First there was Gremlin Graphics Derby. A satellite studio for the Sheffield based software house. It was formed some time around 1987 but has frustrated my attempts at location. If you know, please tell me. One of the people who worked at Gremlin Derby was programmer Chris Shrigley and in 2019 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate by the University of Derby. A transcript of his commendation is online and includes a few words about what happened next:
In 1986, I got my first real job in the game industry at Gremlin Graphics, where I spent several dizzying years learning to be a proper games programmer, making games mostly for my beloved Commodore 64. But in 1988 the UK game industry hit a rough patch and Gremlin had to close its Derby offices and lay us all off. A week later, we reopened as Core Design and barely skipped a beat.
Wikipedia lists the founder members of Core Design as Chris Shrigley, Andy Green, Rob Toone, Terry Lloyd, Simon Phipps, Dave Pridmore, Jeremy Heath-Smith, Kevin Norburn and Greg Holmes. I don't know the circumstances but somehow Jeremy Heath-Smith and Kevin Norburn ended up as the only two shareholders.
Saxon House, Heritage Gate, Derby, DE1 1NL
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| NEW COMPUTER EXPRESS April 22 1989 page 30 |
Core Design was born on 13 May 1988, registered at Companies House under the unpromising name of Megabrite Ltd. I'm pretty sure it started as an off the shelf company registered at Altrincham, to the south west of Manchester. There's a flurry of activity in July 1988 which indicates the company was being taken off the shelf, including a change of registered office to the address above at Saxon House [1]. The name Megabrite stuck for another couple of months before someone decided it was terrible and Core Design properly entered the world in October 1988.
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| July 2026 |
That's Core Designs' first proper office, somewhere on the ground floor. These days it is a residential building and the conversion to homes happened around 2017.
Core Design started as a developer making games for other companies. The advert up the page gives an idea of the fractured nature of the UK computer market in 1989. It was transitioning from the 8-bit computers which had dominated to the new 16-bit formats. If you were a developer you were expected to be able to make games for all of them. Which is what Core Design did. They hit the ground running with six of original titles and conversions released across 1989; Action Fighter, Dynamite Düx, Rick Dangerous, Saint & Greavsie, Switchblade and Axel's Magic Hammer. But which came first? Simon Phipps, one of the founders of Core Design, has a website where he gives a release date of June 1989 for Rick Dangerous and adds:
Rick Dangerous was an original platform game that spoofed the Indiana Jones genre and was the first game to be developed by the newly formed Core Design.
Rick Dangerous is now mainly remembered as a painfully difficult memory test. That was pretty also much the view in 1989 but reviewers then were more tolerant of brutally unfair games and seemed to mistake them for something fun. ST FORMAT spoke to Simon Phipps and Bob Churchill in 1990, on the eve of Core Design becoming a publisher, and got some additional information on what they described as "the expletive-deleted difficulty":
"That was my first game, and it was simply too tough in places"... It was also the first project on which Core's chief game tester Bob Churchill worked, and it appears the combined inexperience of the two gents resulted in a game that was a hell of a lot harder than it should have been.
Firebird took Rick Dangerous and Action Fighter. Gremlin Graphics handled Axel's Magic Hammer and Switchblade. Dynamite Dux was for Activision. And Saint & Greavsie, for Grandslam, was according to Simon Phipps:
A short ‘filler’ project (10 weeks from start to finish). It was the conversion of a soccer trivia board game that featured soccer pundits Jimmy ‘Greavsie’ Greaves and Ian ‘Saint’ St. John who, in the late 80s graced the UK’s television screens every Saturday lunchtime with their own unique brand of soccer punditry.
1989 was a good year. So was 1990 with more games for Gremlin plus Monty Python's Flying Circus for Virgin Interactive. Rick Dangerous 2 was turned around fast for the MicroStyle label, from MicroProse , who had retired the Firebird brand they'd owned since May 1989. Core also began publishing. Three games in 1990, CarVup, Corporation, and Torvak The Warrior. All three carried a new address on the back of the box.
