Tynesoft

≠Unit 3 Addison Industrial Estate, Blaydon, Tyne & Wear, NE21

Tynesoft is my story of failure, hope, failure, more hope, more failure, a bit more hope, and a disappointing final near miss. The company was always on my would-be-nice-to-do list but I just couldn't justify a trip to Newcastle upon Tyne. The city is just too far out of my normal orbit to be practical. So I set the company aside, which was a shame because it's definitely one I wanted to cover. (Failure).

I had the inevitable dodgy C90 full of pirated games as a kid and I recall diligently ploughing through the tape, determined to play each game at least once. Auf Wiedersehen Pet, the first Tynesoft release, was on that tape and it was terrible. Not to condone piracy but it was a good example for refuting the oft made argument that a pirated copy of a game was a lost sale. I thought the game was bad but but it turns out a lot of people really wanted to play a game about the adventures of a group of construction workers in Düsseldorf. "There were 17,000 advance orders for the game," company partner Trevor Scott told the EVENING CHRONICLE for a profile of the game and author Bob Carr. One person who wasn't enthusiastic was Jimmy Nail. He refused permission for his likeness to be used on the cover. Hence the headline of newspaper story.

EVENING CHRONICLE
7 June 1984, page 6

The result was a truly rotten effort. Is it a promotional photograph from Auf Wiedersehen Pet or it is just a picture from a local building site? It may be a rotten cover but it guarantees no actor's agent will come calling and asking for residual payments for their client. Fortunately for Tynesoft no one told Jimmy Nail, or his agent and representatives, that loading screens were also a thing.

Tynesoft were a classic example of a publisher who could only exist in the very specific conditions of the UK software industry at the time. They were able to make a living releasing games for machines overlooked by bigger publishers; the C16/+4, the MSX, the BBC Micro, the Acorn Electron, and the Atari 400/800 computers. Tynesoft got so good at this that they were able to start buying the rights to games from other companies to convert them to these minority home computers; Alligata's Who Dares Wins II for the C16; and for Acorn's BBC Micro, Software Projects' Jet Set Willy and Jet Set Willy II and a couple of First Star games from America, Spy vs Spy, and Boulder Dash.

One person who submitted games to Tynesoft was Harry Price. What's a good way to describe him? Let's go with, notorious plagiarist. He submitted several games to Tynesoft which were pre-existing games with altered graphics; Big Bad John was originally Mastertronic's Molecule Man; H.A,R.D. was Android 1 from Vortex; some of his other Tynesoft games were modified from program listings printed in magazines. Altogether about 12 Harry Price games released by Tynesoft across 1986 and 1987 have been identified as changed versions of other titles. Mastertronic were initially tipped off by SINCLAIR USER staff writer Jim Douglas who noticed similarities between their game Spellbound and Crimebusters, a Harry Price game for IJK Software. SINCLAIR USER filled in the details in their December 1986 issue:

Harry Price, the author of the offending game, called somewhat ironically Crime Busters, at first denied the program was a rip-off but Alison Beasely, of Mastertronic says: "The first 50 bytes of both programs are exactly the same, the solutions to the games are almost the same, the character sets are copies and even our hacker trap is included in IJK's game."
Beasely gave Price two options: "I told him to write an apology to us, stating that the game was copied." Price refused and, according to Beasely, she said, "In that case you'll receive a writ for fraud and infringement of copyright tomorrow. "After that he agreed to write the letter," concluded Beasely.
Since their discussion IJK has withdrawn Crime Busters and asked distributors to return all stocks. Ian Sinclair, a director of the company, says: "We're an old software house, five years old, and we're extremely upset that something like this could have happened when we launch our first Spectrum game. It is the sort of thing that could happen to any software house - the market's got so big that we can't possibly look at all the games."

There was a point when I thought I might be able to get a whole article out of the Harry Price games so I fired off an experimental email to Alison Beasley. 

Blimey - that's going back a loooong time... I have no recollection of this incident.
Best of luck.

It was worth a try.

