Palmerstone Park House, 13 Palmerstone Road, Southampton
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| YOUR COMPUTER June/July 1981 page 28 |
"Our story begins with a ZX80 in a back room..." HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY profiled Quicksilva in March 1983 and I can't do any better than their opening line.
Nick Lambert founded Quicksilva to sell hardware which undercut the price of Sinclair's official ZX80 upgrades; a 3k memory upgrade sold for £40, compared to the £64 official price. Then he wrote a ZX80 game called Defender and Nick suddenly had a business on his hands.
Mark Eyles joined in 1981 as Quicksilva's first employee. He is also the author of an academic paper called, A first-hand account of Quicksilva and its part in the birth of the UK games industry, 1981–1982. You can find it here. It's invaluable as a resource and contains some lovely archive photos, including one of the inside of Upper Brownhill Road in 1981. I would like the directors of other companies to do the same thing. I'd be grateful if Simon Brattel of Design Design could get on this right away for delivery by the end of September.
Nick recalls Quicksilva advertising in a magazine called ZX80 INTERFACE, which doesn't seem to have made it on to the internet and also PRACTICAL ELECTRONICS, which has but I haven't been able to find an advert. What I have been able to find is the one up there, from the first issue of YOUR COMPUTER. That issue also contains similar quarter-page adverts from Bug-Byte, Mirco Power, and a full-page one from Molimerx; who were streets ahead of their rivals and had been going since 1978. Quicksilva skip issue two of YOUR COMPUTER (August/September) and resume advertising in issue three. The magazine goes monthly at this point and so do the Quicksilva adverts. Their new advert is a wall-of text which looks cluttered and more dated than the previous version. COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES joins YOUR COMPUTER on the newsagent shelves in November 1981 and Quicksilva begin advertising there from issue two. The C&VG advert is cleaner and more professional[1], someone has clearly had a rethink about the design. Software is becoming more prominent and two games are advertised, available for both the ZX80 and ZX81, QS Defender and QS Asteroids. (The wall-of-text YOUR COMPUTER advert also promoted a ZX81 game called Life which has been quietly dropped). The big innovation is cover art. The adverts boasts the games have "FULL COLOUR cassette inserts of original paintings by Steiner Lund." In 1985 Steiner Lund recalled to CRASH that:
I knew Nick Lambert and John Hollis of Quicksilva before the actual computer game thing really got going. I knew they were starting something so I did some roughs without them asking and were pretty chuffed with those so that's how I got to do the first one.
QS Defender for the ZX81 was, probably, the first UK game to have a full cover colour. This was a big innovation at the time and made Quicksilva games stand out next to their rivals.
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| Mazogs (1982) Bug-Byte and QS Defender (1981) Pictures from www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/tapefull.html |
Quicksilva was ahead on presentation. Bug-Byte was ahead at promotion. They were running full page adverts from December 1981 although initially these adverts were in a weird format that looked like four quarter-page adverts next to each other. It took until May 1982 for Quicksilva to follow suit and this was also the first time the company ran the same advert across multiple magazines (C&VG, YOUR COMPUTER, and now SINCLAIR USER), before this there had been minor differences in layout, as if each magazine had been handed a different template. The Quicksilva range now has a third game, QS Invaders.
Mark Eyles summed up these early days:
We were literally making it all up as we went along. In retrospect it is clear we were trail blazing, at the time we were racing from day to day trying to keep up with the rapid growth of the business.
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| ZX COMPUTING Aug./Sept. 1982 back cover |
OUTERSPACINGSMARTBOMBING HIGHSCORINGVADERBLASTING GAMEPLAYINGROCKCRUNCHING
FASTMOVINGCLIVEASTOUNDING
QUICKSILVA
It's a cute advert. A one-off as far as I can tell. Mark Eyles claims it was:
The first time a UK game developer had advertised in full colour.
Obviously, I'm not going to let that go unchallenged. The second issue of ZX COMPUTING went on sale from July 23rd 1982. Also on the shelves, the July issue of SINCLAIR USER which features a spot colour advert for Bug-Byte on the inside front cover. Spot colour doesn't count. It's cheaper and more limited than full colour. July's YOUR COMPUTER carries some full colour adverts but they are for hardware companies. They don't count. There's a half page advert for Acornsoft on page 24. That's full colour... but it's only half a page... do Acornsoft count as a game developer..? Even if Acornsoft don't count (they don't, I have spoken) there's a full page and full colour advert on page 103. It's for a game called Spectral INVADERS and, oh no!, its by long term rivals Bug-Byte. The July issue of YOUR COMPUTER would have been on the shelves before July 23rd 1982 so Bug-Byte win this round.
