Mizar Computing

104 Bradwell Road, Bradville, Milton Keynes, MK13 7DH

There's an Peanuts comic strip where Lucy very reluctantly reads a story to her brother Linus. "A man was born... he lived and he died! The end!" That's the story of Mizar Computing. I feel bad for being glib but that's pretty much all we know. Mizar were founded in 1984 by Robert Waller and Richard Woodward. The company released one game and closed. The end. They failed. As did so many companies. It's the circumstances of their failure I find interesting because the short story of Mizar and their game Out of the Shadows is also the story of CRASH magazine, one year old and newly confident, and thinking they could make a game a hit by sheer force of will. And learning they couldn't.

Future Publishing

Valeside, West Street, Somerton. Somerset TAJ I 7PS

But the biggest news of the moment was that ZZAP! was to be moved from its base in Yeovil to Newsfield's mega-stylish giga-tower block HQ in Ludlow. In the process of moving, a few things were lost such as Gary Penn's Tears For fears tapes, some biros and our erstwhile newshound Ed Banger through an unfortunate accident on the M4. Oh, and Chris Anderson and Bob Wade who decided they prefered Amstrads to Commodores.
(ZZAP!64 Christmas Special 1985 page 96)

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.

Quicksilva

Palmerstone Park House, 13 Palmerstone Road, Southampton

I didn't realise how interconnected the British software scene could be. The story of Mastertronic blurs into the story of Virgin Games. The Liverpool software houses give the impression of all living in each other's pockets. You can't write about Software Projects without writing about Bug-Byte and you can't write about Bug-Byte without writing about Imagine and you can't write about Imagine without writing about Denton Designs. The same is true of Quicksilva. Its story is part of the story of Argus Press Games. And also part of the story of Electric Dreams. And part of the story of Activision. Oh, and part of the story of Bug-Byte. I feel I should make one of those complicated maps with pins stuck in it and string joining the pins together.

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.   

Commodore Business Machines (UK) Ltd

675 Ajax Avenue, Slough, SL1

I'm paddling in my ignorance here. I don't know much about Commodore and my usual sources aren't helping. Much of the information online is about the history of the US parent company, Commodore International, rather than their UK arm and the sheer popularity of the Commodore 64 tends to swamp any list of results I generate. Even the normally reliable Companies House is letting me down. Their register tells me this about Commodore Business Machines (UK) Ltd; company number 00956774. 

Company name COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES (U.K.) LIMITED
Company number 00956774
Incorporated on 24 Jun 1969
Dissolved on 05 Dec 2000
Registered office address at dissolution Not available
Download Report Not available

Six facts and two of those are "Not available". This is going to get worse before it gets better.

Argus Press Software

KNOWLEDGE CHECK! Which magazine publisher was the first to open a software house? If you said Thalamus, the label from Newsfield Ltd, then sit down because they weren't founded until 1986. Mirrorsoft is not right but it's a better guess than Thalamus, as is Beyond Software, owned by East Midlands Allied Press (or EMAP to their friends), both companies were founded around the same time in late 1983. Obviously the correct answer is Argus Press Software because that's who this update is about.

Enterprise / Entersoft

31-37 Hoxton Street, London, N1 

Once upon a time there was a company called Samurai Computers Ltd. Unfortunately for boring business reasons it had to change its name to Elan. This name also didn't stick and the company briefly toyed with the name Flan but everybody laughed. So the company changed its name again, to Enterprise. And then it finally released the computer it had been developing for nearly three years.

A&F Software

Unit 8, Canal Side Industrial Estate, Woodbine Street East, Rochdale, OL16

A was Doug Anderson and F was Mike Fitzgerald and when they got together it was murder to establish a software house in Manchester. A&F Software is now mainly remembered for a single game, Chuckie Egg, but the company was more than a one-hit-wonder. It shares some similarities with Silversoft. Both companies were pioneers of the early computer games industry and struggled as the market became more established and professional in the mid-eighties, and finally sold out to a bigger brand. The first question, of course is, is the company called A&F or AF or A+F or A'n'F? The answer, it was known as all four at various times across its history. I'll try to use the correct version as we go on because I find that's the kind of perverse pedantry I find funny.

Molimerx

1 Buckhurst Road, Town Hall Square, Bexhill

I was browsing the first issue of COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES when I bumped into an advert for a company called Molimerx. I'd never heard of them. I would love to claim my spider-sense tingled and I realised this was something worth writing up, but I didn't. I just moved on to the next page. A few months later I was trying to dig up some information on Program Power and there on page 158 of the August 1980 issue of PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD was another advert in the same style. A full page advert with eye-catching black and white art, and the slogan "INNOVATIVE TRS-80 SOFTWARE FROM THE PROFESSIONALS." This was odd. Molimerx were old. They were a big professional software house at a time when, my understand was, big professional software houses didn't exist. 

