouldn’t be a problem. You must remember that a lot of these games existed in some form as programs written by hobbyists who weren’t intending necessarily to commercialise them. They just wrote a version of Frogger because they thought that was a great thing to have for themselves, and very often thought no further than that." With this in mind, here's an advert which started cropping up in computer magazines from early 1983.

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY
(3-9 February 1983 page 29)

So who were Northwish? The March 1983 issue of YOUR COMPUTER has an advertisers index on page 170, and credits the page 2 (or Inside Front Cover, as they call it) Spectrum Games advert to Northwish. Ocean sales director Paul Finnegan recalled in Ocean the History: "When [Ocean] started we were in an old warehouse, because [David Ward and Jon Woods] used to provide theatrical props for the BBC and Granada TV productions." That warehouse (less than a quarter of a mile from the Granada Television studios in Quay Street) was the Ralli Building, the address which also appears on early Ocean adverts. The Northwish adverts run until around August 1983 across PERSONAL COMPUTING WEEKLY, COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES and YOUR COMPUTER, and a couple of the later YOUR COMPUTER adverts give the game away by telling interested parties to "phone David on..." It seems fair to assume Northwish was David and Jon's props company and Spectrum Games was run through Northwish as a way of testing the market without going to the expense of setting up a whole new company. If computer games were a fad like rollerskating, as some people predicted, then nothing would be lost by quietly winding up Spectrum Games. Elite did the same thing with their first game Blue Thunder which was credited to Richard Wilcox Software with Richard Wilcox Software actually a label run through another company called Foundry Business Systems Ltd. I guess the question is, why run the "programmers needed" adverts under a different name from the game company? It could be because Spectrum Games operated through a Freepost address. This is an incentive for mail order customers but it might make programmers wary of sending games to a company without a physical address. Alternatively, it could be because Spectrum Games was a label rather than a company in it's own right, and Jon and David wanted people dealing with the company whose name was actually on the contracts.

Jon Woods finishes off the story in Ocean the History: "So we eventually had these three games for both those machines and delivered them to those who ordered. We sent the postal orders back to those we couldn’t deliver to in the 28 days." The May 1983 YOUR COMPUTER advert shows how the catalogue has grown. Four games are on offer. Cosmic Intruders is described as: "The original and best intruders game with some new twists - how long can you last?" The game is AWOL, lost to history, but intruders is a bit like invaders and the first Spectrum Games advert illustrated Galaxy Invaders with a picture of Space Invaders, so it seems reasonable to assume Cosmic Intruders was a renamed Galaxy Invaders. Road Frog must be Frogger variant Hopper under a new name, although Road Toad would be better. Rocket Command is Missile Attack and uses slightly redrawn artwork from the first advert. The last title is still called Monster Muncher. The original Spectrum Games advert offered titles for the Spectrum, 16 or 48k, VIC-20, and ZX81. The ZX81 range has now been dropped so those customers would be getting their postal orders returned.

Around July 1983 the advert changes again. Now eight games are pictured; the previous four plus Penetrator, Frenzy, Caterpilla, and Kong; oddly only seven games are listed on the mail order tick box, Kong is omitted. Spectrum Games would quickly withdraw Penetrator following an objection from Melbourne House. PERSONAL COMPUTER WEEKLY (30 JUNE-6 JULY 1983 page 5): "Melbourne House threatened legal proceedings against Spectrum Games if the Vic20 program continued to be sold. Melbourne's Christine Laugharne said: “There is a law about passing-off. If they don't stop selling the game we will bring an injunction to stop them”. Commenting on the decision to withdraw the Vic-20 Penetrator program, Spectrum Games' managing director David Ward said: "We decided that it was better to do so to avoid any confusion between the two games.”

The next advert which appeared around July/August 1983 is much less effective. The characters are lumped awkwardly together in the centre of the page and there's no mail order slip. It's an advert seemingly designed to keep brand awareness alive without pushing any title in particular. Is this new advert related to the news report HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY ran from the Earls Court Computer Fair (16-19th June, 1983) :" A new deal for 48K Spectrum owners will be offered soon by Spectrum Games, said chairman David Ward. He believes they have been disappointed at games written for both models [of ZX Spectrum], so his firm's range is being rewritten to make use of the 48K memory-but with the 16K version on the other side.
Spectrum brought out five titles, all at £5.90, at the show : Kong. Armageddon and Manic for the Spectrum and Rocket Command and Cosmic Intruders for the VIC-20. Due soon are three games each for the Oric, Dragon and Commodore 64." That news report was out of date almost as soon as it was printed because behind the scenes the fate of Spectrum Games was already sealed.