Suite C, Tradewinds House 69-71A Ashbourne Road, Derby, DE3 3FS
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| July 2026 |
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| EVENING TELEGRAPH 01 December 1998, page 54 |
Tradewinds House is gone. Replaced by a block of flats called The Halcyon which sprawls from 65-71A Ashbourne Road. Much to my surprise, I've been able to find a grainy photo of Tradewinds House, described as a "Most Attractive Detached Period Office Building" in the Derby EVENING TELEGRAPH. It can't have been that attractive or they wouldn't have knocked it down.
Core Design recruitment adverts show the company stayed at Tradewinds House until at least June 1993. However by August 1990 the registered office had been updated on the Companies House records.
Century House, 6 Bold Lane, Derby DE1 3NT
The official records show a series of moves over the next seven years as responsibility for the accounts jump between various chartered accountants based in Derby. I could also represent them via the medium of a series of low-level parking violations made while I bounced around Derby's quite complicated one-way system and ring road. It was getting late on Sunday afternoon and I was in a hurry to get home before anything terrible happened on the M1, m'lud. Century House was parking outside bay markings or designated spaces [2]
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| July 2026 |
Century House has fallen on hard times. In 1990 I'm pretty sure it was home to a firm of accountants called Bates Foston & Co. However, it clearly wasn't home to them for long because by March 1991 the address had changed again.
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| July 2026 |
The Mills is now home to a firm of accountants called Bates Weston. Did Bates Foston become Bates Weston? Probably but that's for a future project of mine covering the detailed step-by-step office history of accountants in Derby and nowhere else; title to be decided.
(Canal Street was parking without displaying a valid parking permit or ticket.)
These two addresses cover a period of about four years. What happened during that time? Well, 1991 saw Core Design work pretty much exclusively as a publisher. They released seven titles and the only one they handed to someone else was the Mega Drive version of Chuck Rock; for Virgin Interactive. In fact, Core Design start publishing games by other developers; Synthetic Dimensions for the MS-DOS version of Corporation and The 8th Day for Heimdall. 1992 was more of the same. The Commodore 64 version of Chuck Rock would have been their last game for 8-bit home computers but it was quietly cancelled. In the UK at least. It saw release in Italy. Raffaele Valensise of Italian developer Genias, remembered what it was like to work with Core Design on the C64 version in a now archived interview:
[translated from Italian]
I remember very well that the guys at CORE Design were incredibly demanding! Even though [Riccardo Arioti, founder of Genias] handled the business side, the negotiations were anything but easy! They had very high expectations and constantly monitored the development stages. But I also remember that, once the work was done, they heaped praise on the development team; they hadn't expected a result like that and were genuinely surprised.
I can imagine the pressure Luca Zarri and Marco Corazza were under while porting the game. In fact, Stefan Roda himself told me that *Chuck Rock* was the very last project he oversaw for Genias. Stefan remembers getting really angry with the CORE team back then because they came across as arrogant and were never satisfied with the port—often over trivial things, like "the little guy on the C64 doesn't have the same colours as the Amiga version...!"...or for a sprite that appeared off-screen a tenth of a second earlier than on the Amiga, or something similar.
At one point, the *Chuck Rock* porting project was cancelled by CORE Design because they didn't consider the Commodore 64 market to be of interest. However, Softel—which operated in the Italian market, where cassette-based games were still selling in huge numbers at the time—reached an agreement with the CORE manager of the day to handle development using an Italian team contracted through Genias.
Even as Core left the 8-bit home computers behind, it made Chuck Rock for the 8-bit SEGA Master System, published by Virgin. There was also a SNES version for Sony, and Mega Drive and Mega CD versions of Hook for Sony Imagesoft. The contact with Sony was good for the long term prospects of Core Design because it seems to have given them early access to a PlayStation but the Mega CD games would be a problem.
Geoff Brown knew, Core had serious funding problems; this in spite of having become the smallest publisher to get a Sega licence to develop for their platforms. Releases for Master System, Game Gear
and Mega Drive went well, but Core committed heavily to development for the ill-fated Mega CD accessory that allowed the Genesis/Mega Drive to play games developed on CD and for the short-lived Sega 32X add-on (which the anticipated Sega Saturn wiped out). When the cash ran out, Geoff stepped in looking to expand CentreGold through acquisitions.