The Edge/ Softek

12/13 Henrietta Street, London, WC2E

It seems silly to sit here and worry about whether I should write about Softek and their better known label The Edge, but that's exactly what I'm doing. I know it's silly. I don't have to write about anyone if I don't want to. I'm not a journalist. I have no obligation to history. I will suffer no consequences if I don't write about Softek, it's not like someone's going to drop an anvil on my head. Plus, I'd quite like to write about Softek. They were one of the first companies I thought of when I started planning this blog. They wrote some notable games. So why am I so worried? Because Softek's founder was Tim Langdell.

Cascade

 Suite 4, 1-3 Haywra Crescent, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG1

"It is impossible to tell you everything about the 50 games on CASSETTE 50 but they include many types such as maze, arcade, missile, tactical, and logic games to suit most tastes in computer game playing. CASSETTE 50 will appeal to people of all ages and the games will provide many hours of entertainment for all the family at a fraction of the cost of other computer games." I remember seeing the advert for Cassette 50 and crunching the numbers in my head. Alien 8 was lots of fun at £9.95 and that was just one game. Logically Cassette 50 had to be fifty times better than Alien 8. It's just mathematics. And it comes with a free calculator watch. Neat! 

Hewson Consultants / 21st Century Entertainment

56b Milton Trading Estate, Milton, Abingdon, OX14 4RX 

I like RETRO GAMER magazine a lot but sometimes they make life difficult for me. I was in the very early stages of thinking about this update when I settled down to read issue 241, and what did I find on page 38? An article called A Tribute to Hewson by Graeme Mason. A full page on the history of the company plus another seven pages of game highlights, along with Andrew Hewson's memories of each title. [Public service announcement -Most UK libraries subscribe to a free service called PressReader which includes RETRO GAMER. If you log on via the PressReader app you should be able to see a couple of years worth of back issues. End of public service bit]. With RETRO GAMER covering the history of Hewson Consultants this is, I guess, the story of how I recently drove to an industrial estate near Oxford. I'll try not to be too passive aggressive. 

Bug-Byte

Mulberry House, Canning Place, Liverpool, L1

Last year, on an intermittently showery day in December, I went for a walk round Liverpool. My route was carefully plotted and I managed to take in the ex-offices of Software Projects, Imagine, Odin, Thor, Denton Designs, and Bug-Byte. What I hadn't taken into account, because it was the early days of the blog, was this material effectively represented five months of updates and once it was spread out I'd be writing about my grand day out almost a year later. Still, here we are, ending with the company that began it all. This then is the final movement of my Liverpool Oratorio. 

Silversoft

London House, 271/273 King Street, W6

FOR ADDED REALISM PLAY THIS STANDING IN THE BATH. The bold advertising strapline on Silversoft Ltd's advert for Worst Things Happen at Sea got the company dinged by the Advertising Standards Authority. CRASH issue 13 (February 1985 page 59) reported how two members of the public complained on the grounds that electricity and water don't mix, and in a game likely to appeal to children the advert encouraged  a disregard for safety. You can view the offending advert here in CRASH issue 11 (December 1984 page 139). Out of curiosity I sent an email to the ASA, and got a polite but brief reply. "Thank you very much for contacting the Advertising Standards Authority with regard to ruling made against the company Silversoft Ltd in 1984 or 1985. I am afraid I am unable to help you on this occasion, as that ruling was archived off many years ago and we no longer have access to it."

Amstrad / Amsoft

Brentwood House, 169 King's Road, Brentwood, CM14

Brentwood not Brentford. Brentwood not Brentford. Brentwood. Brentwood. I've got a blind spot on the location of the Amstrad HQ which must be a result of reading too many Robert Rankin books.  I'd normally weed out mistakes before publishing but in this case I'm going to allow rogue Brentfords* to remain; to see how many there are. Let's call it a science experiment. Amstrad moved to Brentwood in 1984, 16 years after the company was founded and the same year the CPC 464 was launched.

Imagine

5 Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool, L1

The 1984 collapse of Imagine Software was a seismic event for the UK software industry. Imagine had become one of the biggest and best known software houses in just over 18 months of existence. Its professionalism, marketing, and overall corporate image seemed to point the way for the rest of the fledgling software industry. There is also the irony that a company as obsessed by image and marketing as Imagine should have its collapse documented in real time by a BBC film crew making a documentary for a series called Commercial Breaks, "A series that follows the fortunes of entrepreneurs around the world as their stories unfold."

Software Projects

 Bear Brand Complex, Allerton Road, Woolton, Liverpool, LS25

Another day, another Tesco superstore. This one is in Woolton, Liverpool and it's built on the site of the old Software Projects office, a place with the odd name of Bear Brand Complex.

The Bear Brand Complex was a massive factory in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton. Like Blenheim House, System 3's home in Pinner, it seems to have been taken for granted and despite being a huge blot local landmark there are surprisingly few photos. Google brings up some pictures of the building being demolished in June 1997, around the same time Blenheim House was also being knocked down and ironically Blenheim House met the same fate in the foundations of a Tesco superstore.