Sales director Paul Finnegan was the first to bring the problem to Jon and David's attention. One of the buyers at Boots pointed out to Paul that Spectrum Games was a confusing name. It sounded like the company only sold games for the Sinclair Spectrum but it also offered titles for the VIC-20 and planned to expand on to other non-Sinclair home computers. The name needed to change. In Ocean the History, Paul Finnegan recalls the new name came from seeing a van with Ocean Transport written on the side. "What about Ocean?" Jon is supposed to have asked. Spectrum Games, in its early form, was clearly always intended as a tentative experiment. If it was successful it would need to be transformed into a real company, which is what happened but the real company was called Ocean Software Limited. Companies House records the company being incorporated on 20th July 1983.

Ralli Buildings, Stanley Street, Manchester, M3

December 2022

The Ralli Buildings have gone. Demolished around 1985. They were magnificent huge warehouses, built around 1913. Photos show the buildings looming over their surroundings with one side dropping straight down towards the river Irwell like a cliff. The replacement red-brick building, called Ralli Quays, is considerably less distinguished, and now also under sentence of demolition after only 31 years of use. 

December 2022

The Spectrum Games brand keeps advertising through summer 1983, presumably to avoid damaging sales to distributors and shops. Spectrum Games runs their last advert on the inside front cover of the September 1983 issue of YOUR COMPUTER, the same month that Ocean runs it's first advert on page 215.

Kong and Road Frog have both jumped between companies. Missile Attack has been renamed Armageddon and Frenzy has changed its name to Robotics. Caterpilla's artwork features on both adverts, although the title isn't given in the Spectrum Games advert. Digger Dan is new for Ocean. Rocket Command, Maniac, Strike Force, Monster Muncher, Rocket Command, and Cosmic Intruders didn't get transferred across to Ocean. Also, Northwish is no longer involved in the recruitment of programmers, Ocean runs adverts under its own name.

YOUR COMPUTER
August 1983 page 199

Ocean released it's first officially licenced game, Mr Wimpy, around November 1983. It's ironic that Ocean were careful to licence the logo, advertising jingle ("Wimpy is the home of the hamburger with the greatest burgers under the bun," a jingle that will echo round my skull forever thanks to Mr Wimpy), and mascot, and then tie it to a clone of the arcade game BurgerTime. The licence made the game stand out and it raised the profile of the new-ish company. David Ward told HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY (13 December 1983 page 6): "In the States all consumer items from MacDonalds*, to Kool-Aid  and Coca-Cola have been put into a computer game. The manufacturers regard it as good promotion. But it's still a new idea here... At first we thought we were going to have to pay Wimpy a royalty for using the name. But when they saw the finished product, they liked it so much they said we could use the name free, because it would be good advertising for them." The good advertising continued into 1984. A Mr Wimpy championship was held in the spring with a team from Manchester facing off against a team from London. The winner was 14 year-old Andrew Blackley whose score of 81,300 helped Manchester beat London.

*Yes. HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY write MacDonalds. The brand wasn't as common in 1983, which by one of those odd coincidences was the same year McDonald's opened its 100th UK branch, in Manchester.  

Mr Wimpy was followed close behind by Hunchback, Ocean's second licenced game and their first official arcade conversion. The original was produced by Century Electronics, based in Oldham, and had been a hit through the summer of 1983. RETRO GAMER 151 has a good article on the history of the game, and it's various sequels. The licence cost Ocean £3000, but one oddity is the BBC version released instead by Superior Software. Wikipedia suggests the BBC version was originally an unofficial clone and they cite the RETRO GAMER piece as proof although it's not mentioned in the article. The language used in Superior's 1983 advert is oddly defensive: "This program is sold under licence from Century Electronics Ltd; we have exclusive rights to its sale for use on the BBC micro," as if they are fed up explaining that Ocean owns everything except the BBC rights. I don't dispute Hunchback's success but I have strong feelings about the game. My experience was one of endlessly falling into the fiery pit on screen two because the game was overly fussy about pixel perfect precision. My brother cleared the pit once and promptly died on the following screen. This glimpse of the promised land (for all we knew, those three screens were the full game) was enough for us to spend far too long loading the game and making attempt after attempt after attempt to clear the pit, and just dying and dying and dying. As far as I'm concerned Hunchback is a boot stamping on the human face, forever. Still it's not all about me. The one two punch of Mr Wimpy and Hunchback proved successful. PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMES began running a software sales chart; in the March 1984 issue Mr Wimpy entered at 11 and Hunchback at 24; the following month Mr Wimpy had risen one place to 10 while Hunchback shot to 1: "Ocean's Hunchback hit the top of the charts this month, with the company claiming sales of over 100,000 cassettes. Considering the game only came out just before Christmas that is certainly a performance that will take some beating." By May 1984 Ocean had three games in the Top 20; Hunchback at 7, Mr Wimpy at 14, and new entry Chinese Juggler at 12. This was a better performance than Ultimate or Melbourne House who both had two titles, 