92 Northam Road, Southampton, SO2
Summer 1982, Quicksilva are on the move, which probably explains the lack of an address on the July ZX COMPUTING advert. When they resume advertising in September 1982 they are here:
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| June 2024 |
Northam Road feels sad and neglected. The old Quicksilva office is at the far end and to get there I passed a line of shops with dusty clutter filled windows. It wasn't really clear if any of these businesses were still trading. The Quicksilva end of the street is a little more cheerful. Number 92 is an end of terrace shop occupied by a place called The Hidden Wardrobe. Mark Eyles describes how it looked in 1982:
Quicksilva moved to a shop in Northam Road, Southampton that was owned by John and Polly Randall. They had previously sold leather belts, buckles and bags there, but had stopped trading. Myself and Caroline used the shop counter as a desk (see Figure 10). We had a phone and some room for stacking up boxes of games.
I don't think Caroline Hayon and Mark Eyles would recognise the area today. A dual carriageway was built in 1988 and this seems to have demolished the buildings opposite number 92 and made the street a bit of a backwater. A quick internet search reveals several news stories promising redevelopment but nothing has happened so far.
Back to September 1982. The Quicksilva advert offers two new games for Clive Sinclair's brand new ZX Spectrum. Space Intruders and Meteor Storm. They appear to be versions of QS Invaders and QS Asterioids so why do they have a different name to their ZX80 and ZX81 siblings? Maybe Quicksilva just fancied a change or, maybe, it's related to a legal action Atari launched in the summer of 1982 against Commodore, which side-swiped Bug-Byte, Program Power, and others. Check out the entry for Atari if you want to know more.
The three games in Quicksilva's pre-Spectrum catalogue were QS Defender, QS Asteroids and QS Invaders. Which large US company do you think owned the European rights to publish home computer versions of the arcade games Defender, Asteroids and Space Invaders? Clue, they had just launched a "far reaching" (POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY) legal action against unlicenced games. Go on guess. Quicksilva were not targeted in the initial Atari action but I'd be amazed if it didn't put the wind up them. And that's my theory about how QS Invaders became Space Intruders and QS Asteroids became Meteor Storm. It's a fig leaf disguise but it might be enough to protect against a lawyer browsing magazines looking for familiar names.
Quicksilva continued to expand. Mark Eyles' article again:
We were also being approached by overseas companies who wanted to distribute our games. That the business side of things was growing beyond the level we could cope with was clear. At our weekly company meeting in John’s flat in Malmesbury Road, we (me, Nick, John and Caroline) discussed how we would prepare for the future and remembered this guy who had called on Nick, in Maybush, to sell him insurance. This guy had shown an interest in what we were doing and he wore a suit, so it seemed like he must know about business. Caroline suggested we approach him (Eyles, 2016). His name was Rod Cousens and he was rapidly employed to set up an overseas sales network for Quicksilva, which he did, very efficiently. His business knows how and enthusiasm resulted in him becoming invaluable almost overnight and soon he took on the role of managing director.
Rod Cousens ends up playing a big role in the UK software industry; he's the reason why the story of Quicksilva overlaps with Electric Dreams and Activision. The overseas network quickly paid off. Quicksilva gets mentioned in in a few US magazine, including COMPUTE in October 1982:
A New York firm. Softsync, Inc.[2]
, recently arranged to import some of that British software. Softsync's first two releases are arcade-style space games. They are being sold in Britain by a company called Quicksilva under the names Asteroids and Scramble. However, Softsync is repackaging and selling the games here as Meteorites and Red Alert...
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| CREATIVE COMPUTING December 1982 page 424 |
Both are one-player games compatible with the new Timex TS- 1000, a version of the ZX-81 that Sinclair has licensed the watch company to market in the U.S. Both games come on cassette tape and require the 16K RAM memory expansion module.
