Unit 8, Canal Side
Industrial Estate, Woodbine Street East, Rochdale, OL16
A was Doug Anderson and F was Mike Fitzgerald and when they got together it was murder to establish a software house in Manchester. A&F Software is now mainly remembered for a single game, Chuckie Egg, but the company was more than a one-hit-wonder. It shares some similarities with Silversoft. Both companies were pioneers of the early computer games industry and struggled as the market became more established and professional in the mid-eighties, and finally sold out to a bigger brand. The first question, of course is, is the company called A&F or AF or A+F or A'n'F? The answer, it was known as all four at various times across its history. I'll try to use the correct version as we go on because I find that's the kind of perverse pedantry I find funny.
10 Wilpshire Avenue, Longsight, Manchester, M12
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| YOUR COMPUTER December 1981 page 89 |
Mike Fitzgerald give a nice two-page interview to HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY (12 April 1983 page 18) which gives some insight into the early days of A&F. Mike and Doug had both been made redundant from ICL and Mike invested his redundancy money in an Acorn Atom. The pair were unimpressed with the standard of Atom software and decided they could do better. Some companies inch into life and others appear fully formed. A&F was the latter. Their first advert in the December 1981 issue of YOUR COMPUTER offers two games, Early Warning and Polecat, for the Acorn Atom; both appear to be AWOL from online archives. Behind the scenes, 50 copies were made of each game and £250 was invested in advertising. "Within the week, we had to do 100 more of each. After that, we never looked back." A&F was run out of "Mike's boxroom and Doug's flat." The advert requests cheques and POs to be made payable to ANDERSON which makes me wonder if 10 Wilpshire Avenue was his house. Cylon Attack was added to the list of games in March, and was the main attraction by April 1982 in a half page advert which included the following description: "This 3D all action game in high resolution graphics, takes you into the Science Fiction world of Interstellar Wars." Battlestar Galactica was doing the rounds of the ITV regions at the time and using the name Cylon Attack was a canny move, although the game was completely unlicenced. June 1982 saw the addition of games for the newly released BBC Micro. A&F Software advertised pretty much every month in YOUR COMPUTER. The company's growth can be tracked as success allows expansion from quarter to half-page adverts, and then to full page ones, and then artwork, and spot colour. YOUR COMPUTER might have been expected to return the favour and credit A&F correctly in their Advertisers Index but the magazine seemed to have problems with ampersands; the best they could manage was A F Software.
A&F were one of several companies contacted by Atari as part of a crackdown on copyright infringements of their Pac-Man licence. Micro Power and Bug-Byte were also involved although the main thrust of the Atari (UK) action was against Commodore (UK). Mike Fitzgerald told POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY:
"The letter from Atari requested us to send them a copy of our Polecat program for the Acorn Atom to look at and play. If they decided that the program is not an infringement then Atari would send us the recommended retail price of the cassette.
We have no intention of sending them a copy of Polecat. It does not, in our view, infringe the Atari copyright. If Atari wish, they are quite welcome to call and we will demonstrate the program.
Whatever happens we are not removing our program Polecat from the market and it will need a court order for us to do so.
A and F fully intend to go ahead and develop the Polecat program for any computer we choose."
830 Hyde Road, Gorton, Manchester, M18
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 21 October 1982 page 4 |
"a friend of mine had a job in a computer shop and knew I was after a Saturday job, so he suggested I get in touch with A&F. They sold computers and games and in the back of their shop had two or three programmers writing games. To start with, I was getting the bacon butties and cups of tea, serving customers and generally helping out."
A few adverts exist for Micro-Link as a shop in its own right but also plugging it as "The home of A & F Software".
On the back page of the September 1982 issue of YOUR COMPUTER there's an advert for a company called Control Technology; who are more commonly known as C-TECH. Their 1982 game Krazy Kong is often regarded as one of the worst ZX Spectrum games but that's another story. C-TECH advertised in YOUR COMPUTER almost as regularly as AF, and their September 1982 advert has two oddities. One, they're selling a ZX Spectrum game called Polecat. Two, the address of C-TECH's "new showroom now open" is given as 830 Hyde Road, Gorton, Manchester. What's going on? C-TECH and A&F were loosely connected by Nigel Alderton who sold Rocket Raider, his first game, to C-TECH, plus this blog says that AF would, "later take on C*Tech’s Debdale Park showroom."
