Cascade

 Suite 4, 1-3 Haywra Crescent, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG1

"It is impossible to tell you everything about the 50 games on CASSETTE 50 but they include many types such as maze, arcade, missile, tactical, and logic games to suit most tastes in computer game playing. CASSETTE 50 will appeal to people of all ages and the games will provide many hours of entertainment for all the family at a fraction of the cost of other computer games." I remember seeing the advert for Cassette 50 and crunching the numbers in my head. Alien 8 was lots of fun at £9.95 and that was just one game. Logically Cassette 50 had to be fifty times better than Alien 8. It's just mathematics. And it comes with a free calculator watch. Neat! 

The history of Cascade is well covered. RETRO GAMER have done their usual sterling work and there's another retrospective and interview by Wizwords. There's also a blog where the author attempts to play through all 50 games on the Cassette 50 tape and, best of all, an interview with someone who had a game accepted for the Cassette 50 compilation. The potted history is as follows: Around 1982 Guy Wilhelmy came up with the idea of cassette with more than one game recorded on it. The unique selling point of this compilation was the sheer number of games, 50 on one full length tape. That was something no one could compete with. He wrote 50 games for the Apple II, and also wrote software to allow them to be converted to other formats. He then passed copies of his master tapes and adverts onto Nigel Stevens, a friend from university who lived in Wales. Guy told RETRO GAMER: “The logic was, that if the public saw two companies selling the same thing, perhaps it would give it more credibility,” says Guy, “and if one didn’t pick up an order then the other might.” It was a tremendous success. Nigel moved to join Guy in Harrogate, and Cascade went on to develop games other than the Cassette 50 compilation.

UTS, PO Box 96, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG3

PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD
February 1983

UTS was Guy Wilhelmy's company which pre-dated Cassette 50, or CaZXette-fifty as the Spectrum version was charming called. The Spectrum version seems to have been the first ready for sale, which is a surprise because Guy's RETRO GAMER interview implies that the Apple II version was programmed first, and over on Wizwords he mentions that: "the Spectrum was a pain as well because all the games had to be re-written due to the quirky keyboard on that micro." You can see the genesis of the Cassette 50 tape in the earlier UTS advert, below, which uses the same CaZXette pun and also lists for sale a few titles with the same name as games on the Cassette 50 collection; Galactic Attack, Radar Landing, Space Mission, Lunar Lander, Attacker, and Galactic Dogfight, to just name a few.

PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS
December 1982

Cascade Software, Cascades House, Bargans Lane, Llandogo, Gwent, NP5

SINCLAIR USER
February 1983 page 80

Meanwhile, in Wales. Nigel Stevens placed a half-page advert in SINCLAIR USER which noted that Cazxette-fifty was also available for the VIC-20 with versions for the BBC, Atari, Dragon 32, and Atom, coming soon. Llandogo is a lovely village overlooking the river Wye and Cascades House, where the eventual name of the company came from, was Nigel Stevens' family home. Llandogo is a winding collection of roads and bridleways which rise up the side of the valley. It's proved reasonably impenetrable to Google who made a couple of desultory attempts to capture the village for Streetview in 2009 and 2011 but haven't tried recently. Cascades House was always going to fall under my no-pictures-of-peoples-houses rule but I wanted to know where it was and the lack of street names became a source of frustration. Literally moments ago -so this is as close to a "live" update as I'm ever likely to manage- I found the minutes from a 2016 Monmouthshire Council meeting of the Licensing and Regulatory Committee which included an informative map of the village and showed Cascades House. So it was still there in 2016. Thanks also to the good people of the Llandogo Facebook Group for indulging my stupid questions. It's been a source of some embarrassment that this blog hasn't ventured West of Offa's Dyke and changing that was on my to-do list for 2023.

Cassette 50 became a regular advertiser in SINCLAIR user while the PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD adverts were phased out early in 1983. There doesn't initially seem to have a lot of coordination between Guy and Nigel. The April 1983 issue of SINCLAIR USER carries an advert for UTS on page 33, in their quarter-page format, and a half-page advert for Cascade on page 76. The same month also sees YOUR COMPUTER carry two adverts, page 6 for Cascade and page 63 for UTS. After this it looks as if Guy and Nigel try to divide up the magazine adverts more sensibly. UTS (Guy) adverts tend to appear in COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES while Cascade (Nigel) mostly advertises in YOUR COMPUTER and SINCLAIR USER . By early summer 1983 both companies are routinely using the half page advert. The one below is the UTS variant.

