3DO

Here come some absolutely gross assumptions guaranteed to make experts wince. The Mega Drive and SNES are commonly referred to as part of the fourth generation of consoles, but in the UK it was the second generation at best. The eighties were dominated by 8-bit computers, not consoles. It was only really as the eighties ended that Virgin Mastertronic began to have some success selling the SEGA Master System. Around the same time, home grown companies had a go at cracking the console marker. Konix really tried to be a contender with the Multisystem in 1989. Amstrad had a go with the GX4000 console in 1990. But nobody cracked it because consoles didn't break into the wider public consciousness until the period kickstarted by the release of Tetris for the Game Boy, in September 1990, and consolidated by the June 1991 release of Sonic the Hedgehog. That's when the UK market became ripe for plucking.

Orpheus

The Smithy, Unit 1, Church Farm, Hatley St. George, Nr. Sandy, Beds, SG19

Orpheus were a relatively short-lived software house who were notable for a couple of games. First, an MSX version of Boulder Dash when they joined the increasingly long line of companies who licenced First Star's game. Secondly for The Young Ones. The looks-like-but-wasn't-officially-licenced game of the BBC comedy series.

Load Runner: The Galaxy's First Computer Comic

Ever heard of LOAD RUNNER? I certainly hadn't. It's a real curiosity. A computer-themed comic aimed at 9-16 year olds and featuring a mix of stories told with artwork, photographs, and text. LOAD RUNNER was published fortnightly by ECC Publications who also made WHICH COMPUTER PRACTICAL COMPUTING, IBM USER, and SINCLAIR PROGRAMS and SINCLAIR USER; until they sold the last two to EMAP in September 1984. LOAD RUNNER arrived on 23rd June 1983 and ran for 13 issues, with the last issue dated December 8th 1983.

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 Hunt For Artic House

Artic House, Main Street, Brandesburton, Driffield, YO25 

Right from the start, Artic was a company forever being put on and then taken off my to-do list. The problem was simple. Artic only had two addresses; one was a house and the other couldn't be located in the real world. This is suboptimal for a blog dedicated to tracking down and photographing the offices of old software houses. I kept a draft page on standby in case I turned up anything relevant. It sat in the background of this blog for a couple of years until one Sunday around the middle of 2024 I was in a ruthless mood and culled it and a load of others on the grounds they would never be used. So long, The Sales Curve. See you in hell, Aardvark Software. No room for you, The Electronic Pencil Company. Goodbye, Artic. And that was it. Deleted. Done. Dusted. I'd never follow Artic up now. Then I got an email. Most of what follows is Neil's fault.

Mythos Games

19 The Rows, The High, Harlow, Essex, CM2

Julian Gollop quite rightly casts a long shadow over this blog. He created Rebelstar Raiders for Redshift, Chaos for Games Workshop, and, while I worked at Virgin Interactive Entertainment, I was lucky enough to be peripherally involved in the production of Magic & Mayhem. And then there's UFO: Enemy Unknown. Oh, UFO: Enemy Unknown. If there's one game that can eclipse my love for Highway Encounter, it's UFO: Enemy Unknown. It may be my favourite games ever. And it will be forever called UFO: Enemy Unknown, none of this X-COM nonsense.

The Digital Village

11 Maiden Lane, London, WC2E

The game with the magic words Douglas Adams on the cover. I remember Starship Titanic coming out. It was during that short period from 1996 to 1999 when I was gainfully employed by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and trying to work out if there was any way I could convert my job in Technical Support into some sort of meaningful career in the games industry. I had a friend who worked for a game magazine and I talked to them about Starship Titanic during the bubble of publicity which preceded release. What surprised me at the time was their response, they were already disappointed with it.

Games Workshop

27-29 Sunbeam Road, London, NW10

Welcome traveller. You stand at the dungeon gates and reflect on the words of the priest who led you here. "Only the very brave or the very foolhardy would risk the journey you are about to undertake." These dungeons are famous throughout the land. You have heard the stories about the danger, and the monsters, and the traps. And the stories of the fabulous treasure and those who entered, seeking it. And yet you have not heard any stories about those who returned. The dungeon gates open in front of you. Only the very brave or the very foolhardy would risk the journey you are about to undertake. Which are you?

NOW READ ON!

Mr Chip/Magnetic Fields

1 Neville Place, Llandudno, Gwynedd, LL30 3BL

Three covers? One just isn't enough for Mr Chip/Magnetic Fields. The company was the Three Doctors of UK software. Three distinct incarnations each with their own story. First as a publisher of their own games, then a developer for other software houses, and finally a complete rebrand. 