Were the two companies connected? How else to account for C-TECH selling Polecat? It's definitely the same game. Here's the blurb from the AF's advert: "Avoiding the hungry Polecat, make your way through the maze to the surface, and steal the food growing there. The maze changes when all the available food has been returned home. Millions of random mazes and auto score." And here's the text from C-TECH's: "A completely original and ingenious maze program in which you are a rabbit and the computer is a Polecat. The action takes place in one of over a million underground mazes. The plot involves the rabbit collecting carrots and bringing them back to his burrow whilst avoiding the attention of the ravenous Polecat."
Unfortunately not much has survived of either AF's Atom and BBC versions of Polecat, and C-TECH's Spectrum version. Did C-TECH licence the game for the Spectrum? Did they rip AF off? Was this somehow connected to the Atari letter? Did the author of Polecat shop the Spectrum version to C-TECH because, at the time, AF were not supporting machines outside of Acorn's range? There's no way to find out. Then in November and December 1982 C-TECH undercut AF by selling two BBC Micro games called Early Warning and Lunar Lander cheaper than AF's titles with the same name (November and December for comparison). Or are they the same games? It's really odd.
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| YOUR COMPUTER December 1982 page 138 |
The observant among you will have noticed there's no picture of 830 Hyde Road. Streetview shows the building was still a shop in August 2009 -Debdale Offlicence & Newsagents- but since then its been split into ground floor and first floor flats and I don't like taking photos of places where people live. Meanwhile, October 1983 saw the company rebrand back to A&F Software.
Unit 8, Canal Side Industrial Estate, Woodbine Street East, Rochdale, OL16
Where's Chuckie Egg? Nigel Alderton told RETRO GAMER: "They set up a little workstation for me and encouraged me to code during weekends and the school holidays...It got to the point where they wanted it finished and they said ‘its finished, you don’t need to put any more into it’." The game was finished and picked up its first reviews in October 1983. "It is destined to become an all time Spectrum classic," said POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY. "A most enjoyable and fun game and very addictive," was HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY's verdict. It took the monthly magazines longer to get their reviews printed but they were equally positive. "Highly addlictive, and very good," said CRASH -knocking off a few points because they considered it expensive at a RRP £7.90. SINCLAIR USER's sub-editor came back from a liquid lunch and headlined the review "Ladders unsafe in duck game,"
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| December 2022 |
Chuckie Egg carries a new address in Rochdale, north of Manchester. This address starts appearing on adverts from December 1983. I came into Rochdale via the M62 and swung off at junction 21. It was a short drive from there through the modern warehouses on the edge of town to Woodbine Street East which is narrow road with terraced red brick houses on one side facing a giant historic warehouse which seems to run most of the length of the road; with the Canal Side Industrial Estate at the far end. Unit 8 is round the back of the estate, at the rear of the buildings on the left of the photo above. I don't know what was there in 1983 but I'll bet it wasn't the corrugated green sheds you can see today. The gates to the estate were locked. Nackers! Somehow I'd never considered this possibility. This was as close as I was going to get. I couldn't see the canal but I could hear Canada Geese honking away. The canal is, of course, the Rochdale Canal and, at the other end in Manchester, is Lock 92 where Ocean set themselves up when they moved from their more famous Central Street address in 1992. If you got an inner tube you could drift the 13-odd miles from A&F's building to Ocean's in a real life version of Atari's Toobin. Let me know if you try this.
Not long after A&F moved to Rochdale they were targeted by a "CND supporter." The CND symbol was painted on their front door and a note pushed through the letter box: "Your games breed violence among children. They will grow up with war in mind. Education, not devastation." The subsequent report in the Manchester Evening News (Friday 3 February 1984 page 20) is a classic of local journalism, including the picture of Mike Fitzgerald waving what looks like an air raid warden's tin hat; which presumably the photographer brought along.