C&VG
June 1983 page 114

A couple of points make this UTS advert stand out. One is the addition of an address, 53 Lincoln Grove, (a residential address) under the PO Box number. According to Guy, in RETRO GAMER, Nigel's home in Wales proved more attractive to customers than the PO Box he had to use because of mortgage constraints. Adding the house number and street to the UTS advert might be an attempt to make the company seem more established but it's a risk if your mortgage has restrictions on using your home for business. This UTS advert also offers Cassette 50 on nine different formats. The compilation was originally available on 12, but the Acorn Atom, Sharp, and New Brain versions have been dropped; although Cascade continues to offer them when they run adverts in YOUR COMPUTER and SINCLAIR USER. At the bottom left of this UTS advert is a note that the advert is for the "CASCADE U.T.S. GROUP"  and, there's another note, "cash paid for games -contact us now!" pixelatron.com tracked down the author of one of the Cassette 50 games in 2010. Matthew Lewis wrote Galaxy Defence which starts appearing on the Cascade adverts as game number 45 around January 1985. He recalls: "There was an ad in our local newspaper, The Argus. It was probably the smallest ad in the paper – a tiny little box, black-and-white, asking for Spectrum games to be sent to some address. I don’t think it even had a company name on, just an address somewhere not too far outside South Wales." An address not to far outside South Wales, that sounds like Llandogo. Disappointingly a search of the British Newspaper Archive reveals nothing. Well nothing except this.

BRISTOL EVENING POST
14th November 1983

Mr N. Stevens of Llandogo? I think it's fair to assume that is Nigel Stevens of Cascade, but who are they recruiting? We'll come back to that later. I can't find any trace of the games wanted advert on the British Newspaper Archive. Matthew makes a couple of interesting points in his interview. First, about the advert itself: "It was just an approachable ad – it didn’t scare me. If it had been a bigger software house, someone I knew, then I wouldn’t have sent anything off." Secondly: "A cheque arrived for £10... But the letter did say that by cashing the cheque, I’d give up all rights to the game." The whole operation was so low key Matthew didn't even realise Galaxy Defence had been published.

C&VG
September 1983 page 140

C&VG
November 1983 page 144

September 1983 saw a new format advert appear; at least in C&VG. The YOUR COMPUTER adverts continue unchanged all the way up to the end of the year which makes me wonder if they were block-booked. The number of formats supported has decreased from nine to seven; the Lynx has been dropped and the BBC has been omitted by mistake -it would be added back in to subsequent adverts. Then in November 1983 Cascade entered the wonderful world of colour. They ran a Christmas 1983 campaign of full page colour; although only for the Spectrum and VIC-20 tapes. Were these the best selling versions and worth an extra push? Cascade remind me of Addictive Games. They both built success on the back of a single title converted to multiple formats. They both also invested in their first colour adverts at the same time, although Cascade would revert to black and white half page adverts after Christmas 1983 while Addictive never looked back. The main thing to note from this advert is that the address of the company has changed.

 Suite 4, 1-3 Haywra Crescent, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG1

UTS is dead. Long live Cascade. The success of Cassette 50 prompted Nigel Stevens to move to Harrogate where he and Guy Wilhelmy formally founded Cascade Games Ltd, company number 01755554 registered on 23rd September 1983. Going back to the small classified advert, I think that could be Nigel Stevens using his Llandogo address to recruit sales people for Cascade. It's possible Cascade had ambitions to move away from mail order and into the shops, as both Bug-Byte and Imagine were doing around this time; and look at the note on the colour advert: "Dealers & Stockists enquiries welcome." As it turned out Cassette 50 was a mail order phenomenon. Guy later recalled the tape sold "hundreds of thousands of copies."

Cascade fell into a well practiced routine across 1984. If you picked up a computer magazine there was a good chance you'd see the standard half-page black and white advert with occasional incremental changes. A Commodore 64 version, advertised from around June 1984, is joined later in the year by conversions to the Acorn Electron and Oric Atmos in November 1984. The compilation also makes it overseas. EL ORDENADOR PERSONAL MAGAZINE carries an advert for the Spanish version using the Cascade and Cassette 50 name. Here's an advert from New Zealand magazine NZ BITS & BYTES (August 1984 page 89) and one with familiar artwork from Norwegian magazine HJEMMEDATA (April 1984 page 57) where Cassette 50 is being sold by a company with the disturbing name of Jethro Hot Stuff. "WE DO IT THE 'HARD' WARE WITH SOFTWARE," is their slogan. The consistency of advertising copy and artwork across different countries makes me think Cassette 50 was sold to overseas companies on a franchise basis with companies free to use as much of the marketing and brand as they wanted.

1984 ticks into 1985. Cascade runs with a lower profile through the first two thirds of the year but then they are back with a bang from September 1985.