(THE STORY OF US GOLD, Chris Wikins and Roger M. Kean)
Units 2 and 3, Holford Way, Holford, Birmingham, B6 7AX
There's a weird circularity to US Gold's purchase of Core Design. Back in 1988 the founders all worked for Gremlin Graphics, which was 75% owned by Geoff Brown; boss of Birmingham based software distributer CentreSoft and their label US Gold.
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| DAILY TELEGRAPH 27 October 1994 page 23 |
Turnover at Core in the year to July 31 more than doubled to £4.74 million as it benefited from the first sales of cartridge games for Sega.
But profits fell by more than 70% to £33,130 as it was hit by higher manufacturing costs associated with cartridge production and an exceptional pension contribution of £105,000.
There was another reason for Geoff Brown's interest in Core:
I’d seen development on
Tomb Raider and I thought, Shit! That is
a fantastic product.
(THE STORY OF US GOLD page 109)
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| June 2023 |
I've now used the photo of Holford Way three times and I haven't written about Centresoft/US Gold yet. That should give you some idea of how big the company was.
Wimbledon Bridge House, 1 Hartfield Road, SW19 3RU
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| November 2024 |
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| November 2024 |
I'm fudging the timeline because it makes more sense to follow the registered office addresses all the way through to the end. US Gold as you might have noticed never got to release Tomb Raider. They were themselves taken over by an even bigger company, Eidos. They were based in Wimbledon Bridge House, above and so big it requires two photos. What happened to US Gold is best left for their article [3] but US Gold never got to see the benefit of two years supporting the development of Tomb Raider. The company was taken over in April 1996 six months before Tomb Raider's release.
The story of what happened next is well documented in an arstechnica.com article called “It felt like robbery”: Tomb Raider and the fall of Core Design. The short answer is money. The longer answer involves a rich stew of unmanaged growth at Core Design, increasingly jaded and bitter creators, and a distant head office in Wimbledon who kept demanding one more Lara Croft game, one more Lara Croft game, because one more Lara Croft game would surely stave off all their financial problems and put Eidos back on an even keel. In the end a fed up design team at Core Design dropped a pyramid on Lara Croft at the end of 1999's Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation.
The first Tomb Raider game was out at the end of 1996 and was followed by another each year up to 2000's Tomb Raider Chronicles. That gives you some idea of the pressure put on Core. Eidos killed the goose that laid the golden eggs but before they did, they put it in a sexy dress and smeared lipstick all round its beak:
You left Core originally over concerns that Lara was getting "sexed" up. She still seems that way in Legend - how do you feel about that?
It wasn't about her boobs getting bigger. She was always designed to look good - people's psychology is that they like attractive characters on both sexes. What I objected to was the marketing which represented Lara in a way that was nothing like the character. At the time I didn't like that and it prompted me to want to retain control of characters I created in the future, so that's why I left.
That's Toby Gard, creator of Lara Croft and animator at Core talking to THE GUARDIAN in 2006 just before the release of the seventh game in the series, Tomb Raider: Legend. He left Core Design in 1998 and I plan to cover the changes in marketing of Lara Croft in a short story I call:
Lara Croft: a story in three pictures [4]
Toby Gard came back in 2006 to work on Tomb Raider: Legend. When he did he was working with a company called Crystal Dynamics. Eidos took Tomb Raider away from Core Design in 2003 following the release of Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness which was criticised for a cumbersome control system and bugs. EDGE scored the game at four out of ten, in issue 126 (August 2003) and noted:
That this review is being written just days before the release of the game speaks volumes. The lack of tight Al and the abundance of minor glitches suggests that Core could have done with another couple of months for fine tuning.
OFFICIAL PLAYSTATION 2 MAGAZINE described Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness as "slow, apathetic, dawdling, lazy and listless." And then scored it at eight out of ten [5]. Still, the game went on to sell 2.5 million copies and its hard not to suspect the worst thing Core Design did was deliver the game slightly too late to hit Eidos' 2002 financial year. The company was hoping for some good news to offset £30.7 million of losses for the year. Jeremy Heath-Smith stood down from Core Design and the Eidos board and Lara Croft was given to Eidos' US developer Crystal Dynamics who were regarded as more reliable.