CRASH
May 1984 page 44/45

CRASH issue 4 printed a nice contemporary photo of David Ward (left) Jon Woods (right) standing in front of the Ralli Building. It's annoyingly cropped, to fit between columns of text tilted at a screamingly fashionable angle, so it's impossible to see more than a sliver of the building but the location of the photo was one I wanted to track down. If it still existed. Manchester is in a permanent state of development but it will be lovely when it's finished. Looking across the River Irwell to where the Ralli Building used to be I could see an odd nineteen eighties smoked glass construction, in bad shape, and an overgrown patch of grass with brick arches behind, all accessed from a stub of the towpath under a footbridge which Google Maps calls the Noiseless Bridge. The smoked glass building is the shell of a pub called The Mark Addy. Not the actor, this Mark Addy was a Victorian champion rower and swimmer who rescued over 50 people from the River Irwell. The pub opened in 1980 and the Manchester archive photo shows the end of the Mark Addy beer garden not long after opening, along with a laughably insubstantial chain link fence on the river side. David Ward is perched on one of the raised flowerbeds you can see in the archive photograph. The pub was badly flooded on Boxing Day 2015 and has never reopened. The Noiseless Bridge cuts right in front of the ornate balustrade visible behind Jon and David, which is just about the only part of the Ralli Building site that still exists.

December 2022

6 Central Street, Manchester, M2 5NS

Ocean moved in late spring 1984, from Salford to Manchester. Central Street is, appropriately enough, almost in central Manchester. It's an impressive Victorian building which still exists in its primary role as a meeting house for the Manchester Quakers. The Friends Meeting House Manchester website boasts of the building's award-winning meeting and conference facilities and this is presumably the space that was once let to Ocean. Frankly, a peaceful religious order renting and sharing space with a software house sounds like the premise for a Rising Damp style clash-of-cultures sitcom. The Meeting House address is actually 6 Mount Street.

December 2022

This is the most common view you'll see of the old Ocean offices because I'm definitely not the first person to take its picture; see this photo from the Ocean Software Facebook page where someone more talented than me has also photoshopped in characters from Ocean's games and adverts; Sergeant Pepper style. Central Street itself runs down the right side -in the photo above- of the building and tucked away at the side of the building is another door. Could this be the fabled 6 Central Street address? Frankly I haven't a clue.

December 2022

Imagine Software went bankrupt spectacularly in July 1984 and Ocean was well placed to take their spot as the biggest and fastest growing software house in the UK; outpacing their longer established rivals. How did they manage this? David Ward, in Ocean the History, suggested: "And one of the reasons why we were reasonably successful is we responded in a more professional way than others. We were older than our contemporaries, we had a degree of hard-won business experience in terms of sales, marketing, financing – the kind of components you need to make a business. Because, lo and behold, instead of these envelopes coming on a Monday morning with an order for a game on whatever machine, we had a repeat order from WH Smith…" By September 1984 Jon and David had a spare £50,000 to invest in distributor Centresoft's new US Gold label, which needed cash to pay advances to American publishers (The Story of US Gold, Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean). In return Jon Woods and David Ward got fifty percent of US Gold.

Daley Thompson's Decathlon, like Mr Wimpy, was a licence pasted over a copy of an arcade game, Konami's Track & Field. The licence was a shrewd one and sales were boosted by Thompson's successful defence of his Olympic title at the 1984 Los Angeles games. My brother bought a copy sight unseen purely on the strength of the name, and fortunately the game was good fun. It's now also the subject of a weird false memory, for me. My brother and I found it hysterically funny when Daley lost an event and his shoulders slumped and he put his hands over his face. I used to credit this as the point where I dimly released games could do more than just be simple reaction tests, they could be funny as well. However having just played the game again I can confirm it doesn't feature this disappointed pose I so clearly remember; where did my memory come from? Bob Wakelin's cover art is also worthy of comment. It shows Daley Thompson running straight out of the inlay. It's the perfect image and small details make it all the better. The hand in front of the logo shows that everything on the cover is behind Thompson, including his competitors who can barely be glimpsed because they are lost in Daley's speed blur. The Olympic rings are the only thing in front and Thompson is powering towards them, as if they are the finish line; I'll bet the International Olympic Committee wouldn't be so casual about the use of their symbol today. I like it. Bob Wakelin didn't. In Ocean the History, much to my surprise, he said: "That’s rubbish. Technically it’s crap. I can understand why it’s iconic. The design and the layout of it works really well, and Daley’s coming right at you, but technically… But then, it was 1984… I was still trying to get a grip on what I was doing."

