Freepost Oldland Common Bristol, BS15 5BR
(really, 16 Brendon Close, Oldland Common, Bristol BS15 6QE)
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 30 September 1982 page 24 |
I've tried not to get bogged down in the details of the dispute between John Greye and Malcolm Evans. It's already covered in the J.K. Greye article. However, a certain amount of rehashing is necessary because the story of the end of J.K. Greye Software is also the story of the beginning of New Generation.
So, first John Greye and Malcolm Evans fell out. The release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in April 1982 seems to have
crystalised the doubts Evans had about his work/reward ratio from J.K. Greye Software, where his ZX81 games 3D Monster Maze, 3D Defender, and Full Screen Breakout were the engine of the
company's success:
"John
Greye ended because after about six months my wife and I realised he
was doing very little to promote the company. Even though he was
supposed to be the marketing manager I was actually doing all that part.
My wife and I were working about 15 hours a day together doing all the
mundane jobs, mail order shipping and programming games. We worked at
his flat in the morning but we seldom saw him and in the afternoon he
never answered his phone. It was me that was actually doing all the
marketing and all he was doing was the advertising. When the Spectrum
came along it was an inevitable split. It was somewhat acrimonious
unfortunately. He was demanding 50 percent of my profits from my future games and things like that"
(Malcolm Evans interview, 2023, Geek Retrospective)
The inevitable split occurred in August 1982 and cast a shadow over both companies. For the next six months New
Generation promoted itself with very small, very low key adverts similar to the one above. Even when Escape was joined by another game called 3D Tunnel in
February 1982. Then Rod Evans joined New Generation. Rod was Malcolm's twin brother, described to HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY (18 October 1983 page 43) as "the family business expert," and his first task was to resolve the situation with John Greye. Malcolm Evans talked about how this was done in his 2023 interview:
What
he actually did is to agree that [John Greye] and I for a year we would
market our own games and just at the end of that year divide up the
profits 50/50 but we were to use our best endeavours.
With the split formalised in April 1983, New Generation began to grow. Even at this early stage it was clear the company was a success. YOUR COMPUTER magazine had reported in the March 1983 issue:
All [Malcolm Evans'] games have sold in large numbers and he has even had the distinction of having two hit programs in Your Computer's Top Twenty at the same time. 14,000 people have bought his Spectrum program Escape, and his latest release, 3D Tunnel, looks set to have the same success; already WH Smith has ordered 10,000 copies of the game.
Knot in 3D was added to the product line in the early summer of 1983. The peculiar title hid a game which was easier to play than explain; try and imagine a Tron lightcycle game set in a 3D space allowing movement horizontally and vertically. When the game was advertised in June 1983, alongside Malcolm Evan's ZX81 titles as per Rod's agreement, the company was still based in Bristol. There would be a new address when the advertising resumed in August.
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| SINCLAIR USER June 1983 page 109 |
Why keep your business address private and then allow a magazine to publish your home address in full? Crazy.
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| CRASH June 1984 page 21 |
The HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY interview noted that games were becoming more complex and time consuming to write. New Generation had expanded to take this into account when CRASH headed down to Bath for a profile printed in June 1984. The company now had four employees; Malcolm and Rod Evans, James Day, and Paul Bunn:
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| EVENING POST Thursday 19 January 1984 page 33 |
Paul joined New Generation Software after he saw an advertisement in the Bristol Evening Post. Says Paul, 'I leapt out of the chair and dialled the number immediately, because it offered everything I wanted.'
New Generation's other programmer is James Day. At 19 years old this is James's first job, and next year he is planning to go to college to read physics and electronics. Already he has developed several games.
The interview touched on a deal New Generation made with Quicksilva to distribute Commodore 64 versions of their games globally; the three games in this deal were Escape, 3D Tunnel, and Trashman.
Trashman was New Generation's big game for 1984. Quirky and imaginative, with a nice streak of humour. Its eight levels were named after streets in Bath, including Lyncombe Vale. A sequel quickly came out before the end of the year, Travel With Trashman. The end of that game hinted at a third, involving a time machine, which never appeared. In October 1985, HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY previewed New Generations forthcoming games; Amstrad conversions of Trashman and Travel With Trashman, and a C64 game called Magica (renamed Arcana), these would all eventually be released by Virgin Games. HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY also talked of a third Trashman game due for release in January 1986 called Trashman Goes Moonlighting. "in which Trashman undertakes a number of black economy occupations to make ends meet." Neither the Amstrad or Spectrum version were ever released but the Amstrad version surfaced somehow about a decade ago in Italy.
