Penguin, Puffin, Collins, Heinemann, Hodder & Stoughton, Century, Arrow, Hutchinson, and Hill MacGibbon

The success of The Hobbit must have left book publishers wondering if they were also sitting on a fortune. The game cost £14.95, expensive at the time (less so today; it works out to just over £50) but the price didn't impact its success. Sales were being estimated at north of 100,000 copies by November 1983 [1]. What if everyone sat down and started singing about gold?

The Hobbit was on sale from December 1982 and it really didn't take long for other book publishers to try and grab a piece of the action. This article is more cumbersome than usual, especially the title, because different publishers all entered the market at around the same time and released the same sort of games on roughly the same schedule. My selection of companies might seem arbitrary. It is. As much as I'd like this article to be definitive it's a topic which keeps revealing more detail every time I look at it [2]. I had to stop somewhere. I've already made three separate trips to London because I kept finding new publishers who released Bookware in the 1983-85 period. I'm also trying to keep the definition of Bookware to that originally used by Mosaic Publishing, who started out releasing games and books, or short stories, as a single package. Mosaic were founded on 4 May 1983 and aimed to have their first games on sale in January 1984. They picked up a lot of interest in the gaming and publishing press, were the first to use the label Bookware, and pretty much led the market. It's spring 1983 and everyone is thinking about Christmas.

Collins Software

8 Grafton Street London, W1X

In May 1983, Collins was six years away from the News Corporation takeover which would see them merged to become HarperCollins. They had a couple of imprints who released software. One was Collins Educational Ltd [3] who released educational software written by Peter K. McBride. He had made a career out of this, having previously done the same for Longmans' software label. Collins published books for children through their Armada imprint, including Biggles, Billy Bunter, and the Three Investigators series. It clearly made sense to combine the two and Peter K. McBride wrote the first Bookware for Collins Software based on another Armada series, the Paddington books by Michael Bond. There were four titles; Paddington and the Disappearing Ink; Paddington's Early Visit; Paddington's Problem Picture; and Paddington's Shopping Mix-up. All four were educational and came with with what seems to be a specially written Paddington story;  versions were available for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Acorn Electron. A common theme of the Bookware genre is that programmes are treated like books and remain the copyright of their authors which was not usually the case. If you wrote a game for Ocean it became the copyright of Ocean. The cassette for Paddington's Problem Picture shows the game remained the copyright of P. K. McBride with the copyright for Paddington held by Paddington and Company Ltd. Collins Software will return later but for now, that's it.

October 2025

See that gap? That's where 8 Grafton Street was. Step back in time with Streetview and you'll see a generic fifties/sixties office block which was empty in 2012, boarded up by 2015, and demolished in 2023. Collins Publishers themselves were based in Glasgow but in 1983 they took over Granada Publishing, a subsidiary of Granada Group. It was Granada who were based in Grafton Street and clearly they had office space going spare for Collins Software to use.

Heinemann

22 Bedford Square, London, WC1

Heinemann Computers in Education was the snappy title educational publishers Heinemann gave their software label. They followed Collins and, around November 1983, released four educational games for the Spectrum, all written by Birmingham based developer Five Ways Software; Special Agent, Punctuation Pete, Ballooning, and Car Journey. These came with instructions that doubled as a non-fiction book so the Car Journey book includes a bit about the history of roads, Punctuation Pete talks about the history of words, and so on. Having released these four titles Heinemann withdrew from the software market.

November 2025

This is now my third trip to Bedford Square; once in 2023 for Entersoft, the software arm of Enterprise Computers; then earlier in 2025 when writing about The Digital Village; now I'm back here again at the other end of the year. Number 22 is centre right in that picture; two right from the red door. The afternoon sun put on a nice display so I thought I'd grab a more scenic picture than usual. All the buildings are identical. Number 22 is on the north side of the square and it's a terraced Georgian House with a black door, exactly like the Entersoft and Digital Village buildings.

Penguin
Bath Road, Harmondsworth, UB7 0DA

THE BOOKSELLER
October 1 1983 page 1473

The publishing world is not large. Everyone seemed to know everyone else's business. When Vicky Carne was setting up Mosaic Publishing she approached a lot of companies and individuals for financing. Penguin had an additional heads up because Mosaic licenced John Astrop's Puffin book My Secret File for their Bookware range. At this point it must surely have occurred to Penguin that while they could make some money by allowing other companies turn their books into games they could also do everything themselves and keep all of the money. Thus Penguin's new range of software was announced in September 1983. A time when their Puffin imprint had five books in the BOOKSELLER Children's Bestsellers Top 10; The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, The Forest of Doom, Peepo, and Supergran is Magic. 

