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)

Commercial Breaks: The Battle For Santa's Software

8pm, 13 December, 1984. BBC2 aired The Battle For Santa's Software. The penultimate episode of documentary series Commercial Breaks. It is brilliant. A 30 minute time capsule of eighties excess, corporate culture, and success and failure. It would have been a real ripped-from-the-headlines watch at the time because the fallout from Imagine's liquidation continued into 1985. The production team must have been simultaneously delighted and stressed out when the company they were documenting imploded, spectacularly, and right in front of them. Copies of The Battle For Santa's Software. have been available on Youtube for years but on 13th June 2025 the BBC Archive channel uploaded a copy in pristine high definition. It looks lovely and understandably has grabbed a lot of attention; at the time of writing on 22nd June it's already racked up 64,000 views. Obviously I want to surf this zeitgeist but how? What can I say that hasn't already been said? How about if I just watch it and write about whatever comes to mind. Welcome to The Battle For Santa's Software the slightly annotated version.

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.

Platinum Productions

Ayrshire

I'm slowly transferring residents of the Untraceables gulag to pages of their own (see the CGL article for a full explanation why). I was originally planning to move New Generation Software this week but they've unexpected turned out to be more complicated than expected, so they'll have to wait. We're off on a trip to Ayreshire instead. Can I learn anything new about Ocean and US Gold's preferred development house for converting games to the ZX Spectrum?

Angus Ryall

 This isn't an obituary. Angus Ryall is not dead; as far as I know. So what's it for? Well, writing about Games Workshop made me go back and read again Angus Ryall's short lived Front Line column in CRASH and I think it's great and contains some of CRASH's best writing about games (and also, frequently, not about games). I just want to talk about it. Sorry, this is one for me.

Alligata Software Ltd

178 West Street/1 Orange Street, Sheffield

This town ain't big enough for both of us. Software houses often cluster. EA has created an entire ecosystem in Guildford. Cambridge remains a hotbed of hardware and software companies. London was always big enough to support a whole load of publishers and developers, as were Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. So why am I surprised that Sheffield was the home of Alligata Software and Gremlin Graphics/Interactive? Maybe because Sheffield doesn't feel like a big city (the offices of both companies were within easy walking distance) and partly because Gremlin got so big so quickly that it's difficult to imagine another company surviving in its shade. But Gremlin and Alligata were never really rivals because Alligata was on the way down by the time Gremlin was on the way up. 

Eidos Interactive

Wimbledon Bridge House, Hartfield Road, SW19

"Later, we IPOed the company by reversing into a shell called Eidos (hence the name change from Domark) on the London Stock Exchange." That's Dominic Wheatley, one of the two founders of Domark, describing on Reddit the baffling financial procedure which lead Domark to become Eidos. A common theme on this blog is the failure of any of the big players of the UK software industry to survive as independent entities; Gremlin, Ocean, Psygnosis, they all fell one-by-one. Would Eidos Interactive be the company to break that curse?

Zeppelin Games/Merit Studios Europe/Eutechnyx/Zerolight

25 Osbourne Road, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2

"The north-east is a bit of a remote outpost for UK software now that Tynesoft has bitten the dust. This last bastion of Geordie publishing specialises in budget software." That's how THE ONE described Zeppelin Games, entry number one in their Software Landmarks of the UK article in October 1991. It's a short entry for a company which ended up being a big player in the UK games industry although I'm not 100% sure the company is still running today. I'll get to that later.

Infogrames

Mitre House, Abbey Road, Enfield, EN1

Infogrames, the company whose bloody fingerprints are all over the dagger in the back of the corpse of the UK software industry.

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.

Gremlin Graphics

 Alpha House, 10 Carver Street, Sheffield, S1

It's the eve of the millennium and you fall into conversation with an 8-bit time traveller from 1985. "What happened to all the software companies?" The traveller wants to know. "What happened to Ocean?" "Gone," you tell the traveller. "Lost two years ago."
"US Gold. They must still be around."
You shake your head, "US Gold were taken over by Eidos, who were themselves formed out of Domark."
"Mirrorsoft! A company supported by Robert Maxwell's business empire must be flourishing!"
"Gone, and there's quite a story attached to that."
"Ultimate Play the Game?"
"Gone."
"Melbourne House?"
"Gone."
"I loved Highway Encounter. What happened to Vortex?"
"Gone," you sigh.
"Mastertronic?"
"Gone."
"A&F Software?"
"Gone."
"CRL?"
"Gone?"
"Hewson Consultants?"
"Gone."
"Beyond?"
"Gone."
The traveller looks frightened and lost. "Is there no one left?" They whisper.
"Oh yes," you answer, "there's Gremlin Interactive, although you'd have known them as Gremlin Graphics."
The traveller looks confused. "The Monty Mole company?"