Several of the Tynesoft Harry Price games archived at Spectrum Computing have loading screens which include a credit or reference to IJK Software, as if the games were originally intended to follow Crime Busters; Big Bad John, H.A.R.D., Mind Your Head, One for the Road and Tidy Tony. Was this how the games were released by Tynesoft? IJK were not a well known brand on the Spectrum so it's possible Tynesoft assumed IJK was a company name used by Price.

How lucrative could this all have been for Harry Price? There's a website called Stairway to Hell which includes a feature called Tynesoft Boys Club which mentions: 

One programmer got three of his old titles from another software house, changed the name of the loading screens and title screens and resold them to Tynesoft for £500 each. [Namely SANTA'S DELIVERY, BOZO THE BRAVE & TREK II.  All were originally released by Icon Software]

This was a different programmer, but if Harry Price got the same deal then his 12 games were worth £6000.

Tynesoft made the transition to the Amiga and Atari ST where they released a terrible Superman game (this was different to Beyond's terrible Superman game) and in 1990 a licenced version of the 1984 film Beverley Hills Cop. This last game was completed following a £5000 offer from the official receiver, as programmer Kevin Blake told RETRO GAMER (issue 75 page 36), "Tynesoft went bust because, as a company, it was tied to a print works that went belly-up." The official receiver locked the building on Friday and the office was burned out in an arson attack, although as graphics artist Phil Scott added, "luckily it was so damp in there that the fire didn't take full hold, and so it was mostly smoke damage."

Tynesoft was also working with Adventure Soft to release a game based on horror hostess character Elvira. The game was literally on the cusp of release when Tynesoft went under.

CU AMIGA
May 1990 page 94

Mike Woofroffe of Adventure Soft talked about the background to  Elvira: Mistress of the Dark with the Retro Hour podcast:

Well that was an accident that was because we were we were approached by the guys at Tynesoft to help them with the development of the game and halfway through it they hit the buffers so we had done a load of work on this game for them and there wasn't going to be a game because they'd gone out of business so their agent put us in touch with Cassandra Peterson's husband who was her agent. I went over to the States and said well can we do a deal here because we've got a game half developed, and stuff, and we did a deal with them direct and then Accolade picked it up from there.

THE JOURNAL
Saturday 2 June 1990 page 9

(Hope) In mid-March 2024, I had a reason to visit Newcastle. A friend was running the Tyne Bridges to Boundaries ultramarathon; an ultra marathon being a 32 mile road race for people who feel a regular marathon is not far enough. This is plainly a very silly thing to do. I offered to go along and provide moral support on the day of the race, and then spend the following day driving round photographing buildings on industrial estates in the Tyne-Tees region; which is plainly not a very silly thing to do. 

I reopened my Tynesoft draft and looked up the Addison Industrial Estate on Google Maps, and immediately stalled. The address I had tracked down from adverts archived at Spectrum Computing was just Addision Industrial Estate, Blaydon, Tyne & Wear, NE21 4NE . This was not enough to track down an individual building. The Stairway to Hell website also features a selection of Tynesoft photos which I scoured looking for background details which could be useful in Streetview. We are, of course, talking about 34-odd years ago, plenty of time for Tynesoft's building to be rebuilt beyond recognition or just demolished after the fire. (Failure). Then I found Acorn Electron World, an archive site which included scans of inlays and adverts and gave me a more complete address; Unit 3. (More hope). Except, the Addision Industrial Estate doesn't number its units, at least not any more. (More failure).

March 2024

On the Saturday of the race I ended up passing the entrance to the Addison Industrial Estate several times. It's close to a road called King Oswald Drive which proved to be a good place to park while waiting to offer moral support for my friend's return trip down the banks of the Tyne. My friend and her partner are both well aware of my [perfectly rational] hobby and I was able to stop and grab a couple of photos of the entrance to the estate. During the course of which I was able to also take this picture.

March 2024

Note how the building on the left has Unit 2 painted on the door in big friendly letters. (A bit more hope). However, that hope led nowhere. Logically one of the two buildings next to it should be Unit 3 but neither of them have that address or look like any of the old photos showing the Tynesoft building.  (Disappointing final near miss).

The Auf Wiedersehen Pet cover is from Spectrum Computing. The BBC version of Boulder Dash is from acorn electron world. Super Gran from Lemon64.