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, The Citadel of Chaos, and The Forest of Doom were books in the Fighting Fantasy series. This was huge at the time. The series as a whole sold around 20 million copies. I was 11 in 1983 and I remember the books being passed round my class like something from an underground press. Reading them felt subversive and illicit. The Fighting Fantasy books carried a whiff of parental disapproval, which helped, but what really made them a craze were the rumours. The books had "been banned" at an unnamed nearby school because a kid reading them "had died". We didn't have the collective imagination to claim they made kids levitate. Obviously Penguin carefully considered the occult impact of turning such powerful books into software and then considered the sales figures and went ahead.

THE BOOKSELLER
September 10 1983 page 58

Penguin went in big. They used a four page BOOKSELLER advert [4] to announce their collection of books and computer games to be published on 8th December. You could buy the book and the software, for the Spectrum only, in a pack or just the tape. The headline title was The F Plan Diet (pack £6.95 or tape £4.95) which had sold really well in print. More interesting for this blog were the other four titles. Collins and Heinemann had stuck to educational software but Penguin went properly into games with software based on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (book pack £6.95 or tape £5.95) and The Korth Trilogy, Escape from Arkaron, Beseiged, and Into the Empire (£4.95 each). The Korth games, and accompanying books, were written by Peter K. McBride, fresh from programming for Longman and Collins; I said publishing was a small world. These would all be released as part of something Penguin occasionally referred to as The Puffin Personal Computer Collection. 

Looked at now, it's odd how much prominence the advert gives to The Korth Trilogy over The Warlock of Firetop Mountain which is barely mentioned. Maybe Penguin felt The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was such an obvious seller it made sense to give the other three games a boost. The BOOKSELLER, in an article the following week, noted the print run for each game was 20,000 copies  and they were expected to sell out rapidly. Penguin knew Mosaic's range was arriving early in 1984 so did they rush release their titles to have them in the shops before Mosaic? Hidden in the high score table for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a message from the programmers: "we apologise for the game being boring but we were literally only given 3 weeks to write it."

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was written by Neil Mottershead and Simon Brattel of Crystal Computing and adapted from their game Halls of the Things. POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY spoke to Crystal Computing who described the rapid development of the game:

"We ended up doing it quite by accident -we simply bumped into Steve Jackson, one of the authors of the book, in Currys one day -we got talking, he came back and looked at Halls and liked it." The final program was completed in six weeks. "Puffin were fairly stringent in their requirements for the game. There we sorts of things we had to put in -likewise there were things we couldn't do."

POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY 26 January-1 February 1984 page 13

According to Penguin's BOOKSELLER advert there would be:

Heavy consumer and computer press advertising in the run-up to Christmas and the peak-selling period just after the festive season when thousands of families are the proud owners of new machines! All culminating in a Channel 4 TV campaign in January.

Not much of this campaign has survived. Sadly the TV advert hasn't been kept anywhere. The computer magazine adverts have been archived, featuring a robot attracting the reader by shouting "ATTENTION EARTHLINGS!" Maybe it's just me, but I can't shake the feeling the robot looks a lot like Tharg the Mighty, editor of 2000AD.

Crystal Computing hated Keith Campbell, who wrote the adventure column for COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES, and gave Halls of the Things a bad review in C&VG issue 27 [5]. He followed this with an even worse review of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in issue 29: 

Not so the software, which, not unreasonably, I anticipated would be a computerised version of the book. It is not. The game is almost identical to Halls of the Things from Crystal Computing. Guess who wrote the program? Messrs Mottershead and Brattel of Crystal Computing. Phew! What a coincidence! And you bought both? Ever been had?

The fire was lit on a grudge which burned for years and persisted even after Crystal Computing changed their name to Design Design. Simon Bratell's 1984 magnum opus Dark Star came packaged with a Teletext simulator [6] called Spectacle which was packed with unflattering comments about C&VG and Keith Campbell. Spectacle page 150 features Keith Campbell's "ever been had," comment followed by: "Keith, your unbiased reviews are an example to us all. Are C&UG [7] never going to forget that argument? Are the sins of the advertisers to be bestowed upon the programmers?"

Penguin Books office had been on Bath Road since 1940. Here's a picture showing the building when it was all shiny and new. 

