27-29 Sunbeam Road, London, NW10
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| June 2024 |
Five games. That's the story of the Games Workshop software line. Five games released across something like 10 months from September 1984 to June 1985; Battlecars, D-Day, Tower of Despair, Chaos: The Battle of Wizards, and Talisman. A short list but influential. One of those games has a fair claim to be the best ZX Spectrum game ever. Which one can it be? It's Chaos. Obviously. Chaos is brilliant. I'll get to it later.
By 1983 Games Workshop had five shops of their own across the country; Hammersmith, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and Nottingham. It would have been impossible for Games Workshop co-founders Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson not to see the computer games boom coming because they were right there in it. Games Workshop was selling software in its shops from early 1983. Penguin Books, who published the pair's Fighting Fantasy series under their Puffin imprint, were turning The Warlock of Firetop Mountain into a computer game for Christmas 1983; via Neil Mottershead and Simon Brattel of Crystal Computing. Game's Workshop's cheerful board game Apocalypse: The Game of Nuclear Devastation was licenced to Stoke Newington based Red Shift and converted to the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum. Against this background, it's perhaps inevitable that Games Workshop moved into software. What's surprising is, they didn't until the autumn of 1984.
The aim, presumably, was to launch with a range of games in time for the Christmas sales boom. It shows a degree of caution I find unusual because most big companies treated the 1984 software market like gold-rush California and were frantically staking their claim; see Atari, Thorn EMI, EMAP, K-Tel, Virgin, Argus Press, and probably others I've forgotten. The only other companies who launched with a comparable amount of planning and caution were British Telecom with their Firebird range and Mirror Group Newspapers.
November 1984 saw the launch of a campaign of full page colour adverts running in BIG K, C&VG, CRASH, and SINCLAIR USER.
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| CRASH November 1984 page 137 |
As is perhaps typical, I've just stumbled across a new source. It's DICE MEN: THE ORIGIN STORY OF GAMES WORKSHOP by Ian Livingstone, published in 2022 by Unbound. I'm sorely tempted to go back and rewrite this article from scratch but showing this process of discovery feels more authentic [1]. Even if it means I have to do a screeching handbrake turn back to 1983.
Paraphrasing, Games Workshop overstocked software in 1983 and were badly burned by subsequent lack of demand for console games and cartridges. Ian Livingstone frames this in terms of the Great Videogames Crash of 1983 and normally I'd politely disagree with this assessment but I think he might be right. When Games Workshop started selling software they appear to have done so with a distinctly American perspective:
Games Workshop began selling a range of popular computer game cassettes and cartridge games for consoles in our shops in 1982. Activision cartridges for the Atari console were the mainstay, but we also sold cartridges for the Intellivision, ColecoVision, Vectrex, and the Philips games console. We even sold niche Apollo, CBS Electronics, Imagic and Spectravision cartridges.
Spot the problem? None of this was what UK buyers wanted. I'm not sure how Games Workshop ended up with such a USA-skewed perspective but its possibly a result of the regular business trips Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were making to America, and seeing what was successful there. The result? Games Workshops UK shops were:
Massively overstocked with games that nobody wanted to buy, when the
crash came, Games Workshop was hit with a severe cash flow problem which
threatened the future of the company
...
Games Workshop survived thanks to our
hobby games sales and the determination of Retail Operations Manager Bob
Malin to return a lot of overstocks to their manufacturers.
Bob
Malin recalls: ‘Christmas 1983 saw the video games market go from boom
to bust, and early 1984 saw our warehouse in Sunbeam Road holding
£200,000 worth of unsold games cartridges, which, had we had to pay for
them, may well have bankrupted the company. Fortunately, I managed to
convince Mattel to take the stock back.’
The late entry of Games Workshop into the software market with a small selection of games for Christmas 1984 wasn't so much caution, as the result of the company's struggle to survive. Despite this early brush with disaster, Ian Livingstone recalls their software division was set up in 1983 and headed by a young buck called Angus Ryall. I only really knew Angus Ryall as CRASH's acid-penned strategy games correspondent but his main job at the time was working for Games Workshop as software marketing manager.