Quicksilva entered the new year with a bang as they developed the art of hype. "QS Produce the most ULTRA-MEGA-AMAZING games in the entire known universe!" was the tag line on their January 1983 advert. This was followed in March by yelling the question "WHO ON EARTH COULD HAVE CONCEIVED QUICKSILVA SOFTWARE?" For the first time Quicksilva was offering games for non-Sinclair computers; Tornado on the VIC-20 and Magic Window for the Atari computers. HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY launched at the start of March 1983 and Quicksilva were there to offer a total of £2500 of software as a prize for the launch competition. Their interview with Nick Lambert followed in issue two and gave some idea of the scale of the business:
Every two months our turnover has doubled -that's the kind of rate we're growing at. It's absolutely fantastic...
Among the countries Quicksilva sells to are Iceland, Chile, Australia, Holland, Denmark, Israel, America, South Africa, Spain, Belgium, and Greece...
Among the countries Quicksilva sells to are Iceland, Chile, Australia, Holland, Denmark, Israel, America, South Africa, Spain, Belgium, and Greece...
Quicksilva's programmers, mostly freelance, get 25 per cent of the cover price of each program, excluding VAT...
Nick expects Quicksilva's turnover for the year ending this month to be £1/2 to £1m. And next year he predicts a turnover of £5m-£10m, in the UK alone.
Palmerstone Park House, 13 Palmerstone Road
Spring and early summer 1983 proved to be hectic. First, Quicksilva moved to Palmerstone Park House a building which I think was converted to a residential property around 2020, judging by the pictures on Streetview. That's why there's no photo of it here (or of 95 Upper Brownhill Road). It's a two story building facing a thick line of trees which screen Palmerstone Park from the road.
No sooner was the move over and done with than Quicksilva got into a legal dispute over a software exchange scheme run by a London based shop called Software Centre. (POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY, 24-30 March 1983 page 1). The scheme, called Buy'n Try, offered to pay 80% of the original price on any software returned to the shop within six months of purchase. Not unreasonably software companies regarded this as a licence to copy. Nick Lambert told PCW: "I think we have a good chance to stop them. If we don't try, we might as well all pack up and go home now." Quicksilva applied for an injunction, which was turned down. Another hearing was scheduled for 22nd March and both parties reached an agreement in time for the 7-13 April issue of PCW. Software Centre agree to reduce the return window to one month, and both parties were responsible for their own costs.
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| SINCLAIR USER December 1982 page 2 |
Then, at the start of May Nick Lambert and John Hollis stepped down from the day-to-day running of Quicksilva:
"Quicksilva has now got to the stage where it is operating smoothly -developing, releasing and marketing new games," explained Nick Lambert.
"John Hollis and I will now be less involved with the everyday running of the company, leaving us time for other things."
"John Hollis and I will now be less involved with the everyday running of the company, leaving us time for other things."
Rod Cousens was appointed general manager. Then a couple of months later, Quicksilva opened an American office in San Antonio, Texas,
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| COMPUTER GAZETTE November 1983 page 132 |
426 West Nakoma is a flat roof, single story, commercial building made of sand-coloured brick. It's home to a company called Fusion Pool Services. Obviously I'm never going to get to San Antonio, I mention this in the vague hope that one day someone will send me a photo (whereweretheynow@gmail.com). Mark Eyles described the place in a news report for CRASH, May 1984.
We watched out the window as we came in to land looking for the Quicksilva offices which are visible from the plane. We landed finally in a clear cool Texan sunset.
The following morning we arrived at the offices and started to sort out the orders and enquiries from the [Consumer Electronics] show. Quicksilva Inc is well established and has its own Disk Duplicating facilities, stores and functions 24 hours-a-day, Cassettes are copied by a large duplicating company a mile down the road, the covers are printed round the corner and lunchtime is spent in a Mexican restaurant with Guacamole and Nachos (these are food and not friends!)
55 Haviland Road Ferndown Industrial Estate Wimborne, Dorset
Quicksilva positioned itself at the centre of the UK software scene and never seemed far from the news. They were a founder member of the Guild of Software Houses. They organised, with Bug-Byte, an industry awards dinner called Quick Byte where small Oscar-like busts called Clives were given away to the winners of assorted humorous categories; the Grubby award, The Most Awesome Use of the Word Awesome award, ...Feel the Width award. They set up a Quicksilva fan club called The Game Lords. And they were the subject of a complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency after someone objected to a banner on their advert "free universe with every tape (offer subject to availability)". The ASA decided not to pursue the complaint.