THE BYSTANDER
Wednesday 10 January 1940 page 15

The site was redeveloped some time around 1972. RIBApix has a selection of photos showing the new open plan building, including the view from the other side of Bath Road. This is what the building would have looked like in 1984. Polar Park doesn't look like that now, of course. Penguin Books moved out around 2001. While I was hunting around for information I found a description of the site which I diligently copied and pasted, and then forgot to get the citation. So here is some unidentified and uncredited text:

Penguin Books was behind and slightly to the right of the what is now the Arora hotel on the Bath Road. The bus stop now known as "Compass Centre" used to be "Penguin Books".
The high bay warehouse is the only part that still exists and from what I can see of the Hatch Lane photo, the warehouse is the large block. The footpath shown in the right of the photo meets the Bath Road just west of Penguin.
I used to work across the corridor from the old Puffin Club office. I think it had a sticker left on the door when I started there.
All of the editorial and "arty" staff were in Kensington in the Eighties, Harmonsworth was the warehouse, Accounts, operations, computer dept and sales.
The site is now being developed as "Polar Park" which I guess is a reference to it's old use.

Polar Park is on the other side of the road from Heathrow airport. Heathrow, of course, sits in the middle of a web of transport links designed to get people to their planes as (relatively) easily as possible. This means, it's not difficult to get to Heathrow airport but it is surprisingly hard to get to Heathrow adjacent. Driving was out but I also couldn't get the train or underground because they all take you direct to the airport with no pedestrian access to Bath Road. In the end I got the Underground to Hounslow Central and caught an 81 bus, a round trip to and from Victoria station which took something like three hours. When I got off the bus, this is what I saw.

October 2025

I'd misread the description above. Where it said "Penguin Books was behind and slightly to the right" I took that to mean the hotel (now the Hyatt Place hotel) was more or less built in front of the old 1972 building. It wasn't. If you look in the far right of the picture above you can just see a warehouse, that was built right on top of the old Penguin offices. Fortunately, I had a better picture (sort of).

October 2025

I'm not sure why I took that picture but I'm glad I did. I don't fancy another round trip to Heathrow-adjacent. I think I was under the mistaken impression that the warehouse was the "high bay warehouse... the only part that still exists". The warehouse referred to is actually this one which you can see being built in the RIBApix photographs. I did toy with the idea of getting a photo looking up the Polar Park access road but there was one good reason not to; Polar Park is the home of Heathrow Police Station. The Police at Heathrow are armed and I didn't want to look too suspicious on CCTV. I'm happy to label this a failure of journalistic integrity but I didn't much fancy arguing with a van full of armed Police officers that I'm allowed to take pictures from Bath Road looking into Polar Park.

536 Kings Road, London, SW10

Penguin also had a London office on the Kings Road. The address is listed on the inside of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain inlay. It also crops up in an issue of LOAD RUNNER, advertising the Puffin Young Programmers of the Year competition.

LOAD RUNNER
Issue 6 page 9

This was considerably easier to reach via a 20 minute walk from Earls Court Station. I did this on my return from Hounslow and points west. Disappointingly the whole building was covered in scaffolding.

October 2025

To review, by the start of 1984, Heinemann had withdrawn, Collins weren't sure, Penguin were waiting to see how successful their games were, and Mosaic was in it for the long haul. I wonder how much of the interest of other publishers was driven by the success of Mosaic. Even their titles based on lesser known works, like The Pen and the Dark, were selling around 20,000 copies. Their second wave of Bookware arrived around June 1984. Shortly after the launch of a range from a new company.

Arrow
17-21 Conway Street,  London, W1P 6JD 

Arrow were a label of Hutchinson Publications, and in May 1984 they released eight educational games which also came with a story tape. These were released in a series called Learning Box. All the games were for the Spectrum and all of them were written by Five Ways Software who were doing very well out of the Bookware concept.

 

October 2025

I find myself with little to say about Arrow or their offices. Conway Street is just south of Euston Station and I got there as the sun was starting to go down on the same day I'd travelled out to Heathrow and then walked to Kings Road before travelling on through London via Grafton Street and Fleet Street. I was a bit tired. Conway Street is just north of the Post Office Town but I couldn't work out how to take a photo which included it. 

Unexpectedly Collins released a fifth Paddington game in July 1984, Paddington's Garden Game. Then, the August issue of MICRO ADVENTURER carried a wealth of Bookware news as everyone started revealing details of their Christmas 1984 releases. 

