396 James Reckitt Avenue, Hull, HU8 0JA
Artic
Computing is a classic success story. It was founded in 1981 with £20
of pocket money by an 18-year-old schoolboy called Richard Turner. Since
then it has developed into a software company with an annual turnover
of around £750,000, and plans for worldwide expansion.
[Please be aware, further down the page I discuss the game Ship of Doom. This section quotes archive material which uses words relating to serious sexual violence].
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD April 1981 page 138 |
That introductory quote is how issue 21 of THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE introduced Artic for a profile printed some time in 1984 [1]. School friends Richard Turner and Chris Thornton had signed up to a school computer course which used a time sharing scheme on a Honeywell computer. Richard was hooked and his parents brought him a ZX80 for his 18th birthday. He learnt how to program and submitted software to Middlesbrough-based company Linsac. He and Chris Thornton, who had started studying computer science at Hull University, wrote and submitted more programs to Linsac. Then in January 1981 they decided to found their own company[2]. YOUR COMPUTER interviewed Richard Turner in May 1982 just after Artic's first birthday. The company was thriving and the founder was heading towards the end of his first year at university and staring down the barrel at forthcoming exams:
Originally, Richard Turner had
intended to study at Liverpool University as pan of his sponsorship deal
with Fords. He now decided to switch to Imperial College, London.
Richard
Turner is the first to admit that combining a university degree with
running a business is not easy. He was offered a year's leave of absence
from university to concentrate on running Artic, but turned it down. "I
knew I would never go back if I took a year off".
The crunch will
come in June with the first-year exams. If he fails he will probably
work full-time on Artic, but he thinks he has done enough to pass.
Actually, he dropped out.
His
studies lasted only a year, at the end of which he decided to take a
year’s break to run the company. He never returned to the University.
(THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE)
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| SYNC May/June 1981 page 4 |
The April 1981 advert up the page would have been placed shortly after Sinclair launched the ZX81; on 5
March 1981. A more substantial advert followed in the May/June issue of
SYNC an American ZX80 magazine also available in the UK. Bug-Byte and Hewson Consultants also advertised in the same issue. The SYNC advert appeared about a month before the launch of YOUR
COMPUTER so this is also the point UK magazine publishers realised the market of people interested in home
computers was growing wider than the hobby electronics/business crowd.
For
the first six months times were hard — the company made £21. With
comparatively heavy spending on advertising, Artic found itself in debt.
However the launch ZXChess proved to be the turning point.
(YOUR COMPUTER, May 1982)
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD November 1981 page 181 |
[Richard Turner's] first big success was with the game ZX Chess, which he launched at the first ZX Microfair - in the summer of 1981. Turner’s resources were pushed to the limit: “The night before, we were still copying cassettes using seven ZX81s and putting them in plastic bags with instructions wed run off the school photocopier.’ ZX Chess was a great success, and Turner claims to have taken £1,500 at the fair.
(THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE)
The lorry logo was designed by Charles Cecil. He hasn't entered the story yet but in 2015 he talked to MCV and one of the things he remembered about Artic was designing their logo:
I
designed and drew the shittest logo, which they used. But we weren’t
worried about logos and marketing. We wanted to make games.
Charles Cecil seems to have been the first person to make the Artic/articulated lorry connection. Richard Turner told YOUR COMPUTER about the original source for the name:
"The
name comes from an anagram of the initials of our names", explains
Richard Turner. "We thought of various different names, most of them
terrible, but we seated for Artic. We had not even thought of the
articulated lorry, but it became our logo".
(YOUR COMPUTER, May 1982)
Artic's initial range included some of the earliest text adventure games to go on sale in the UK. Before Artic you had Molimerx who were publishing Microsoft's TRS-80 version of the original main frame Adventure as early as 1980 and, in May 1981, the first in Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventure series. Supersoft quickly followed when they released their Pan Books approved version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in July 1981. And then Artic nipped in with Adventure A for the ZX80 and ZX81. YOUR COMPUTER promoted it in the August/September 1981 issue:
Artic
computing of Hull are marketing a ZX-80 Adventure program. Priced at a
reasonable £7, the program is written entirely in machine code. It is
nearly 10K in size, which means the RAM Pack is essential. Richard
Turner of Artic says: "It is fast and easy to play".
The game is
already available for the ZX-80, and will soon be ready for the ZX-81.