September 1984
The history of Games Workshop is short enough that I can go through it more or less on a month-by-month basis.
Angus Ryall is introduced to magazine readers in the pages of MICRO ADVENTURER (September 1984 page 6), in story about the new Games Workshop range:
GAMES
WORKSHOP is publishing four software titles in October. Angus Ryall,
software marketing manager, says that the four will be Battlecars,
Journey's End, D-Day, and Argent Warrior.
...
All
four titles will be initially available for the Spectrum 48K, at a
price of £7.95. Games Workshop plans Commodore 64 versions for mid
November, and will be distributing in America.
October 1984
The next stop on Angus Ryall's tour was the offices of CRASH (October 1984 page 30) for a four page feature and interview. Argent Warrior has been renamed Tower of Despair and now there are only three games being released in late September, Journey's End has disappeared from the list. The article ends with a boast:
The £3 1/2m a year turnover company is set to expand its operations even further with the move into computer software publishing. 'We want to become known for high quality products,' Angus told me. To that end a lot of work goes into them and the games are going to demand a lot of work from players. But that's nothing new to fantasy role-players and somehow the ethic is enshrined in the company's name -Games WORKshop.
D-Day and Battlecars were the first two games released. PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS began its review (13 October 1984, page 45) with the comment that they were: "Possibly the best releases this week." D-Day was a two-player strategy game, programmed by a group called the Dagenham Design Cell. Battlecars was based on a pre-existing Games Workshop board game. It was, until Chaos came out, the most arcade-like of the range and offered two players the chance to compete against each other; not easy on a Spectrum keyboard. Behind the scenes, the game was programmed by SLUG. A programming cooperative of disgruntled ex-Red Shift staff. Exactly what happened at Red Shift in May 1984 isn't clear but director Charles Ablett later gave his version of events to GAMES COMPUTING (January 1985 page 76):
The first game to be released [by Red Shift] was Apocalypse. This was a licenced version of the board game created by Games Workshop. There was to be a follow up, of a different game called Battlecars, but there were problems: ‘‘The programmers left after three months when the program was 90% complete, taking the program with them. I believe that they sold it to Games Workshop Software for £4000’’.
November 1984
"The New Force In Software" was the tag line across the top of the full page colour adverts which began running from this month. The campaign would continue until February 1985. I'm writing this on the day THE GUARDIAN ran with a headline Warhammer maker Games Workshop plans fourth UK factory as sales boom so its a odd to be looking back to a time when Games Workshop's own adverts felt the need to introduce the company:
Games Workshop is the UK's largest fantasy and adventure games company, with ten years experience behind it. Now we're using our expertise to create the best in computer games, and the first three are BATTLECARS, D-DAY, and TOWER OF DESPAIR.COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES (November 1984 page 173)
The Personal Computer World Show had taken place from 19-23 September 1984 but, magazine lead times being what they were, CRASH didn't get their report into print until the November issue. CRASH described the show as "the starter's gun for Christmas" and included a photo of (right to left) Steve Jackson, Russell Clarke and Angus Ryall. With a note that Games Workshop's stand was "yards" from Domark's where Ian Livingstone was present to promote Eureka, Domark's launch title. A new adventure game they had commissioned Ian Livingstone to design.
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| CRASH November 1984 page 40 |
Mike McKeown gave an interview to website CASA in 2018. He revealed that:
We had good royalties for a couple of years. I think the four of us made a couple of thousand each, which was a nice bonus at the time.
It probably sold around 7-8 thousand copies - GW gave us 10% royalties, more than most software houses. Ian and Steve made that on their gamebooks and thought it was standard.
The success of Tower of Despair meant that work began on a sequel:
The original idea for the game was a single title outlined by Jamie. When it seemed to be a success, Russell and I plotted out the story to be a trilogy - we used a set of rooms in the first game as inspiration for titles and so Key of Hope and Champion of Destiny were outlined and shopped back to GW.
