The Hitchhiker's Guide to Copyright Infringement

A couple of things combined to give me the idea for this post. The major one being Fantasy Software. I knew they'd had a brush with solicitors acting for Douglas Adams over their game Backpackers Guide To The Universe but I originally thought they had been unlucky and just chosen a bad time to release a game with a title parodying The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is, sort of, the case but it's also the end point of a trend of Fantasy passing off Hitchhikers ideas in the scenarios of their games. After I noticed that, I seemed to keep falling over examples of other companies doing the same. 

Adventure International (UK)/ Calisto Software/ Adventure Soft UK / Horror Soft / Adventure Soft Publishing / Headfirst Productions

119 John Bright Street, Birmingham

I really blundered in to this one. This company, sorry, group of companies, turned out to be way more complicated than I expected, I mean, just look at that title. What a nightmare! To increase the potential jeopardy, I'm writing this introduction before I've got the whole of the article sorted out. Can I complete it? Can I make any sense of the whole thing? Let's find out, shall we?

Mosaic Publishing

187 Upper Street, London N1 1RQ

"What's the oldest computer game based on a book? This is obviously a trick question because I expect people to say The Hobbit (Melbourne House 1982) or if they are feeling clever Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Supersoft, 1981) which was released with the permission of Pan Books. The actual boring correct answer is probably Space War which was inspired by science fiction stories including the Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith. This game was playable on a PDP-1 mainframe and written in 1961; I said it was a trick question [1].

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.

Automata UK

65(a) Osbourne Road, Portsmouth, PO5

Most of the pages of this blog exist because they give me a warm hug of nostalgia. "I loved Highway Encounter," etc, etc, etc. But occasionally things get more complicated. Newsfield, for example, was supposed to be my lovely stroll down memory lane but instead forced me to consider the difference between the job of my dreams and the realities of working with actual fallible humans. Automata is also less straightforward. Positioned deliberately outside the mainstream of UK software, they were, and remain, a contradiction. A counterculture business. Simultaneously obscure and well known. Lionised, today, and yet my memory is of not liking them much. Was I a stuffy teen conformist, unable to cope with anything which didn't fit into my plastic-fantastic routine of Top of the Pops on Thursday and Howard's Way on Sunday? Am I, as Star Trek once put it, Herbert?

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.

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.