1985 was the year the software industry retrenched after the boom years of 1983 and 1984. New Generation attempted to move with the times. Licenced games and sports titles were in, so they did a deal with UK squash champion Jonah Barrington and released Jonah Barrington's Squash. The game was technically innovative, with good digitised speech, still a novelty on the Spectrum, but it was not successful. And then New Generation seemed to lose direction.
A few games come out over 1985 but none are particularly notable. New Generation sold a few unreleased games and the rights to their back catalogue to Virgin Games early in 1986 and stepped away from software publishing. It's possibly a tribute to the business skills of Rod Evans that New Generation were able to cash out, rather than sliding into bankruptcy or quiet closure as so many small companies did between 1985 and 1987. He may have been paying attention to the fate of Quicksilva. They had been one of the big fishes of the software industry until they were brought by Argus Press in 1984 and lost their independence in 1985. New Generation's deal with Quicksilva seems to have been an early victim of the Argus purchase; Quicksilva didn't convert any games after Trashman and, by 1985, New Generation handled its own C64 and Amstrad conversions for Jonah Barrington's Squash. Virgin marked their purchase with one of their trademark wacky PR photos; below is Nick Alexander of Virgin pretending to do the hoovering while wearing a hard hat. I don't know why and Nick Alexander refuses to account for himself.
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| CRASH June 1986 page 11 |
This wasn't the end. Malcolm Evans explained what happened next in his 2023 interview:
Eventually we got to the point where we thought we've been beaten by companies that were pouring massive amounts of money into [games] and we couldn't actually afford that. So we sold all the rights to Virgin Games. They took over and we -seems funny now thinking about it- we were saying we haven't got enough money to do the games but they gave us enough money to build a portable computer this isn't about '86.
This explained something which baffled me when I scanned through the archives at newspapers.com, and found three job adverts from a company called Sentor, that also used the New Generation name.
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| EVENING POST Thursday, 20 February 1986 page 29 |
That advert is the first and describes:
The company which is situated on the western side of Bath has been established for three years and has an enviable record of success in software development and marketing. It has now diversified into a special purpose portable computer which is without equal.
The name on the advert is blurred, it kind of looks like Mr R. Gamlln, but later adverts in November and December 1986 tell applicants to write to R. Evans at the same address.
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| EVENING POST Friday 28 November 1986 page 41 |
"SENIOR" in that advert should probably be "SENTOR" which is why I'm not 100% sure Mr R. Gamlln was the correct name in the first advert. The proof readers at the EVENING POST must have been on a work to ruel. Development of the portable computer was clearly going well and Malcolm Evans described it in 2023:
It had a touchscreen on it, as well, which was completely new and it was designed to take round to furniture designers, like kitchens and bedrooms, to actually go and sell their wares so they could design in front of the customer.
Sales were regular but low. The company had cash flow problems and ended up calling in the receivers.
Annoyingly on the day we got the receivers in, would you believe, Wren Kitchens, who's still going now, they actually wanted us to go in and show our system to them.
When I first wrote up New Generation, in September 2022, I declared them untraceable by default because both their addresses were residential. The address on this job advert gave me something new to chase. It was a shame I couldn't find it. Railway Buildings didn't seem to exist. A bit of focused Googling directed me to a Facebook group called Bath History & Mystery where a user called Penni Wallace posted this old picture with the note that all the buildings in this photo are now gone.
Comments further down the page gave a little more information. Railway Buildings, at least the part of the terrace that survived the Bath Blitz of April 1942, was demolished in 1993. This is the building that replaced it. It would of course have been smart of me to take my photo from the same angle as the old photo but I didn't. I am a fule.
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| April 2025 |
There's a separate debate to be had about how much Railway Buildings counts as a New Generation Software address. Was it New Generation or was it the mysterious Sentor? Was Malcolm or Rod Evans involved or was the company run by the mysterious R. Gamlln? I call the shots round here. I say 1-6 Railway Building t-e-c-h-n-i-c-a-l-l-y counts. Thus and forever New Generation Software are upgraded from Untraceable; nunc et semper et in sæcula sæeculorum.
VERDICT: TRACED!
The Trashman cover comes from Spectrum Computing.
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