Sportscene Specialist Press/Dennis Publishing

14 Rathbone Place, London, W1P

CRASH, YOUR SINCLAIR, and SINCLAIR USER which was your favourite?* I was a CRASH kid but around 1988 it was clear the crown was slipping from CRASH's head and YOUR SINCLAIR picked up that crown and wore it proudly for the next few years. ZERO, Dennis' 16-bit magazine, carried the YOUR SINCLAIR crown on to the next generation, and then PC FORMAT made it a hat trick. Newsfield never really succeeded in producing another magazine that matched the love/nostalgia for CRASH and ZZAP. I'm not familiar enough with EMAP's titles to say whether they passed the success of COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES forwards; although I know a lot of people have a soft spot for the MEAN MACHINES titles. And Future. Well, their titles were frequently wildly successful but they always seem stamped from a template; magazines like AMIGA POWER were the exception. I think the point I'm groping vaguely towards is that Sportscene/Dennis was unique in producing a trilogy of beloved magazines.
(*No one ever says SINCLAIR USER.)

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.

Newsfield Ltd

1/2 King Street, Ludlow, Shropshire

So we're doing magazines now are we? Well yes, obviously. The tagline of this blog is "seeking out Britain's pioneering software houses," but I've covered Argus Specialist Press and assorted computer manufacturers under the fig leaf justification that those companies did occasionally chuck out a few games. I could have done the same for Newsfield because they spun off a software house called Thalamus but it seems unnecessary. Newsfield were an essential part of the UK software scene in their own right, as were other publishers like Future (AMSTRAD ACTION) or Sportscene/Dennis (YOUR SINCLAIR and YOUR 64), or hardware companies like Romantic Robot (the various Multiface machines) and joystick kings Konix. A whole support industry grew up around software companies like the ecology of a coral reef and to not talk about it is to not tell the whole story.

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.

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.

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.

Addictive Games

Albert House, Albert Road, Bournemouth

The two things I associate with Addictive Games are Football Manager and Kevin Toms' face. His decision to do a Victor Remmington and put himself on adverts and packaging was smart. It gave Addictive Games a personality and made the company stand out at a time when most software houses were anonymous and programmers were just names or, at best, occasional photographs in a magazine. It helps of course that the game is Football Manager. One of those rare titles which achieved escape velocity and became a cultural touchstone in its own right. I was amazed when idly searching the online British Newspaper Archive to find a 1994 review of Premier Manager 3, for the Amiga, where Football Manager still had enough resonance for the writer open the review with: "Football Management games have been around since the early days of computing, with Kevin Toms' Football Manager setting the standards on the good old Sinclair Spectrum." (NEWCASTLE JOURNAL, Friday 18 November 1994 page 33).

Virgin Games

I briefly worked for Virgin Games during its Virgin Interactive Entertainment regeneration. This was the second of my three grazes along the side of the UK games industry (for graze number one, see Graftgold). I never met Richard Branson because the company split from the Virgin mothership in 1993, before I joined, and used the brand name under licence. However, my time there was exactly the glamourous never-ending parade of celebrities you'd expect. Dave Prowse once passed through the office and signed a copy of Tie Fighter. The company receptionist was Simone Hyames, Cally from Grange Hill. I saw Feargal Sharkey a couple of times. And, I was once nearly in the same room as Chaos and X-Com designer Julian Gollop. That's right, look impressed.

Mastertronic

8-10 Paul Street, EC2A

"Pocket money games tapes, at £1.99 each have been launched for sale in video shops, petrol stations, hi-fi stores, supermarkets, and newsagents," was how HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY introduced budget software house Mastertronic; issue 57 (April 10-16 1984 page 1). Fourteen games were released at launch, "eight for the Commodore 64, four for the Spectrum and two for the VIC-20. Another seven will appear by the end of the month and then at the rate of one to three a week." I think those initial 14 games were Vegas Jackpot, Duck Shoot, Bionic Granny, Mind Control, Magic Carpet, Spectipede, Munch Mania, and Space Walk for the C64;  Vegas Jackpot, Gnasher, Spectipede and Magic Carpet for the Spectrum; and Vegas Jackpot and Duck Shoot for the VIC-20.

Melbourne House

Castle Yard House, Castle Yard, Richmond, TW10

Melbourne House was my first stop on an August 2021 trip across London, the day after Argos failed to deliver my washing machine (this bit is not relevant and would be removed by any decent sub-editor). It was my second full day of scouting old offices but only the first time I'd actually done any sensible planning. The first trip was done on an impulsive basis, like one of those films where Mickey Rooney suddenly goes "hey why don't we put on the show right here."