If you think you could write a better game or adventure than this one, we'd be very interested to hear from you. Send a sample of your work on a cassette to Angus Ryall at the address on the back of the booklet.
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS December 1984 page 36 |
...
QL D-Day will come on two microdrive cassettes, at £24.95.[2]
Chaos is of course one of the greatest games ever made. A game
for up to eight players, in which everybody is a wizard assigned a
random selection of spells and the aim is to use those spells to be the
last wizard standing. The game is well balanced, simple to pick up, and
nuanced enough to reward endless replaying. Like all the best games, no
two rounds are the same. Chaos was well reviewed at the time but
didn't get the exposure it deserved. It took a budget release on the
Firebird label, and then two outings as a YOUR SINCLAIR cover tape
before it really began to build its reputation.
Julian Gollop recalled the making of Chaos for his now archived blog:
Publishing the game was somewhat complicated by the fact that my colleagues who worked for RedShift, the company that published my earlier games, had left en masse and proceeded to do deals with Games Workshop. This resulted in several computer games being made for them, such as 'Talisman' and 'Battle Cars,' which were computer adaptations of Games Workshop boardgames. But the deal also included 'Chaos.' It seemed like things had gone full circle - Chaos the board game being inspired by a Games Workshop board game, and then later the computer game published by Games Workshop.
The program, which can involve up to four players, is said to the the true successor to Valhalla.
...
As at the time of writing, we at YS haven't actually seen the game, we can only ask you to believe what Games Workshop are letting on.
Invoking the memory of Valhalla is brave. It's only been a couple of months since The Great Space Race, Legend's follow up game to Valhalla, crashed and burned.
April 1985 is the last time Games Workshop runs any adverts for their software range.
Games Workshop has now gained the rights to produce an arcade game based on [Judge Dredd] the cartoon character from the 2000AD comic magazine. The company already has a Judge Dredd board game, but gamed computer rights in a separate deal.
"The game will be a high speed joystick-driven maze game set in Megacity One," said Angus Ryall, Games Workshop's software marketing manager.
"We will probably include a map screen which the player can call up to show where the player is in the city."
The Judge Dredd arcade game is scheduled for release on the Spectrum in the autumn.
(POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY, 2 May- 8 May 1985 page 5)
Games Workshop backs off
GAMES Workshop, which moved into the software marker last autumn, is pulling out again, informed sources suggest.
Angus Ryall, Software Marketing Manager, would not comment except to say, "We
would not normally be doing things at this time of year anyway - there is a possibility of releasing more stuff in the autumn."
But Workshop employees have been told that further software releases are unlikely due to distributors overstocking at Christmas and the influx of American software - "the American stuff has cleared up the market," Angus Ryall claimed.
Attempts are being made to sell at least one game which was planned for release to another software house. This is Runestone, which combines a Lords of Midnight style graphics adventure with a hill sentence parser text adventure.
Other games and conversions are apparently being shelved indefinitely - including [D-Day for the Sinclair QL] and the planned Judge Dredd arcade game, announced a fortnight ago.
(POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY, 23-29 May 1985 page 5)
There were a few loose ends to be tidied up but that was broadly it for Games Workshop software.
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| YOUR SINCLAIR September 1991 page 19 |
Judge Dredd didn't appear in a game until the disappointing 1987 Melbourne House release. Someone associated with the CRASH review had a good memory and noted:
It must be over two years ago that Games Workshop confided they were developing a computer game based on the cult 2000AD comic-strip hero -but the Workshop stopped producing software.
Rollerball just disappeared.
There is one last game listed on the Games Workshop page at spectrumcomputing.co.uk, The Castle of Lost Souls. This isn't a Games Workshop board game licenced to another company, like Hero Quest or Space Crusade. It appears to have been intended for the Games Workshop line. There's next to no information online about the game, it never appeared in a magazine, and it's not mentioned in DICE MEN, and yet it exists to be downloaded. The story of its recovery is one of those lucky moments.
Steve - ah, the dim mists of memory part. What became of that? Was it ever released, or was it yet another idea of those lovable GW rascals for which much work was done to no avail?