It is intended that this should be the first in a series of
Adventure-style programs for the ZX-80/81.
The September/October issue of SYNC gives a little more detail.
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| SYNC September/October 1981 page 48 |
Two more games quickly followed; you won't be surprised to learn they were called Adventure B and Adventure C. This is where Charles Cecil properly comes into the story. He would stick with Artic and become a director after completing his degree:
When
I left school I had absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do... I got a
fantastic sponsorship from Ford, and went to work in Essex, in Basildon
in particular... It was a pretty miserable time for the car industry,
and a friend of mine had just started a computer games company. He was
somebody on my engineering course, and had just reverse engineered a
ZX81.
He invited me up to Hull, which is where he lived, and he
showed me some games, and suggested I write some adventure games. So I
owe everything to him. His name was Richard Turner. Richard also had a
partnership with somebody called Chris Thornton, and he had a TSR-80,
which was so advanced back then. The games on that were just amazing.
Chris taught me a little Basic, and some machine code, and it became
clear that was what I wanted to do. For a 19-year old it was incredibly
exciting.
(MCV, 2015)
Artic is barely a year old by the time of the May 1982 YOUR COMPUTER interview. They already had a catalogue of 12 games including ZX Chess II and Galaxians:
"We have just had a big order for 2,500 Galaxians cassettes from W H Smith".
The
Galaxians program was written for Artic by William Wray, a Hull
schoolboy who is currently doing his levels at Cottingham grammar
school. William Wray first visited Artic with a view to buying some of
their programs, but he and Richard Turner started talking and William
Wray ended up sending in one of his own programs. With a little help
from Artic, Wray's Galaxians program was polished up and marketed under
the Artic label.
The order from W H Smith resulted from the ZX .Micro
fair in January. "I saw John Rowland, Smith's market development
manager, at the ZX Microfair and told him 'This is a brilliant program,
come and have a look'. He came over and his kids started playing it.
That always works".
The Galaxians cassettes were only delivered to W H
Smith on March 1, so it is still too early to say how well they are
selling. But Turner is confident the Galaxians game will be successful
and hopes to secure a big repeat order from W H Smith soon.
(YOUR COMPUTER, May 1982)
John Rowland must have been hunting round the January Microfair for games for WH Smith, that's the same one where he spotted and placed a big order for 3D Monster Maze by J.K. Greye.
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| YOUR COMPUTER October 1982 page 81 |
ZX80 games were quietly dropped from adverts in October 1982 as the company prepared for Christmas. They were probably still being sold but newer games took up the advertising space; arcade games for the ZX81, Gobbleman and Natmir Raiders (Natmir being the name of programmer Jon Ritman, backwards). Adventures A to C finally got names; A, Planet of Death; B, Inca Curse; C, Ship of Doom; there's a new game Adventure D Espionage Island; and a chess game for this new Sinclair Spectrum, it's called Chess.
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| YOUR COMPUTER November 1982 page 56 |
Automata had done very well with their 1982 game Pimania and November 1982 saw Artic dip a toe into the prize computer game pool with KRAKIT. This came from a Canadian company, International Publishing & Software Inc [3],
and Artic distributed the game in the UK; there was a reasonable Canadian/US market for the Timex Sinclair 1000, a slightly
modified ZX81. Artic stopped promoting the game towards the end of 1983
as noted by SINCLAIR USER (December 1983,page 17)
Artic
Computing has ceased promoting the software for its Krakit competition,
although existing entries are being taken into account. Managing
director Richard Turner says: "A number of people decided not to buy the
cassette because their friends told them how difficult the game was."
It's not clear if anyone ever claimed the prize. Interactive Fiction blog Renga in Blue did a very through and deep dive into the game, including trying to solve the 12 clues.
Christmas 1982 was a very merry time. SINCLAR USER ran a report in March 1983 which quoted representatives of WH Smith, distributors Prism, and:
The
major software houses also reported a boom in business. Douglas Berne
of Silversoft said: "Things took off at the beginning of November and
stayed the same well into January."
Richard Turner of Artic Computing
told a similar story. "We had an incredible response and the big
problem has been keeping up stocks, The demand is still heavy but we are
almost back to normal.