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| THE GUARDIAN Wednesday 6 August 2003 |
Jeremy Heath-Smith and his brother Adrian went off to form Circle Studios, based "less than half a mile down the road from the Core Design offices in Derby" according to EDGE (Life After Lara, issue 134, March 2004 page 60):
Finding talented staff is a perennial problem for developers, especially startups. Obviously, Circle circumvented this problem by poaching its entire workforce from Core Design. "We asked 37 people to join us and 36 came," says Adrian.
And Core Design?
"Core Design is now floundering around with a handful of people trying to get a project of the ground, and no real leadership, which is sad." [Jeremy Heath-Smith] doesn't exactly radiate sympathy.
Core Design outlasted Eidos. The company put itself up for sale in June 2004 and was taken over by Battersea based publisher SCi around 2005 (it's not easy to be precise because the deal took two years to be completed). Core worked on a game for the Playstation Portable called Smart Bomb. Then they proposed a tenth anniversary remake of Tomb Raider in 2005 but Sci/Eidos preferred to keep the game with Crystal Dynamics.
Core Design themselves were sold in 2006 to Rebellion, publishers of 2000AD and games like Sniper Elite and Rogue Trooper. Now this is where things get even more complicated because Edios kept the Core Design intellectual property and name. Rebellion bought the physical studio. So let's follow the story of the name through to the bitter end.
Square Enix Ltd, 240 Blackfriars Road, 12 & 13th Floors, London,SE1
SCi formally changed their name to Eidos in 2008. The following year, Square Enix brought up Eidos and stayed at Wimbledon Bridge Road until 2014. Then they moved here.
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| November 2024 |
By 2008 Companies House was recording Core Design's accounts as being made up for a dormant company. This continued all the way through to 2016 when the company was dissolved. But that was only the end of the Core Design name.
55 Ashbourne Road, Derby
Rewind to the days when Core Design was still owned by US Gold. March 1997 saw the registered office address updated to one about three doors down from where they were previously based, 69-71A Ashbourne Road.
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| July 2026 |
This is the standard view of 55 Ashbourne Road. I didn't realise at the time but I've taken a photo virtually identical to the one used on the Wikipedia page. It's a good angle to use because it includes the street number and hides the bins behind the gate post. God bless Derby estate agents because I've found a picture of 55 Ashbourne Road in its glory.
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| Derby EVENING TELEGRAPH 7 December 1999 page 13 |
You can just about make out the wing which was demolished around 2008 on the right of the photo. I think there's a car park on that side of the building now. You'll notice the advert says the building is available from January 2000 and that's because Core Design were on the move.
2 Roundhouse Road, Pride Park, Derby, Derbyshire DE24 8JE
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| July 20026 |
Okay. This is not 2 Roundhouse Road. This is the Roundhouse, part of Derby College. I got confused and flustered. It was late, parking was really bad, and I'd done all my Core Design research for the trip at very short notice. Streetview marks all of Roundhouse Road up to the station as number 2. A fact I didn't notice until five days after my jaunt.
This is 2 Roundhouse Road. Luckily for me it is pretty much in a straight line behind the Roundhouse and when you look at my photo I think I can spot the roof of 2 Roundhouse Road partially obscured by trees.
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| July 2026 |
It still counts!
It still counts.
[UPDATE 19/08/26] Fortunately, I don't have to rely on that threadbare hope any longer. The Derby correspondent for Where Were They Now? sent through a proper picture.
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| August 2026 |
Core Design moved to Roundhouse Road for a period that covers their last few Tomb Raider games and Core's first non-Tomb Raider games since 1999; Project Eden and Thunderhawk: Operation Pheonix from 2001 and Herdy Gerdy in 2002. Next came Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness and then a gap until Smart Bomb was released in 2005 to something of a collective shrug. Core Design was stripped of its intellectual property and name and sold to Rebellion Developments.