Beyond Software

Competition House, Farndon Road, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE19

Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight, Lords of Midnight. Lords. Of. Midnight. Lords of. Midnight. Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight. Lords; of Midnight. Lords, of, Midnight. Lords of Midnight -Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight.

Lords of Midnight.

Lords of Midnight.

Lords of Midnight.

Lords of Midnight. 

Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight Lords of Midnight. Lords of Midnight.

Doomdark's Revenge.

Sinclair Research

25 Willis Road Cambridge, CB1

"No dessert until you've eaten your greens." Well this post is my dessert. I wanted this blog to be more than Sinclair focused nostalgia (although that's my origin story) so I made sure to eat my greens first with articles about Amstrad and Enterprise plus, still on the to-do list, Commodore, Acorn, and Jupiter Cantab (no, really). Even better, I can use the cover of another of my favourite games Stop the Express. Which, to continue the dessert-based metaphor, is the equivalent of smothering a big scoop of chocolate ice cream in jam, evaporated milk, jelly, spangles, etc, and then be told to stop running round shrieking or I won't be allowed to watch Blake's 7.

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.

Software Creations

2/4 Oxford Road, Manchester, M1

"I can't believe I walked past the Ocean offices for years without realising the significance of the building, likewise Software Creations." This sentence, posted at the Spectrum Computing forum by user Daveysloan sent me into a bit of a tailspin. I'd prepared a trip to Manchester in August 2022, taking in Ocean (obviously), Design Design (also, obviously), Vortex (hopefully), A 'n' F (maybe, if I could make the train to Rochdale work). However the trip was cancelled at the last minute because of the chaos caused by Avanti West Coast's new and improved timetable. The day I should have been in Manchester I read a thread on the Spectrum Computing forum which spun off into a discussion about the addresses of software houses. This was obviously right up my street, until Daveysloan mentioned Software Creations. I could add them to the Manchester list. That wasn't a problem. The problem I'd got was, who the heck were Software Creations?

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.

Virgin Interactive Entertainment

@338a Ladbroke Grove, London, W10

This post should have been easy to write. I worked for Virgin Interactive Entertainment for several years but the words seemed to drip onto my keyboard and lacked any real impact. That's wrong for this incarnation of Virgin Games (parts one and two of the story are here) because the company was all about buzz and sensation (or hype and cheap shock tactics, if you are more cynical). Then I found a link to a Kickstarter for Sex, Drugs & Video Games! The 90s Virgin story- London & LA by Tim Chaney, Managing Director. The "warts and all" story of the company's rise to fame "or more correctly infamy," It sounds like an amazing work of gonzo journalism. Hyperbolic. Bombastic. Pyroclastic. It doesn't match my memory of working there but I was in the basement.

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. 

Ocean

6 Central Street, Manchester, M2

There's a running joke in the Mary Whitehouse Experience Encylopedia where Rob Newman gets increasingly frustrated at having to define simple words. I feel this entry for Ocean should read a bit like his definition of Tree. Ocean: "Don't be stupid you know who Ocean are. You know, Ocean. OCEAN! OCEAN! It's Ocean. Jesus..." The company is already well documented. There's a history of Ocean by Chris Wilkins and Roger Kean. Mark R Jones wrote Load Dij Dij which covers his experience working there and captures the excitement of going from an external observer of a company, to an insider. RETRO GAMER has half a dozen articles, there are umpty-hundred videos on Youtube about Ocean's best games and their worst and their history and their rise and fall. The BBC covered Ocean at least twice, in their notorious 1984 Commerical Breaks documentary, and they sent Keith Chegwin there to check it out in 1988. This blog entry might be redundant before its even begun.