1983 was the start of a period of transition for the software industry. Take a look through the May 1983 issue of YOUR COMPUTER and you get a sense of how fast things are changing. The big difference, the arrival of Imagine at the start of the year. Charles Cecil identified how they changed the market with the launch of Arcadia, their very first game.
Artic
did very well, but that scene got very quickly blown away by companies
like Imagine, who licensed everything, and had extraordinary marketing.
It became quite clear we were entering a pretty toxic stage where
marketing could sometimes matter more than the quality of a game. (MCV, 2015)
Imagine didn't invent full page colour adverts, or double page spreads. They did pioneer hype. The May 1983 issue of YOUR COMPUTER contains an astonishing six page full colour spread across pages 72/73, 74/75, and 76/77, and also the back cover. "THE INVASION HAS BEGUN" screams that first spread and that must have been how it felt. The cosy world of ZX81 games and Microfairs and little quarter-page boxout adverts still existed and would continue for another couple of years but it was beginning to look old fashioned.
Artic was still relevant but looking a little behind the pack. They had upgraded to full page spot colour adverts but Artic's contemporaries in 1982, Quicksilva, Bug-Byte, and Silversoft, were now running double and triple page spreads; in the case of Silversoft, on the pages right behind Artic's advert. Artic needed to change. Step one was to experiment with a new advertising style. Step two was to increase the pool of programmers. Step three was to move from 396 James Reckitt Avenue.
Artic
was originally run from Richard’s bedroom in his parents’ house in
Hull, but as the company’s list of software grew to 93 titles, Turner
decided that it had to have premises of its own.
(THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE)
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| YOUR COMPUTER July 1983 page 22 |
Main Street, Brandesburton, Driffield, YO25
Artic's original address at 396 James Reckitt Avenue is a 1920s/30s three bedroom semi-detached house backing on to Hull's East Park. There's not a lot to say about it. Somebody lives there and they deserve not to have me standing outside taking pictures and discussing their taste in curtains. Artic's new address was about 13 miles north of Hull in the village of Brandesburton. The result of the move was a new office, more staff, a streamlined catalogue and an advertising campaign more in line with the big boys of the market.
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| SINCLAIR PROGRAMS September 1983 page 18 |
Just up the page is Artic's first full colour double-page spread. It looks slightly old fashioned when compared with their September 1983 advert. The "Can you combat the the ALIEN ATTACK?" advert is only one page but does more with less. It is less cluttered and more dynamic. The company logo has been redesigned to work better in colour with Charles Cecil's lorry retained on the mail order form. Artic would produce several single page colour adverts focusing on different collections of software; adventure games or Spectrum titles or Chess games or games for Christmas. That Christmas advert is opposite one for 16/48 the Spectrum magazine on tape; 16/48 would soon cause plenty of trouble for Artic.
Another experiment was advertising on television. Richard Turner remembered this in a 2017 RETRO GAMER profile on Artic:
There was a major blow out on a TV advert – “that was a huge blunder but an ad agency convinced me to spend £120,000 on it and it was performing so poorly for us that we had to pull it,”
You can watch the advert on YouTube. It survived because it aired during ITV's broadcast of the nuclear war television film The Day After, on 10th December 1983. It's possibly unfortunate the opening lines of the advert were: "we interrupt this galactic war with an important announcement." The appeal for new programmers resulted in a big expansion of the catalogue on to other computer formats. HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY reported on Artic's Christmas plans in September 1983.
Artic Computing has just announced no less than 21 titles, due out in a week... [Richard Turner] said the 21 new programs bringing the range up to 62 are his largest launch so far and were the result of a successful appeal to freelance programmers.
Mostly priced al £5.95, there are five for the VIC-20, one for the Oric, 10 for the Spectrum and five for the ZX81.
Artic has also become the distributor for educational software from Arnold Wheaton. There are six titles for the Spectrum and BBC micros costing £13.95 each.
Remember Ship of Doom? The 1982 adventure game written by Charles Cecil. A reader of 16/48 magazine did and wrote to correspondent, Yaz, for help. Yaz replied in the issue four (March 1984) adventure column, Of Dungeons and Green Men, offering help and a brief overview of the game and then the swerving off in an unexpectedly serious direction.
It seems that quite a few readers are having problems with Artic's Adventure C, the SHIP OF DOOM.
In this adventure you search a hostile alien spacecraft for the control panel which operates the Graviton Beam, gripping your craft.