There was more news of Collins Software:

Graham Taylor, of Collins Software, plans to release a number of games by the end of the year, and will be concentrating on adventures. "I have no interest in arcade style adventures," he said, "their day is past."

Penguin had two more Fighting Fantasy games on the way based on The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom. Hutchinson were planning to release two games based on their Lone Wolf game books, Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water. And there was news of yet another company entering the scene.

Hill MacGibbon

92 Fleet Street, London, EC4Y

I can't tell you how much confusion Hill MacGibbon caused me. I could find no information on them anywhere but I got fixed on the idea they were a book publisher.  In my defence, I had good reason to assume they were a book publisher. For starters, there's that company name. They certainly sound like a book publisher. They worked with Five Ways Software like, seemingly, every other book publisher who ever released a computer program. Plus, one of their first acts was to create a catalogue by buying up and re-releasing old educational software; a few titles from Longman and the four Heinemann Computers in Education games. The Heinemann software was given exciting new covers. The one for Car Journey is particularly deceptive. The Hill MacGibbon rebrand sees the dull Heinemann cover replaced with something which makes the program look more like an early version of Out Run.

It turns out the reason Hill MacGibbon walks like a book publisher, swims like a book publisher, and quacks like a book publisher, is because it was set up by a trio of ex-book publishers:

Three Heinemann directors to go it alone into software

Alan Hill, Hamish MacGibbon and Roy Davey are leaving the Heinemann group to go it alone. They expect Hill MacGibbon Ltd to be operating before February is out from a temporary address at 3rd Floor, St Bartholomew House, 92 Fleet Street, London EC4.
The new company has outside support -but not from any other publishing house- and an equity basis of just over £250,000.

BOOKSELLER, January 28 1984 page 296.

Alan Hill founded Heinemann Computers in Education with Hamish MacGibbon as chairman. Roy Davey, marketing director of Heinemann Educational Books, worked with Five Ways Software to develop the four titles which Hill MacGibbon later brought from Heinemann. Hill MacGibbon's first new games came out around November 1984 and I'm not going to linger on them because, although they were more thoughtful than equivalent fare (compare for example their game Run for Gold to Daley Thompson's Decathlon), they weren't Bookware; that would come in 1985.

October 2025

The black door in the middle of my photo is the entrance to Bartholomew House, 92 Fleet Street. It is more or less opposite the Daily Express building, which in 1984 was still occupied by the newspaper. Hill MacGibbon were up on the third floor but the view from their office is long gone. The building opposite was demolished and redeveloped in 2000, and the site is now cleared again. Unfortunately it has been cleared for a terrible 21 story tower but this isn't an architecture blog.

Hodder & Stoughton

Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks

Unlike all the other companies listed here, Hodder & Stoughton were not based in London. Their main office was in Dunton Green near Sevenoaks. It's gone now, the huge site was cleared some time in the nineties and used for housing. 

Hodder also entered the Bookware field just before Christmas 1984. They were the publisher of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and planned to release a Bookware version, as an adventure for the Spectrum. The game cost £9.95, pricy but in line with the cost of a premium game in 1984. Your £10 got you 5p change, the game, a copy of the book, and the knowledge you had made a donation to Great Ormond Street Hospital as part of the J. M. Barrie Peter Pan bequest. Despite good intentions Peter Pan got lukewarm reviews and was unfavourably compared to The Hobbit. Peter Pan included a contest to win one of signed copies of the cover art. The address to send your entry to is oddly familiar:

Hodder & Stoughton, Children’s Books 47, Bedford Square, London WC1

Oh well. At least I won't have far to walk. I predict it will be a terraced Georgian house with a black front door.

November 2025

Oh I was wrong. The old Hodder & Stoughton office is the left-hand side of the grand white building in the middle. The other half of the building is the Consulate of Angola.

Century Software

Portland House, 12-13 Greek Street, London, W1V

Christmas 1984 also saw Century Publishing try their luck with a couple of games  and books. There was David Gemmell's Legend which came in a VHS-sized box containing a copy of the 384 page book: "the largest I have yet seen in Bookware," according to MICRO ADVENTURER. The second title, also with a copy of the novel, was The Horse Lord, released for the BBC Micro.