CRASH
September 1985 page 51

"I realised at some point that Cascade had become a marketing company rather than a software house and most of the profits were being ploughed back into advertising to keep the company at the forefront,” Guy told wizwords.net. "I just had this crazy idea that we should give away a watch that retailed for £15 away free with a £9.95 compilation and... took a massive commercial decision.” The decision paid off, sales of Cassette 50 rose again and Guy recalls that "we were taking up the entire output of a watch factory in Hong Kong." I came in here after seeing the September 1985 advert in CRASH.  Fortunately this fool and his money were not parted. I could never persuade anyone to write a cheque for me. I know what you're wondering. Did buyers in Norway and New Zealand get offered the watch? The answer... I don't think so. But look here's an Australian advert from AUSTRALIAN PERSONAL COMPUTER (December 1985 page 165) using more familiar, edited, artwork. For those of you keeping count, Cassette 50 is available on twelve formats again, an Amstrad version has been added.

Cascade wanted to be a real software house and in 1985 they developed a flight simulator called ACE. It cost £40,000 to develop and that money all came from Cassette 50. ACE got respectable reviews. A sequel followed in 1987. Pirates of the Barbary Coast, a 1986 game, caused a spat with MicroProse who claimed the logo on the packaging was too similar to their game Pirates.

Cascade took a tough line telling PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD: "Ours was out first, and in any case the packaging isn't similar. We have used Letraset which happens to be similar. and the copyright for that rests with Letraset, not Microprose or anybody else." Nothing seems to have come from the dispute. Cassette 50 was still available, although, unless anyone knows differently, 1987 seems to be the last year it was on sale. It's on sale in YOUR SINCLAIR (June 1987 page 42) as part of a buy one, get one free offer. The compilation is virtually four years old at this point, and at this late stage it's also available on disk under the imaginative title of Disk 50. Cascade's big game for 1987 was 19 Part 1 -Boot Camp "inspired by" according to the back of the box, "the Paul Hardcastle song of the same name." The song was released in 1985, and as ZZAP!64 noted in their review: "Nineteen has missed out on musical topicality, and no doubt is intended to cash in on the recent fad of films based on the Vietnam war. Boot Camp is very similar to Combat School... three of the four events are reworkings of Konami's army-training sub games." A sequel 19 Part 2 with the subtitle Combat Zone, or possibly Viet Nam, never appeared.

The company name changed to Artronic Products in 1988. It's not clear why. Mobygames cites "financial problems," but a lot of companies rebranded in the late eighties. This was around the same time that Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic. In 1990 a Receiver was appointed but Artronic seems to come out of receivership in 1993 although Companies House records them as inactive until finally dissolved in 2018.

May 2022

Cascade's old office proved surprisingly difficult to find. Even now I'm not sure I've got it 100% right. Haywra Crescent is a short road off a roundabout which merges into East Parade after about 100 metres. There are only really about four poorly numbered buildings. Haywra Court, a care home, takes up most of the crescent, next is a probation service building, and then a school uniform shop.  Now the most likely suspect for Cascade's ex-office was the school uniform shop but Google manages to tell me its address is both 63 East Parade and 1-3 Haywra Crescent. Who to believe? Obviously I chose the latter but not before I circled the block half a dozen times trying to interrogate Google for better information while also trying not to look like a burglar, Harrogate Pharmacy, in the photo above, has an address of Unit 2, 1-3 Haywra Crescent (although it's actually on Bower Street, aargh).

I've got addresses for four companies who sold Cassette 50 around the world. If you can, please grab a picture and send it to shoutingintoawell@yahoo.com or Sham Mountebank on Twitter. Norway and Spain should be the easiest to find. Jethro Hot Stuff were at Kjelsåsvn. 51 - Oslo 4. Spanish Cascade had an address of C/ Cristobal Bordiu, 35 Madrid-3. The Australian version of Cassette 50  was sold by Softpac Enterprises but their advert lists two addresses under PO BOX numbers which might not be locatable; P.O.BOX 285 Glenroy Vic. 3046 and BOX - 2350 Sth Hedland WA. 672. Annoyingly, New Zealand company Young Generation Electronics traded under a PO BOX number, P.O. BOX 61 8

Papakura.

UPDATE- to my eternal shame I've just had to go through this entry and correct the repeated references to Oslo being in Sweden. It isn't. It's in Norway. Somehow "oops" doesn't begin to cover it. I'll be returning my grade A Geography GCSE to the East Anglian Examination Board on Monday and I hope this doesn't cause any problems with the annual delivery of the Christmas tree to Trafalgar Square.