The game is text only and of the Verb Noun type.
(GET FOOD, GO SOUTH etc.)
There are 43 locations which can be mapped using normal co-ordinate geometry.
(Always make a map.)
The program is in M.code and therefore quick in response. In all, the old classic mainframe type adventure.
HOWEVER!
There are certain points in the game that I find very disturbing!
Early in the game you are confronted with a little girl. If you ask for help at this point the program replies "NEVER TRUST WOMEN".
In fact, the only option open to you is to kill the little girl before she strangles you!
Later, you meet a "beautiful young android girl". The only purpose for the existence of this character is as a victim of acts of sexual violence!
A typical response to a criminal act such as "Rape Android" is for the program to reply "She moans violently and blows a fuse".
This is not the same as the dubious routines found in programs such as Valhalla, which give you an amusing(?) reprimand for using obscenities, but at the same time hold the obscenities in their dictionaries at the expense of more useful words.
Ship of Doom goes far beyond that type of immaturity and seems to condone violence against women; a stereotype that ought to be shattered, not reinforced.
Authors should remember that many home computer users are children and not twisted misogynists who get pleasure from fantasies of gratuitous sexual violence.
Thirty three years later a clearly embarrassed Charles Cecil explained to RETRO GAMER the circumstances behind the creation of this section of the game. It had:
...been born out of a desire by Charles’ 19-year-old self to pander to gamers who got frustrated when the game didn’t understand the text that they had entered. “Some gamers would start typing expletives when the parser didn’t understand the words that they had entered, so I thought it might be a nice idea for players to get a response in Ship Of Doom,” explains Charles. “In hindsight, it was very puerile”.
I'm not interested in scolding anyone. I absolutely understand how that section of Ship Of Doom got written. I wrote things as a teen which make me cringe. Unfortunately it
provided ammunition to people with their own agendas and what happened next is a classic example of deliberately edgy or tasteless material being taken out of
context to be served up for an unfamiliar audience. Yaz's editorial was
picked up by THE SUN (or if you are more cynical, passed to THE SUN to
generate publicity for 16/48) who got Mike Atchinson to write up a
story. In a moment that should be beyond parody, but isn't, his "probe" into the game was placed on page 3.
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| THE SUN Tuesday 13th March 1984 page 3 |
I'm tempted to footnote the story to death but if I highlight every inaccuracy, stretched fact, wilful distortion, and outright lie, then I'll be here forever. Just assume I rolled my eyes twice at every sentence in what follows:
HARRODS have banned a sick computer game for children after a Sun investigation.
The top people's store removed Ship of Doom from their shelves after hearing that players have to "KILL" a small girl and "RAPE" a young woman to win.
The grisly £6.95 game has already been blasted for "condoning violence against women" by the influential computer magazine 16/48.
...
A spokesman for Harrods in Knightsbridge said yesterday: "We're very grateful to The Sun for pointing out how offensive this game is for children. We don't want to stock computer nasties."
Our probe was backed by Geoffrey Dickens, a leading campaigner against child sex.
He said: "Well done The Sun. We must protect women and children. This game is in bad taste and corrupts players."
But a spokesman for the makers, Artic Computing of Humberside, said: "We have no plans to withdraw the game. It's used in colleges of education.
It's not us who program in obscene commands -it's the players."
According to Richard Turner in RETRO GAMER, the spokesman was his mother who was the Artic office manager. She handled herself very well. I couldn't make a statement like that on the spur of the moment. The story snowballed from The Sun's report. The BIRMINGHAM EVENING MAIL contacted the Sandwell branches of WH Smith and Rumbelows and reported, on Thursday 15th, the game had been removed the game from their shelves[4]. Friday 16th saw MP Graham Bright indirectly and inaccurately mention Ship of Doom in Parliament during a debate on amendments to his private members bill which became the Video Recordings Act 1984:
"The amendments have been tabled in response to a detailed discussion in Committee, and they refer to video games. Most video games are exempt, but it is possible for a video game to include violence or sex.
Hon. Members may be aware of The Sun campaign for Harrods to stop selling one such game as it included scenes of killing and raping a girl. The amendment will catch that area."
Mike Atchinson reported on this in a follow up story on Saturday 17th (CURB ON TV GAME 'NASTIES') and Artic gave a defiant quote to THE HULL DAILY MAIL when contacted on Monday 19th:
A spokesman for the firm, which denies the game is sick, said: "[the ban] wouldn't include our games because they don't come into that category."