Rebellion promptly named the company Rebellion Derby. Normally I get cross when companies show no care for history but what else could they do with their nameless acquisition? I wonder what Edios' logic was in keeping the name? Did they have plans to pin the Core Design name to a new team and Tomb Raider game? Did they expect Jeremy Heath-Smith to make them an offer? Was it just spite? Regardless, Rebellion Derby chuntered on for five years. They made Free Running, released in 2007, which got a reasonable reception. Shellshock 2: Blood Trails which was developed for Eidos and released by Rebellion in 2009, to a much poorer set of reviews. Then the end of 2009 saw Rebellion Derby develop Rogue Warrior for Bethesda, a game that was laughed out of existence. The game stars Micky Rourke who raps over the closing credits. Make sure you have headphones on before you listen to his voiceover dialogue here.
Then the office lease came up for renewal and suddenly Rebellion were reviewing "the need for the Derby facilities". This is possibly the least glamourous reason ever for holding the future of a studio in the balance. It turned out they didn't have a need for Derby facilities. The studio closed in March 2010 and the closure was followed by accusations of unpaid wages.
Core Blimey Miscellaneous
Core Design USA, 2737 Polk St, Suite 3, San Francisco, CA 94109
Over in San Francisco was the American office which handed all the marketing for Core Design's pre-US Gold games.
Croft House
It's probably a coincidence but right next door to 55 Ashbourne Road is a place called Croft House. The name is written on the gate post. It's pretty overgrown and in order to get a decent picture I had to lift the bush out of the way. Maybe Toby Gard walked passed it every day and the name lodged in his subconscious...
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| July 2026 |
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| July 2026 |
Lara Croft Way
Between Burton Road roundabout and Osmaston Road roundabout is a stretch of Derby's inner ring road called Lara Croft Way. It opened in May 2010, just as news stories were reporting claims that wages and redundancy payments had not been paid to staff at the recently closed studio. The name of this section of the ring road was put to a public vote and won by a convincing margin. I like it. Too often gaming and games are not taken seriously and their contribution to the economy and culture of the UK are dismissed. I've covered a lot of defunct companies while writing this blog and at times it seems to function as little more than a Memento mori. A series of obituaries for largely forgotten companies and games that once meant a lot to an increasingly small group of people. Baker Street has Sherlock Mews. Dundee has Bash Street. I'm really pleased a public vote allowed Derby's most famous virtual daughter to make a mark on the real world.
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| July 2026 |
Residents of Derby are invited to send a better photo of 2 Roundhouse Road to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. I'd like to thank Chris Chapman, @retrohistories.bsky.social, for planting the seed that turned into this article. I'm quite lazy and Derby always seemed a little to far away to make it worthwhile. I'm glad I went. I'd also like to take this opportunity to apologise to the people of Derby for ignoring their parking regulations. It was late and quiet and I don't think I inconvenienced anybody. Also, if it helps, I overpaid on my parking at Markeaton Park when I walked down to Ashbourne Road. I definitely didn't need to pay for four hours. It was far too hot to go with my original plan of walking round the city centre as well. Leave a comment or/and follow me on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social. Report me to Derby Council's parking enforcement team at www.derby.gov.uk/contact-the-council/
[1] Now, given Chris Shrigley's comment about reopening a week later. Is it possible Gremlin Derby was also based at Saxon House?
[2] I did the same thing at Saxon House. As it got later I ran out of imaginative ways to taunt the parking authorities.
[3] Which, as I've said previously will be the last article on this blog because I want to end on a big name. When you see US Gold in the headline, regard it as me tapping out.
[4] It was going to be four pictures but I decided to omit a particularly shit page from an American magazine called PC ACCELERATOR called "Women we love to play." Described on the contents page as:
[2] I did the same thing at Saxon House. As it got later I ran out of imaginative ways to taunt the parking authorities.
[3] Which, as I've said previously will be the last article on this blog because I want to end on a big name. When you see US Gold in the headline, regard it as me tapping out.
[4] It was going to be four pictures but I decided to omit a particularly shit page from an American magazine called PC ACCELERATOR called "Women we love to play." Described on the contents page as:
We talk face to chest ... er ... face, with the newest Tomb Raider model. See how she, ahem, “stacks up” with the polygonal Lara.
The editor was a bloke called Mike Salmon. I include his name in the hope he does occasional vanity internet searches.
[5] Hmmm.
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