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.

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?"

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. 

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)

Odin Computer Graphics / Thor (Computer Software)

The Podium, Steers House, Canning Place, Liverpool, L1

In the lands of the north where the black rocks stand guard against the cold sea, in the dark night that is very long, the men of the northlands sit by their great log fires and they tell a tale.