Ubisoft Ltd

Spaces - Guildford Units A-J, Austen House, Station View, Guildford GU1

Look at that. A 2025 game, Assassin's Creed: Shadows. I never expected that to happen when I started this blog. The most up to date I've previously been was using the 1998 cover of Starship Titanic for The Digital Village. I had plenty of choice when I was looking for an Ubisoft cover. The company has been going since 1989. Yes, I know. I know Ubisoft is a French company and they've actually been running since 1986 but this blog is called Where Were They Now? not Où Étaient-Ils Maintenant? If you want coverage of those first three years and a picture of 14, Rue Erlanger, 75016, Paris then start your own blog or send a photo to me at whereweretheynow@gmail.com

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.

Gargoyle Games

74 King Street, Dudley, DY2

TO THE STARS!

Birmingham, generally lagging behind Manchester and Liverpool for games programming is now making a sterling effort to catch up. Brand new company Gargoyle Games, has launched its first game for the 48K Spectrum. It's called Ad Astra (to the stars), and is a 3D shoot em up like you've never seen before. The 3D perspective view is quite astonishing - see the review in this issue. 

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?

Lookback at 2023

Happy Christmas. Last year December 25th intruded rudely on the publishing schedule of the blog. This year it's Christmas Eve but I like the idea of casting a self-indulgent eye backwards over the last 12 months.

Virgin Mastertronic

16 Portland Road, London, W11

 It's a brave person who types the name Virgin into the Companies House register; 6984 matches found. Even the more specific Virgin Mastertronic brings up several pages of results but there's obviously only one of real interest. The company now known as Sega Europe Limited. The story so far: Building work on a London Underground extension unearths some unusual prehistoric remains and a strange rocket-like object that a bomb disposal expert deduces to be an unknown Nazi weapon.... The early days of Virgin are here and, for the completists, this is where you can read about Mastertronic.
NOW READ ON.

Denton Designs

30 Rodney Street, Liverpool, L1

When Imagine software went bang in 1984 it's ex-employees scattered across Liverpool; some went to Odin, some to Software Projects, and six went off and set up Denton Designs, their own development house. Steve Cain, Ally Noble, John Gibson, Karen Davies, Graham Everitt, and Ian Weatherburn were the original six. Karen Davies later told CRASH: 'We just sat down and rang round the major software companies offering our services... We were surprised at the reaction we got from companies -it was invariably favourable. Business wise people were naturally a bit wary at first, because of the Imagine reputation, but as programmers and artists we had a good grounding and reputation, and people had heard of us through the Imagine name." (June 1985 page 30)

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."

The Map

Recently I found this article in a 1991 issue of THE ONE magazine (October 1991 page 50).

It's a snapshot of the UK industry at a time when everyone still thought 16-bit was the future, and the release of the PlayStation -which really would change everything- was four years away. Liverpool and Manchester are represented by Psygnosis and Ocean, alone. The gaming heritage of both cities has been whittled away until just two massive companies remain. Elite is still going, as are Domark and US Gold who have both yet to regenerate into Eidos. And over in Reading, Thalamus have just survived the liquidation of their original parent company Newsfield; publishers of CRASH and ZZAP64.

I'm surprised to see how few of the companies I've covered; right now (with now being October 2022) I make it four, Elite, Mirrorsoft, System 3, and Virgin. It shows how much my own personal nostalgia is biased towards the 80s 8-bit industry, and though I did go 16-bit with an Atari ST, and even 32-bit with a PlayStation, those machines don't hold the same soft spot in my memory.

Oh, and Dartford residents won't have been happy to be lumped in with London. It may be on the inside of the M25, unlike Slough which just squeaks outside, but it's part of Kent. Not Greater London.