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?

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].

The RamJam Corporation

 

Just off Carnaby Street near the Old Coffee House Pub

A software publisher who quickly turned into a development house. The RamJam Corporation only released one game under their own name, the quirky and surprisingly difficult to spell Valkyrie 17. It came out at the end of 1984 when the UK market was maturing and it was becoming increasingly tricky for smaller software houses to get games into shops. The Ramjam Corporation ended up signing a distribution deal with Palace Software (a subsidiary of Palace Pictures) which generated the kind of amusing PR photos that magazines love to use to generate copy.