By Thursday 29th March Richard Turner was talking about suing THE SUN unless it apologised
We will be happy with an apology, if we don't get one we will issue a writ.
(THE HULL DAILY MAIL page 10).
16/48 was a very anodyne magazine so it feels strange to read such a personal and opinionated editorial. I've got no problem with Yaz calling out material they felt went too far in Ship of Doom but everyone who subsequently hitched their trolley to the outrange bandwagon was a self-serving creep.
If you set aside accidentally nearly getting all computer games subject to the Video Recordings Act then 1984 was a pretty good year for Artic. THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE paints a thumbnail picture of how the company operated:
Artic now employs 15 people, including three telesales staff and five full-time programmers, who are paid a salary plus royalties.
Artic’s
biggest sellers to date have been Bear Bovver (which alone has sold
over 40,000 cassettes), Galaxians and Gobbleman. ‘The company has
recently launched a new game for the Spectrum called World Cup, which
sold over 5,000 copies in three weeks.
RETRO GAMER described Artic House as:
A working environment that was low on overheads... generally it was a case of paying 20 per cent to the developer and having a small admin team to sort faulty tapes and answer the phone. “When you’re selling 50,000 football games at £3, it’s pretty much all profit,” Richard adds.
The problem was, the software industry continued to change. Wholesalers and distributors inserted themselves between shops and software houses. This benefitted shops, they no longer had to chase round individual companies to order stock, but the distributors acted as gatekeepers and small companies struggled against the new big beasts of the industry like Ocean and US Gold. Artic had a couple of innovative solutions for this problem as outlined by THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE:
Artic plans to handle its own overseas marketing as much as possible, and the company is currently investigating expansion into Europe. For the North American market, Artic has made a contract with two established software houses, Softsync and the International Publishing Corporation, to distribute each other’s products.
The company also followed in Mastertronic's footsteps with direct sales to newsagents and other non-computer shops:
Another marketing innovation is Artic’s counter units. These units are display boxes that can hold up to 64 cassettes. They are currently being sold to newsagents, allowing people to buy their software locally rather than having to go to the large retailers.
Best of all, as far as this blog is concerned, Artic opened its own shop in London.
Artic plans to open its own chain of retail outlets throughout the UK. These will be known as Artic Software Stations, and will sell not only Artic’s games but also the products of other companies. The first ‘station’ opened in Acton, West London, in July 1984 and doubles as the company’s London headquarters. The significance of the shop is that it is not in a main shopping precinct and is well away from the commercial centre of London’s West End. Asked why he chose this particular site, Jeff Raggett, Artic’s London marketing manager, replied: ‘A high street site would be £300-£400 a week, and this shop is a lot less, so we don’t have to sell many cassettes to cover overheads. A lot of people have criticised us, saying were mad to open shops, but at least we can see what is selling, and can talk to people about what they like about the games.’
Artic Software Station, 263 Acton Lane, London, W4
This is a great example of the chain of coincidence that develops as these articles get written. I found an interview in which either Richard Turner or Charles Cecil made a passing reference to Artic's London office. This was interesting but didn't give anywhere near enough information to track the office down. I didn't keep details of that interview and so later made an effort to track it down. I failed but instead, somehow, ended up at a French Blog; Les pionniers de l'informatique. I translated the page and wasn't sure what I was looking at, it appeared to be reprint of an old magazine article but there was no source. The article, when identified, was issue 21 of THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE. Not only has that turned out to be a key source but it also specified that Artic's London business was in Acton. It only took a quick search of the Internet Archive to turn up an advert for a game called On The Oche which gave the Acton Lane address. If I had kept that first interview, I probably wouldn't have found the French blog and I wouldn't have learned a lot about Artic and more importantly I wouldn't have gone to Acton.