The other thing Ocean did in 1984 was resurrect the Imagine label. It seemed an incredible thing to do. The brand was tainted by extensive coverage of their bankruptcy, the non-appearance of the Megagames, and the often poor quality of games which did get released. Ocean was negotiating with Konami to release licenced versions of their arcade games but the Japanese company was worried their titles would get lost among Ocean's other games. The obvious solution was to set up a new label for the Konami titles but why buy Imagine? The logo is great, obviously, and the deal came with the unreleased World Series Baseball (good) and World Series Basketball (less good) but it still looks like an odd decision. Except... Imagine, based in Liverpool, were Ocean's great rivals. It must have been deeply satisfying to buy up the remnants of the failed company and take it on to greater success.

Ocean was a behemoth by the end of 1985. The CRASH Christmas special has six pages of adverts for Ocean and four for Imagine. US Gold managed six pages in total, followed by Firebird and Elite with five each.

UPDATE- 19/03/23. Mark R. Cobley-Jones has posted a video on Youtube. It's a walk round of 6 Central Street showing how the Ocean offices look now compared to how they looked in their eighties heyday.

2 Castle Street, Castlegate, Manchester, M3

Ocean left Central Street in 1992. Yes, I've skipped from 1985 to 1992 in a single bound. There's not much point in going year-by-year through Ocean's history. The short answer is, they became hugely successful. They headed to bigger offices on Castle Street, within walking distance of their old offices but on the south side of the River Irwell. Castle Street is almost an island bounded on three sides by the Bridgewater canal and the Rochdale canal.

December 2022

According to this thread on the rllmuk forum they also had a second set of offices nearby at 21 Castle Street, so obviously I was going to photograph that building as well.

December 2022

[UPDATE 30/04/2023] The building at 21 Castle Street is called Merchants Warehouse. It was refurbished in 1997 which means Ocean must have been one of the first companies to move it. Rebuilding Manchester on Twitter has a remarkable comparison photo showing how the building looked before and after restoration

c1980 > 2021 - Merchants Warehouse, Castlefield. ‘Before’ photo kindly provided by Warren Marshall. pic.twitter.com/nKSNtO5cVm

— rebuildingmanchester (@rebuildingmcr) December 5, 2021      [END UPDATE]

[UPDATE 23/03/2024] Infogrames took over Ocean in 1996 and their registered address at Companies House shows a move from 2 Castle Street to 21 Castle Street on 22 September 1997. I think it's reasonable to assume Ocean moved on the same date. [END UPDATE]

Incidentally, if you walk round the corner of 21 Castle Street you can find Lock 92 on the Rochdale Canal which, according to Podcasto Catflappo, is where this scene was filmed for Filthy Rich & Catflap episode one.

The 1992 market was considerably different. Everything was more expensive; licencing costs, development, marketing. The games business had become international, and Ocean opened offices in Amercia (1870 Little Orchard St, San Jose, CA 95125) and France (ZAC De Mousquette, 06740, Chateauneuf De Grasse -just inland from the Côte d'Azur, oh là là*). Worse, after five years of stability producing games just for the trio of ZX Spectrum Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, the UK market had fractured; there was the Atari-ST, the Commodore Amiga, SEGA Megadrive, SEGA Master System, the Nintendo Game Boy, the NES, and Super NES, and PC compatible computers, and then every now and again someone like Amstrad or Commodore or Atari would have a go at releasing a console of their own. It was a mess.

Ocean was struggling, although it didn't look like it to an external observer. More and more funding was required for game development and the company was finding it more and more difficult to cover overhead costs. Funding came first from French Company Chargeurs SA, who brought 23% of Ocean in 1994. Then in 1996 Infogrames, another French company, merged with Ocean in what was described as a £100 million deal. David Ward described the resulting company as "a worldwide company," but Ocean was treated as the junior partner. I'll be honest. I don't understand the circumstances that led Ocean to be brought out. Could they have raised capital by floating on the stock exchange? I can only assume that was a route David Ward and Jon Woods didn't want to take. In 1998, Infogrames chairman Bruno Bonnell announced the company was "standardising its various interests under the single brand banner of Infogrames," and Infogrames UK was born out of Ocean. The new company stayed at Castle Street but some time around the millennium Infogrames UK decided it wanted a London address and the link with the past was finally broken as Ocean was downgraded from Infogrames UK to Infogrames Manchester.

*as always. If anyone wants to become an international correspondent for Where Were They Now? then grab a photo of the office and lob it to shoutingintoawell@yahoo.com

Do you understand international finance? If you do, please leave a comment explaining why Ocean ended up being taken over.