The Hunt For Artic House

Artic House, Main Street, Brandesburton, Driffield, YO25 

Right from the start, Artic was a company forever being put on and then taken off my to-do list. The problem was simple. Artic only had two addresses; one was a house and the other couldn't be located in the real world. This is suboptimal for a blog dedicated to tracking down and photographing the offices of old software houses. I kept a draft page on standby in case I turned up anything relevant. It sat in the background of this blog for a couple of years until one Sunday around the middle of 2024 I was in a ruthless mood and culled it and a load of others on the grounds they would never be used. So long, The Sales Curve. See you in hell, Aardvark Software. No room for you, The Electronic Pencil Company. Goodbye, Artic. And that was it. Deleted. Done. Dusted. I'd never follow Artic up now. Then I got an email. Most of what follows is Neil's fault.

Artic

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.

Atarisoft

I'd like to go back to the Atari well one more time to talk about the short-lived Atarisoft UK range. I originally planned to make this part of the Atari article but it was just too long. In America, the label was a success, at least at first. Whatever plans Atari UK had for the range were disrupted at the end of July 1984 when Warner Communications sold the consumer division of Atari to Jack Tramiel. Atarisoft UK rapidly stalled and although a few games slip out across the remainder of 1984, its surprisingly difficult to make sense of what happens or why.

Atari Corp (UK) Ltd

Atari House, Railway Terrace, Slough, SL2

Atari was founded in 1972, and it took 10 years for them to cross the Atlantic and set up their UK subsidiary. This was well after Commodore, who arrived in 1969 in their guise as a manufacturer of typewriters, and just before Activision, who set up their UK branch in the autumn of 1983. At least, that's the simple answer. I thought the story of Atari UK was going to be an easy one to write. I was wrong.   

Ariolasoft

Carl-Bertelsmann-Str 161, 4830 Gütersloh

In 1983 Ariola Records, the music division of German conglomerate Bertelsmann, set up a software company. This company was named, unsurprisingly, Ariolasoft and went to become the German distributor for Activision, Electronic Arts, and the Sega Master System. The company also published original games including Vermeer, Kaiser, and Ooze: Als die Geister mürbe wurden. Ariolasoft renamed itself United Software in 1990 and was taken over by the German division of MicroProse in 1993. Which is all very interesting but this blog is about the UK software industry and Britain hasn't been a part of Germany since Doggerland was submerged by the rising North Sea.

State Soft

Business & Technology Centre, Bessemer Drive, Stevenage, SG1

This is where I rectify a mistake made in the planning stages of this blog. I wanted an early entry to cover a company responsible for a notable Commodore 64 game, and Boulder Dash was always an unmistakably C64 title for me; probably because of trips to a friend's house where the game was always on the menu. However because my background is the C64's bitter rival the ZX Spectrum I defaulted to the World of Spectrum entry for my research and concluded Front Runner was solely responsible for all UK versions of Boulder Dash. It wasn't. It turns out Boulder Dash in the UK has the most convoluted licencing history possible with every version released by a different company; C64 (State Soft), Spectrum (Front Runner), Amstrad (Mirrorsoft), BBC (Tynesoft), MSX (Orpheus). It's tempting to wonder what First Star (the original USA publishers) were thinking but I suspect they were thinking, "cor, aren't we making a lot of money licencing this game."