The success of Chuckie Egg made A&F pretty big wheels in the software industry. PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS quoted Mike Fitzgerald on the perils of microparents who "dutifully ring up software houses when their child's program has been collecting dust in some managing director’s in-tray." (December 22 January 4 1984 page 2). "99 per cent of programs we get in aren't up to standard" said Mike and added "lots of parents are naïve about micros when they see something a child's done." He also gave some sales figures for A&F’s "current best-selling program" (almost certainly Chuckie Egg). It, "has sold 20,000 copies in five weeks and the programmer who wrote it will gross 15 per cent on sale prices less VAT — an average of 44p per copy." At the far end of the year, Doug Anderson was invited down to the PERSONAL COMPUTER GAMER offices (November 1984) to take part in "The Great PCG Programmer Shoot-Out". He came third.
Nigel Alderton moved on to a day job at Ocean while A&F converted Chuckie Egg to as many formats as possible. By September 1984 it was advertised as available for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Dragon, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron; in 1984 an MSX version was released. 1985 saw versions for the Amstrad CPC, Atari, and Tatung Einstein (licenced to the Einsoft label).
The start of 1984 was a more difficult trading time for software companies. Trading conditions in June 1984 were described by Imagine's Sales Director Sylvia Jones, in the BBC2 documentary Commercial Breaks: "It's never been as slow as it is now. Never. It wasn't like this, this time last year. It's slowed down dramatically in the last three months." A&F, like a lot of software companies, became vexed by the subject of piracy which was impacting on reduced sales.
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| MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS January 23 1984 page 5 |
January 1984 saw A&F offering a £5000 reward to "anyone who can produce a foolproof way of preventing copying or duplication of programs." Mike Fitzgerald told the MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS that the firm, which employed 10 people, "could employ 10 times as many... and increase turnover from £1 million to £10 million if it wasn't for illegal copying." On a more trivial note, the report also revealed it was Mike Fitzgerald who lived in Longsight, so the 10 Wilpshire Avenue address must have been his. CRASH reported on Mike Fitzgerald's discovery that software was being transmitted over the air by British radio hams (May 1984 page 5). "Mike claims that software houses are currently losing between £5,000 and £20,000 per title, a total loss conservatively amounting to £26 million a year, through the transmissions of games software over the air waves between British radio hams." A&F revealed in June they had spent £20,000 to "to enable an anti-copying device to become 95 per cent effective." (THE MICRO USER June 1984 page 23). But, by November 1984 THE MICRO USER reported that, "Piracy of its products on a massive scale has forced leading software house A&F to abandon in-house development of games for the BBC Micro." (November 1984 page 25). "It costs us £35,000 to develop and market a new program and we need to sell 22,000 copies to break even. Wholesale piracy is cutting into sales to such an extent we’re walking a financial tightrope."
There's not much information online about the latter days of A&F, so some of this is going to have to be inferred. The Acorn range of computers had always been at the heart of A&F and the decision to stop support seems to have knocked the company's confidence. The big release of 1985, in fact virtually the only one, was Chuckie Egg 2. Nigel Alderton wasn't involved. Chuckie Egg 2 is radically different to the original. It's an arcade adventure with a focus on exploration and occasional problem solving, in comparison to the original's platform thrills. Chuckie Egg 2 attracted positive reviews but didn't have anything like the influence of the original. From my perspective, the most important thing about it is the final redesign of the company logo. The company is now A'n'F and they have a slogan "nulli secundus" which as any ex-Coldstream Guards officer knows translates to "second to none."
Then... something happened.
HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY (16 July 1985 page 7) carries a report that A'n'F will be cooperating with M C Lothlorien and "organising the launch of games under a new label in the Autumn." As far as I'm aware no launch takes place.
Next, POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY carries a letter from reader Shelley Baron of Bushey Heath (27 FEBRUARY-5 MARCH 1986 page 27). Shelley needs help with Chuckie Egg 2. She tried phoning A'n'F "but found it has gone out of business."
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 20-26 MARCH 1986 page 17 |
Three weeks later POPULAR COMPUTING carries this advert for a company called Icon Design Limited. This is, possibly, the company registered at Companies House as company number 01987648, incorporated on 10 February 1986 and dissolved on 8 June 1993. Icon Design is based at A'n'F's address.