There was more Bookware for Christmas. Arrow offered Flight from the Dark and Fire on the Water. Once again, this was only for the Spectrum and there were two versions available, a box set of game and book for £8.95, or just the game for £6.95. Mosaic offered The Stainless Steet Rat Saves the World as a game and book edition. This was supposed to be for the C64 and Spectrum but only the C64 version made it to the shops. The Saga of Erik the Viking was released for the Spectrum, C64, and BBC Micro. and only contained extracts from the book; possibly because it was published in 1983 and still relatively new. The Nomad of Time, C64 only, also contained extracts from the book rather than the whole thing.

Penguin had had a rethink. It seems fair to assume The Warlock of Firetop Mountain sold much better than The Korth Trilogy which explains why their Christmas 1984 games were both Fighting Fantasy adaptions. The Citadel of Chaos and The Forest of Doom were both very faithful to the original, when compared to Warlock. It also seems fair to assume the game only version of Warlock sold better than the tape and book pack, so Citadel and Forest were both sold as tape only. Warlock had been a Spectrum only release but now the market had expanded there would also be Commodore 64 versions of Citadel and Forest. In fact, the Spectrum version of Citadel of Chaos went AWOL and was never released. 

And that was it. Penguin released no more games, Bookware or otherwise, and the Fighting Fantasy  licence would pass on to Adventure Soft.

Christmas 1984 pretty much marked the beginning of the end for the Bookware concept. From now on, for the most part, books would now be treated like any other licence. The rights to a book would be brought and it would be adapted into a separate game. A few games went the other way and included a novella inspired by the events of the game; Robert Holdstock wrote The Dark Wheel to be packaged with Elite; James Follett wrote a novella for Starglider; The Sacred Armour of Antirad featured a short graphic novel drawn by Dan Malone who went on to work on the graphics for The Chaos Engine;  and Legend included a 56 page comic in the box for The Great Space Race.

Heinemann was out after Christmas 1984. Penguin was also out. In fact, Penguin was so out that May 1985 saw Hill MacGibbon licence the Puffin paperback version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be included in their Bookware version of the Roald Dahl story; this version also used the paperback cover for the box artwork. After this, Hill MacGibbon was also out. They had been taken over by Collins, and were now operating out of 8 Grafton Street. Collins meanwhile were back in, they would continue releasing educational software for the next year or so but nothing which could be described as Bookware.

Hutchinson released The Fourth Protocol in May 1985, based on Frederick Forsyth's incredibly successful thriller. The game was announced back in October 1984 at the Frankfurt Book Fair just before the release of Arrow's Lone Wolf games. MICRO ADVENTURER covered the announcement in their November issue, describing it as "a coup" and reporting:

The game has been designed by John Lambshead and Gordon Paterson, the team responsible for Legend from Century, and programming will be by the Electronic Pencil Company. It will be a text and graphics adventure, and will run on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum 48k. It will be released in May of 1985. No price has been fixed.

Doug Fox, Hutchinson Computer Publisher's General Manager, confirms that the company will be producing software in conjunction with major titles published by their traditional book side.

"Our objective is to back up our books with high quality software. We hope to publish between six and eight packages a year, and we intend to proceed with caution — we only want top name stuff."

COMPUTER GAMER
May 1985 page 2

Hutchinson advertised the game with a weird airbrushed picture of a mushroom cloud which looks like something from a Terry Gilliam animation. The game got cracking reviews and was licenced for European distribution to Ariolasoft and in the US by Bantam Software. It did well enough for a hints and tips book to be published, which must be one of the earlier examples of this type of guide. The Fourth Protocol got quite a limited initial run because Hutchinson was in the process of being acquired by Century Publishing (the owners of Century Software, natch). It was rereleased later in 1985 after Century Software rebranded as Century Communications. June 1985 also saw a Hutchinson run a single advert for a new Lone Wolf game, The Ice Halls of Terror. This was advertised as a Hutchinson game rather than Arrow, as previously. An Italian blog called Archeogaming notes another advert for The Ice Halls of Terror appeared in the summer special of the Lone Wolf Cub Newsletter. I spotted the game was now being advertised as a Century Communications title, rather than Hutchinson, and the address at the bottom of the second advert is different.

Century Communications
Brookmount House, 62-5 Chandos Place, Covent Garden, London, WC2N 4NW

Initially I thought Lone Wolf and the Ice Halls of Terror was lost in the merger between Hutchinson and Century, and the subsequent rebrand of Century Software as Century Communications. However, Century's re-release of The Fourth Protocol and their 1986 publication of The Fourth Protocol: Playing the Game shows that Century were, for a while at least, interesting in seeing if their label could be a success. Century also released, in late 1985, Their Finest Hour a game by John K. Wilson and Nicholas Palmer. Palmer had been the author of Mosaic's only book, called Beyond the Arcade.