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| May 2025 |
These days, 263 Acton Lane is a local supermarket which has spilled out to occupy both 263 and 261 Acton Lane, in the photo above 263 is the door in the centre. Its a good site for a local shop but not for somewhere set up with the expectation of drawing people in from further away. Anyone not coming from Acton faces a round trip of at least a mile from the closest station. Acton is riddled with stations but the closest, Acton Main Line, Acton Central, and Acton South, are all about half a mile away. The two most useful stations (the ones connected to the Underground network rather than surface lines) are a step further. I can testify to this because around 4pm yesterday, in a foul mood with a sore knee[5], I walked the about-three-quarters of a mile from Acton Town underground station and then the, about-three-quarters of a mile on to Chiswick Park. I absolutely understand the choice was a trade off between location and cost but I feel the scales tipped too far towards cost. I can't say how long the Artic Software Station lasted. It opened in July 1984 and doesn't get referenced in magazine adverts beyond November 1984.
When I left University in 1985, I came to work for Artic, full time and Richard moved across to run his burgeoning kitchen design business, later to be called Articad. Companies like US Gold, and Ocean were much more business-savvy than us – and well-funded American companies like Activision were emerging. The golden era was well and truly over for the bedroom coding companies.
That's Charles Cecil talking to Mark James Hardisty and THE CLASSIC ADVENTURER issue 4 in 2018. The golden era was coming to an end and Artic made one last big roll of the dice in 1985. A game which CRASH first briefly noted in May 1985:
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| HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY 16 July 1986 page 35 |
SINCLAIR USER got a scoop in June. They reviewed this mystery game before anyone else. The game was called Cats. It was based around the T S Eliot poems and the story of the Andrew Lloyd Wallet's musical. The music was a "wailing rendition of Memory." The month afterwards Artic ran an advert for this game but suddenly it was called Paws and the hero wasn't called Deuteronomy he was called Selwyn. CRASH revealed what happened when they reviewed the game in August 1985:
It's no use pretending anything else, Artic wanted to call this game 'Cats' and base the scenario around the stage play. It used to have great music but even ignoring that it seems to have lost a lot more besides. It's a graphically pleasing, well animated , race-against-time maze game, and not a bad one at that.
And then in September 1985, SINCLAIR USER reviewed the game again. With a note:
IN THE June issue of Sinclair User we reviewed Cats from Artic, a super little maze game based on the alleged musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
There were in fact problems we didn't notice. In the first place, the game wasn't going to be called Cats after all because Artic failed to obtain the rights to the theme from Andrew Lloyd Wallet. Secondly, the version we saw was an early development version [6], and very much easier than the final game was ever intended to be.
There's a website called Dining With Strangers with the tagline "Taking strangers to dinner and interviewing them about their lives since 2008". This is a lovely idea and much better than the one I had which involves bombing around the country to lurk on industrial estates in a suspicious manner. But I digress. On the 3rd January 2020, the "stranger" was Charles Cecil, the theme was "Learning the history of adventure games with the co-founder of Revolution Games", and the location was the Quik Bite Snak Shak on the Addison Industrial Estate Ambiente Tapas at Goodramgate, York. It's a lovely chat. The food is better than the Greggs sandwiches I usually manage. There's one point where Charles Cecil quickly runs through some memorable incidents at Artic:
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, as he recalls the company at one point having a “very dubious accountant” who would find ways to downplay profits for tax purposes, or dream up outlandish schemes to make money that would have either led to jail or bankruptcy. “And there was another guy who said he’d take some money we needed to send to America and he managed to convince Richard to give him the money to take to America and pass on and ‘save charges’ — that money was never seen again.”
One subject which doesn't come up is the1986 US Gold game World Cup Carnival. For many people, myself included, this might be the last time anyone remembers hearing the Artic name. We need to turn to THE STORY OF US GOLD by Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean and the section starting on page 57 called The Carnival is over:
Artic was a company on the skids, as Charles says. ‘I joined Artic shortly after Richard Turner and Chris Thornton founded it. We were fabulously successful for a couple of years. And then like so many then we were unable to transition - companies like Imagine had taken over and Imagine was all about marketing and they treated marketing as god more than we did.’
This is probably late 1985 early 1986. US Gold had a problem. They had an expensive licence for the 1986 World Cup but due to crossed wires and miscommunication they didn't actually have a game to go with it. And then Tim Chaney had an idea:
So we went to Charles Cecil at Artic,’ says Tim, ‘and said, hey, you got a football game, right? We want to use it for the World Cup, can you do something to it?’ Charles Cecil admits to complete bemusement. ‘I got a phone call from Tim Chaney one day, and he said, can Geoff Brown and I come and talk to you about maybe doing some work for us? So Geoff turned up in his Testarossa and he said he basically needed a World Cup 86 game using our World Cup Football Artic engine.