Two weeks after that, (3 -9 APRIL 1986 page 6) the magazine prints a reply to Shelly Baron's letter: "Further to the letter which appeared in Popular, 5 March in the Arcade Avenue section. I would like to take the opportunity to straighten the record.... I would ask everyone to please note that A 'n' F Software are fully operational from their normal address." There is no name, the letter is simply credited to A'n'F Software.
ZX COMPUTING (April 1986 page 26) runs a preview of A'n'F's new game Core. The preview starts by noting: "A'n' F Software who will be eternally remembered for their all time Speccy Classic Chuckie Egg (my hi-score is about 750,000 can anyone beat that?), ran into financial problems a while back and went out of business... now that the A'n' F name has been bought by Argus Press Software, The Core is about to be released." When Core is advertised in CRASH (May 1986 page 39) it is credited to A'n' F Software but the address has changed to the then current Argus Press Software Group address at Liberty House, 222 Regent Street, London.
A'n'F has an afterlife. The last four games released on the label come after the Argus takeover; Core, Xeno, Agent Orange, and Wibstars. Icon Design are credited on 33 games at Mobygames from 1986 to 1989. Wibstars is one of them, it must have been odd for the Icon Design team working on an A'n'F game for another company. Icon Design produced a few other games for the other labels orbiting the Argus group, Quicksilva and Grandslam, and wrote games for Mastertronic.
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| THE GAMES MACHINE February 1989 page 72 |
Chuckie Egg was unexpectedly advertised again in February 1989, for the Atari ST and Amgia by a company called Pick & Choose; based at 45 Bury New Road, Manchester. Their name and logo seem clearly designed to echo that of A'n'F. "LOOK OUT FOR CHUCKIE EGG 2," shouted the advert and the sequel followed, again for the Amiga and Atari ST in August 1989. The second strange afterlife of A'n'F is revealed in interviews at the Chuckie Egg Professional's Resource Kit.
Ste Cork, programmer of the PC conversion of Chuckie Egg in 1989, remembers it as, "a simple game written for a dying company." "By '86 there weren't many people from the original company, and only Doug Anderson (the A of A&F) left of the management, but he'd reverted to programmer-only status and it was by then being run by the managers of Lothlorien." Lothlorien folded before the PC port could be released but the Atari ST and Amiga versions were converted by Pete Waterfield, and Icon Design supplied them to Pick & Choose Ltd. Pete Waterfield wasn't a fan of either game. Both games contain a cheat mode which, when activated, adds a scrolling message to the title screen. "Written at M.C. Lothlorien Ltd by Pete Waterfield of Hale.. I do not really enjoy writing games like this but somebody has to.." And what of Pick & Choose? The Chuckie Egg Professional's Resource Kit describe the company as "a general retailer, with little or no aspirations to move seriously into software publishing, so once the range of Chuckie Egg titles became unprofitable and the stocks gradually sold out, the official Chuckie Egg brand slipped quietly away from the software scene, unnoticed by most."
Obviously that should be the closing quote but the strange afterlife of A'n'F has a third and final act. Two years after Chuckie Egg faded away, THE ONE magazine ran an article about, what else but, software piracy (October 1991 page 48): "Two months ago, 9.000 disks were seized from a company called Pick 'n' Choose. The firm is now awaiting a court case, with the main instigator facing charges for 96 different offences" The only follow up I've been able to locate came three months later in AMIGA COMPUTING (January 1992 page 15), "Salford-based Pick 'n' Choose were fined £19,600 and had to forfeit goods worth £16,500 as a result of a concerned computer user helping Trading Standards officers take the firm to court."
And that really does seem to be the end.
Did you work for C-TECH? What, if any, were the links between C-TECH and A&F. If you didn't work for C-TECH, did you work for A&F or Icon Design? What was their Woodbine Street East warehouse like? Did the Canada Geese cause you any problems in a real-life version of Chuckie Egg? Leave a comment, or email whereweretheynow@gmail.com and follow me on Twitter @shammountebank. It's too late for me to try and understand how a different social network works.
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