Sounds like a recipe for disaster?
Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson were early adopters and thought it was the next big thing and that GW could become THE QL gaming house. So they ordered a big print run of D Day.
The developers, meanwhile, forgot to tell anyone that their game wrote back to the micro drive constantly. So when the game was put out, with the standard commercial protection for tapes, the cases had no write protection tabs[3]. So the game was broken.
And since the division had to be self funding, each release was as to pay for the next.
Meanwhile Citadel Miniatures was making a reverse takeover bid for GW and bought out Ian and Steve. All the money went to Warhammer and moving head office from London to Nottingham. No more computer games division ... poof.
I'm going to brush over the comment about Journey's End because I can't find any information about it being released by Games Workshop. There's nothing in any of the three accounts of Games Workshop software that contradicts the others although they all come from different perspectives.
There's a real mystery about why Games Workshop didn't release more than one Commodore 64 game. Tower of Despair was not the game to use to test the market. Whatever went wrong with the C64 version of D-Day might also have soured the company on further conversions. Especially if, as Mike McKeown notes, the division expected each release to be funded with the proceeds of the previous game. Losing the income from D-Day could have stalled the C64 line before it even got started.
It's entirely possible that just too much stuff happened at the beginning of 1985. The first wave of Spectrum games were successful enough to justify a second wave of software but didn't set the world on fire. The C64 version of D-Day went wrong as did, apparently, the QL version. And, on top of this and most importantly, behind the scenes Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson wanted to step back from the day to day running of Games Workshop. DICE MEN again:
Steve and I had been running Games Workshop for ten years and with the added pressure of having to write more and more Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, we were working round the clock. It was exhausting.
There was a brief attempt to run Games Workshop by committee but this fell apart because the management board had strong differences about what should happen next:
Bryan [Ansell, the managing director of the Citadel Miniatures division] wanted Citadel Miniatures, Warhammer and the shops to be the main focus whilst the Workshop directors wanted to focus on the shops, trade sales, games production and magazine publishing.
Mike McKeown's comment about Citadel Miniatures making a reverse takeover of Games Workshop, stems from Bryan being appointed group managing director:
We sent a letter to Bryan on 21 May 1985 offering him the position of group managing director, which he quickly accepted.
May 21st was the date of the offer. I don't know how quickly Bryan accepted but its a heck of a coincidence that the news story about the end of the Games Workshop computer games division runs in the 23-29 May 1985 issue.
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| HAMMERSMITH AND SHEPHERD'S BUSH GAZETTE 3 Sept 1981 page 11 |
We needed a large two-storey building which would be used as a warehouse on the ground floor and as offices on the first floor for operations, accounts and production. We found what we were looking for in Sunbeam Road in Park Royal, North West London and relocated there in September 1981.
The move was considered significant enough to be reported in local newspapers.
Games Workshop didn't stay at Sunbeam Road much beyond 1985. The wording in DICE MEN is ambiguous but it looks like the business moved to Citadel's premises in Eastwood, Nottingham in 1986.
[1] Posh words for lazy.
[2] About £75 in 2025.
[3] A note about write protection tabs for anyone who doesn't remember physical media. Discs, cassettes, and videotapes all had little bits of plastic which controlled whether you could record on whatever piece of magnetic media you were using. Unprotected, that is writable, blank tapes, discs, etc had the tab in place and could be recorded on. Commercial tapes, software, and videos had the tab removed and were protected (unless you covered the hole with a piece of sellotape). From Mike McKeown's description of what QL D-Day was doing, it sounds like the microdrive cartridges were not write protected and because the game was constantly writing to the cartridge, it erased itself as you played it. Not good for a £24.95 piece of software.
Warhammer 40,000 40K GW Space Marine Citadel. Right that's the search engine optimisation sorted. Hello to Henry Cavill. Leave a comment or follow me on Bluesky, @shammountebank.bsky.social. Emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com especially if you know anything about a ZX Spectrum version of Blood Bath at Orc's Drift.
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