Archeogaming's original Ice Halls of Terror post dates back to 2013. Two years later, they ran a short update:

During the 2013 I was questioning if Lone Wolf and The Ice Halls of Terror was ever released. Yesterday, Joe Dever confirmed me that the game never happened.

The Ice Halls of Terror did not get published. This was due to the fact that the developer went bankrupt one month before it's scheduled release! There are no copies of it in existence.

Obviously I went to Covent Garden to take a picture of a building that once housed a company who never released any proper Bookware titles. If nothing else, these photos are useful to occasionally break up the text. I discovered that in order to get a decent photo of Brookmount House I would have to stand right in front of Charing Cross Police Station. If this photo looks like it was taken in a hurry, it was (the Police van I was standing next to has been cropped out. The Territorial Support Group van full of bored coppers having their lunch was, luckily for me, out of sight round the corner).

November 2025

Hodder & Stoughton's Christmas game of 1984 had been Peter Pan. They went less highbrow for Christmas 1985 with a game based on James Herbert's The Rats. It was simultaneously an odd choice and a smart one. Odd because the book was old even in 1985. It had first been printed in 1974. It was a smart choice because it was notorious. The Fighting Fantasy books were passed discretely round my class like our version of pornography. The Rats was passed discretely round my class like actual pornography. An enterprising classmate liberated it from their dad's bookshelf and by the time it had done the rounds it always fell open on the page with the sex scene (which, from memory occurred shortly before the post-coital couple were devoured by rats). If you want to get a sense of the book then listen to this all too brief extract read by "Alan Bennet". The game was written by Five Ways Software and was available for the Spectrum and C64. The Rats was Hodder's last attempt to crack the software market before they also withdrew. The following year Macmillan Publishers would have more success with their new label Piranha, for a couple of years at least.

Penguin, Collins, and the rest never quite grasped how publishing software was different from publishing books. Releasing a couple of games a year isn't going to cut it in terms of gaining a decent share of the market. Books literally have a longer shelf life than games because people who like an author will go out and read their back catalogue. That doesn't apply to games. No one is going to buy Peter Pan because they really liked The Rats. Games need testing and after sales support in a way that books don't. People don't buy a book and discover it isn't compatible with their eyes. Print runs don't have to be recalled because a proofreading error makes all the pages fall out after seven chapters. One of the reasons Games Workshop stopped releasing games was because they realised that to run a successful software company would change the shape of their business. Companies sold books or they sold software but no one ever made it work doing both. Macmillian had some success by allowing Piranha to run at arms length but in the end Piranha didn't make enough money to justify its continued existence.

The Bookware trend was started by Melbourne House when they released The Hobbit in 1982. At the time they made a living selling books and games but the books were rapidly squeezed out. Melbourne House were a full time software house by the end of 1985 when they released a game which did as good a job as any of wrapping a neat bow around this wave of Bookware. They released a game called The Lord of the Rings. It came packaged with a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring.

[1] THE NORTHERN ECHO, Friday 18 November 1983 page 6.
[2]Like literally right now I logged into this page to do a final proof read and what did I see? An urgent note at the top of the page reading "NEED PHOTO OF Portland House, 12-13 Greek Street, London, W1V" Guess what I forgot.

[3] A different company under the Collins umbrella. They seem to operate for several years out of 5 Buckingham Place. This address is tremendously exiting for two reasons. One, it's just round the corner from Ariolasoft's first office at Asphalte House in Palace Street. Two, its four doors down from where Number Six lived in The Prisoner, 1 Buckingham Place.

[4] I like the way the advert inadvertently makes the Penguin logo look like the baddie from The Wrong Trousers.

[5] On the following page was a glowing review of one of Mosaic's first games The Pen and the Dark . The uncredited review gushed: "This is the first venture into software by Mosaic, and if the rest of their software comes up to this standard then they should be very successful." The Pen and the Dark, the game, was written by Keith Campbell. Oh!

[6] I do not know why you would want to simulate Teletext on a Spectrum. To see if you can, presumably.

[7] Not a typo. In Design Design speak, C&UG stood for Complete & Utter Garbage.

What have I forgotten or missed out? Apart from a photo of 12-13 Greek Street. Leave a comment and/or follow me on Bluesky. @shammountebank.bsky.social You can send emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com