Artic performed a quick respray on their 1984 game World Cup Football. A three option practice mode was added and the name on the pitch side hoardings was changed from Artic to US Gold. Weirdly, one thing which appears to have been chopped out from the US Gold version (on the Spectrum at least) is the little animated graphic showing the World Cup being raised or just out of reach, depending on whether the player won or was knocked out. Not enough memory once the practice modes were added, perhaps?
If you want a visual demonstration of how the software industry had changed in the two years between 1984 and 1986 then look at the loading screens of the two games. Artic could release an unlicensed game called World Cup complete with an image of the trophy on the loading screen, and nobody was bothered. Two years later and US Gold's loading screen is stamped with all the appropriate logos, copyrights and trademarks. There was considerable fallout on US Gold for what was seen as the deceptive sale of a two year old game for £9.95 but Artic came off worse. Richard Turner had already sold the World Cup Football rights to Geoff Young of Prism Leisure in 1985. The STORY OF US GOLD finishes the tale:
[Charles Cecil] ‘And Geoff looked at the source code –which he’d bought for £100 – and saw there were similarities in what we’d used as the basis for World Cup Carnival and threatened US Gold.’
As the man in charge of financial operations, Martyn Savage remembers the incident very well. ‘It was Geoff Young of Prism Leisure and he put a writ on us saying if you don’t pay £25,000 by midday we’ll make trouble for you. We were going to ship it out through all the channels, so we paid him.’
‘It was an extraordinarily tight-fisted, really mean thing to do,’ Charles says bitterly, and with reason since Artic had to indemnify US Gold. ‘We had to spend quite a lot of the money we’d negotiated with US Gold to pay off Geoff Young and that was basically the end of Artic.'
The end of Artic but not necessarily the end of Artic House. The HULL DAILY MAIL ran this advert in 1990.
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| HULL DAILY MAIL Thursday July 5th 1990 page 36 |
Richard Turner had moved on from Artic in 1985 to run a kitchen design business. That company, or at least the kitchen design company which rose from the ashes of Artic Computing was the foundation of a design company called ArticCAD who were founded in 1992 and are still going today. But, and this is the important bit, ArticCAD are not based at Artic House, Main Street, Brandesburton any more.
Obviously if you've read this far you are wondering where Artic House is/was. Also, if you think this article is already too long then you ain't seen nothing yet.
The Search for Artic House
A couple of months ago I realised this blog was closing in on its 100th update. Obviously I wanted to do something to mark the occasion but what? It needed to be in the spirit of this ridiculous enterprise but bigger and more spectacular and ideally even more self-indulgent. Not breaking the law was obviously also a requirement so a home invasion of Roger Kean and Oliver Frey's old house in Ludlow was probably out of the question.
Well, the solution dropped into my lap. But you'll need to wait two weeks to find out what it was. (Although, obviously it involves Artic and the Brandesburton building). What you have just read was the 99th article on this blog. Be here in two weeks time for UPDATE 100!
Adventure I: The Search for Artic House.
The covers for Adventure D: Espionage Island, Bear Bovver, and World Cup Football all come from Spectrum Computing.
[1] It grieves me to be so unspecific but THE HOME COMPUTER ADVANCED COURSE was a week-by-week partwork that printed issue numbers but not cover dates. Given they describe how the first Artic Software Station "opened" in July then maybe mid to late July. The magazine relaunched around the end of 1984 and you can see an old TV advert here.
[2] YOUR COMPUTER says January 1980 but I think this must be a misprint.
[3] 3948 Chesswood Drive, Downsview, Ontario, Canada M3J 2W6. Ontario readers, send a picture to whereweretheynow@gmail.com
[4] The story runs on page 20 and quotes the manager of WH Smith who pulled the game when they only had two copies left from an order of ten. The manager of Rumbelows confirms the game was pulled following complaints but they hadn't been able to check it themselves because they had run out of computers. It's a long way from All The Presidents Men.
[5] I twisted it slightly while getting out of a car. Boring, I know.
[6] I can't help wondering if SINCLAIR USER's accidental review of an early version of Paws was the basis of a lot of digs in the CRASH spoof UNCLEAR USER; which got them in to so much trouble with EMAP.
Emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com I am also on Bluesky. @shammountebank.bsky.social
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