The "free universe with every tape" advert brought in a new address in Dorset. The company never moved from Southampton but the mail order address was updated. Annoyingly I was in Bournemouth earlier this year, so that was a missed opportunity.
1983 is Quicksilva in all their pomp. They released around 33 games in a single year across the ZX81, Spectrum, Commodore 64, Dragon, and BBC Micro. One game which didn't come out in 1983, but should have done was a Spectrum version of Atari's Battlezone. The author of the game, username SusanW, recently told the story on the Spectrum Computing forum, and they've very kindly allowed me to nab their account of the game's development, and added a little more detail:
[Battlezone] was a handy supplement to my student lifestyle! But it sadly never made the mega-bucks. A big problem was that it was held up by the spectre of legal action from Atari - the game was actually finished in autumn 1983, and I think at that time there was still quite a lot of life in the "arcade classic clone" genre, so it could have gone out for Christmas '83 at a push and done reasonably well. But at some point (early/mid '83?), Atari made copyright noises towards some company (Imagine? Bug-Byte? maybe? can't remember), and accurate clones were suddenly problematic!
John Hollis had warned me that there was an issue - my diary from the time (1983-09-07) says "phoned John (Hollis), decided on Ship battle", and I converted it all to naval warfare: "Gunboat Attack".
I visited their office just once (1983-11-30) to deliver the finished Gunboat Attack. Diary says "talked about flying with John and Paul. Went to pub + then came home" (Paul would be Paul Cooper). The office where we chatted was up some stairs - I don't recall having a tour of the facility though. John picked me up from the station, so I'm not certain I even had the address.
I never heard much detail about the negotiation with Atari. After I'd delivered GBA, things went very quiet until Feb'84. Then (1984-02-11) Paul Cooper told me QS wouldn't be able to sell it after all. I spoke to John the next day who said he'd see what he could do. I heard about the possible QS deal from John on the 20th, there was some renegotiating, and then on 7th Mar, I wrote "Got QS/Atari deal!". By April I'd done the GBA to BZ conversion, and it was launched at a press event in London on 13th Jun."
I'm really envious of those diary entries. It was a habit I never developed. And even if I did it would probably just read "played Jetpac" "played Manic Miner" "played Tranz Am" "played Horace and the Spiders".
When I wrote about Atari, I was confused why they allowed Quicksilva to release an official arcade conversion of Battlezone instead of keeping it for their Atarisoft label. I speculated it was a result of the split of Atari, following the sale the of home computer division to Jack Tramiel, which allowed the arcade division (who wouldn't care about home computers) to sell the rights on to Quicksilva. It's clear from the diary dates that this can't be the case. The Quicksilva deal for Battlezone was done by 7th March 1984, well before the Jack Tramiel sale in July 1984. Maybe Atari already knew the Atarisoft label was doomed as early as March 1984.
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| C&VG February 1984 page 2 |
As the two major shareholders, it was Nick and John's decision. Personally both Rod and I would have been happy to keep going, but with Nick and John keen to sell that wasn't possible. Rod negotiated the deal, and did a brilliant job of it. No one else around at the time got as good a deal as us, though some tried later when times got a little leaner. In retrospect it was a good time to sell, right at the peak of the first wave of the industry's success.
PCW reported:
"Negotiations have been held over eight months, following an approach from the Chief Executive of the Argus Group, and they reached their conclusion on May 29 at 11.30pm."
Co-founders and principle shareholders Nick Lambert and John Hollis have now left the company... Rod Cousens continues as managing director... while Mike Eyles becomes creative design executive.
Co-founders and principle shareholders Nick Lambert and John Hollis have now left the company... Rod Cousens continues as managing director... while Mike Eyles becomes creative design executive.
Sales of this sort would become more common in the second half of the eighties but once again Quicksilva were ahead of the pack. However the sale had an impact on the company as Mark Eyles described:
People don't always realise that we had our hands tied at Quicksilva for almost a year during those negotiations. We were unable to make decisions without referring them to Argus Press first. I guess they were worried we'd run off with all the good bits and leave them with nothing. This made running the company very difficult and meant that we were losing ground during that year rather than growing at the rate we would otherwise have done. I guess if things had been different then it would have been great to have continued to build up Quicksilva, but then if things had been different maybe there wouldn't have been a Quicksilva.
Quicksilva does seem to falter in 1984. Later, September 1985, CRASH reported that Rod Cousens:
attributes the lacklustre performance of the firm since the takeover to the trauma of eight months of negotiation
Quicksilva was run as an independent company. Check the small print of their adverts and packaging. There's no mention of Argus Press Software. Maybe if things had played out differently the company could have recovered. Instead, Argus Press Software yanked the chain and brought Quicksilva to heel in 1985.
Liberty House 222 Regent Street, London, W1R
or Carlton Lodge, Carlton Crescent, Southampton?
or Carlton Lodge, Carlton Crescent, Southampton?
Things continued under their own momentum for a while. But it was not the same. In the end Argus Press closed down the office in Southampton and absorbed Quicksilva into their London offices.
That's Mark Eyles describing the end of Quicksilva in his interview. There's a sequence of events reported in the gaming press which make me think Argus set out to curtail Quicksilva's independence, but it's important to remember I'm just a bloke on the internet so treat what follows with caution.
In February 1985 Argus Press Software moved to new offices in Liberty House, Regent Street. A move like this would have been planned for some time and it would be logical to bring all the branches of the company under one roof. Did Argus press tell Quicksilva their presence was required in London. If they did, could this hypothetically be one of the reasons behind the Christmas 1984 departure of Mark Eyles and Caroline Hayon? The pair went off to set up a company making holograms
The April 1985 issue of COMPUTER GAMER contains a huge 16 page advertorial by Quicksilva, modestly headlined "1985 the year the game lords conquer the world". At the bottom of page 5 there is a note that:
...the company has, for the fourth time, outgrown its offices.
For some time they have been looking around the Southampton area for alternative office accommodation and are shortly to move into the building. Quicksilva's new address will be: Carlton Lodge, Carlton Crescent, Southampton.
COMPUTER GAMER was published on the fourth Friday of each month and the April 1985 issue would have been on the shelves on 23rd March. The lead time for a big colour supplement could potentially have been as much as a month so it would have been in preparation around the date of Argus' February 1985 move. And COMPUTER GAMER was published by Argus Specialist Publications. This, and the timing, makes that short paragraph announcing the company's intent to find new offices in Southampton seem like a traditional two-fingered gesture of scorn to the suggestion of a London move,
Then, at the end of March, POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY reported (28 March-3 April 1985 page 4):
Uncertainty following QS moves
"Quicksilva is moving premises from Southampton to London, The company will be housed in parent company Argus Press Software's offices in the West End.
None of the eight staff at Quicksilva, including managing director Rod Cousens will be moving to London and most of the employees have already been made redundant. Rod said, "I won't be going to London with the company, but at the same time, I certainly don't want to leave the software industry.
Argus maintains that the move will be more convenient for Quicksilva with tape manufacturers and distributors nearer to hand.
HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY (published by Argus Specialist Publications) had a different take on the London move:
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| C&VG April 1988 page 41 |
It's good to know this was what Quicksilva believed. I was a bit concerned what with the departures of Mark Eyles, Caroline Hayon, Rod Cousens, and the other employees who had already been made redundant. Appropriately, the date of Quicksilva's move to London was 1st April.
Quicksilva carried on as a label until 1988. It just survived the management buy out which turned Argus Press Software into Grandslam Entertainment. April 1988 saw Grandslam advertise a game called Power Pyramids using the Quicksilva brand. The game was held over for release until the autumn of 1988 at which point the second round of adverts carried the Grandslam branding but the packaging, presumably designed in spring, still used the Quicksilva name, for the final time. In a nice coincidence, the art for the cover and advert was by Steiner Lund.
[1] First time out, something goes wrong with the reproduction of the advert and the boxes where the two game covers will be displayed in latter issues instead contains the enigmatic message "CONTROLS FEATURES".
[2] SoftSync Inc. also released Crystal's Zeus Assembler and, proving the Atlantic traffic wasn't one-way, licenced Bug Blaster and Cyberzone in return.. SoftSync Inc. were based at PO BOX 480 Murray Hill Station, New York, NY 10156.
Leave a comment, or follow me on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social and Instagram, shammountebank. Photos of the San Antonio office of Quicksilva and the New York office of SoftSync can be sent to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Please.
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