Licenses vs originals during the ZX Spectrum's commercial era

[PeteProdge]

If you had to succinctly describe the full-price gaming market over the Speccy's commercial life span, you'd probably go:

EMBYRONIC: Laughable coin-op knock-offs
FINDING ITS FEET: Pretty good creative original efforts
FULLY FLEDGED: Coin-op conversions and movie-tie ins

One company, more than any other, really stands out in this, as they were pretty much there for most of it, doing original and licenses of just about anything. I'm talking about Ocean*, and so I've decided put them under my microscope and analyse all their ZX Spectrum output:

• Originals are in very light grey
• Coin-ops are in a strong red, with coin-op knock-offs being in pink
• Sport is mid green
• Movies are dark blue, TV is mid-blue and comics are pale blue
• Others are pretty much scarce anomalies, not really worth bothering with, but they're in the colour key and here's a footnote** if you want further explanations

Is it really fair to treat Ocean/Imagine as a microcosm of the Spectrum games market? Well, I haven't got time to throw in every full price publisher, so they'd do! Yeah, with more time, US Gold should be in there, plus Gremlin really.

* = I've actually thrown in their Imagine output from when they bought that label. I've NOT counted the original incarnation, so you can forget the likes of BC Bill or Ah Diddums having any sway here. Also, I didn't count Ocean's previous incarnation as 'Spectrum Games', but that was about five tangible coin-op knock-offs in 1983, so you'd have a slightly longer streak of pink there if I included them.

** = Incidentally, all the comic licenses are literally Batman from DC Comics. The one 'leisure' license (for want of a better term) is for Wimpy Restaurants, I can't really think of any other full price label doing something like this! The one book license is Tai-Pan (always thought it was a coin-op or a film or something!) The one game license is actually Konami's Tennis, something most would assume is an official coin-op license, but no, it did not turn up in an arcade, it was a licensed conversion of a game Konami made and published for the MSX! WWF Wrestlemania was a strange one, is it sport? *cough* Is it TV? I classed it as TV, you can say it's kind of both those things. Oh, and music was Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

[Morkin]

Nice chart... Someone's been having a 'slow work day'

Wow, just three original (as in 'non-license') games in the last 4 years of existence??

I knew they were TV/media-heavy years for some companies, but didn't realise it'd be that low.

[PeteProdge]

Wow, just three original (as in 'non-license') games in the last 4 years of existence??

Yeah:

Beach Volleyball (1989) which I always had assumed was some coin-op conversion because it just looks and feels like one (and quite a few coin-op conversions on the Speccy were of games I'd not see in my local arcades because we're in the midlands and miles away from truly decent seaside arcades).
Quondam (1989) which is a Schroedinger's Cat - it's an Ocean game but they didn't exactly publish it, it came out on Crash's Power Tape as Ocean didn't view it good enough for release. (See also Road Race, Play For Life and Flashpoint which ended up as magazine covertape giveaways under the Ocean or Imagine brand.)
Battle Command (1991) again, another I just assumed was a coin-op thing, and well, I never played it.

Also, a disclaimer missing from my first post: When it comes to home-computer-only coin-op sequels/spin-offs like Target Renegade or Hunchback The Adventure, I've counted these as coin-op licenses, even though there's not a tangible arcade cabinet running such a game - I just count it as something that comes under the license (it literally did), although purists won't be happy!

I knew they were TV/media-heavy years for some companies, but didn't realise it'd be that low.

I think Jon Ritman who said that he put loads of effort into making Head Over Heels into a truly exciting isometric 3D game, well worth the full price tag and it sold okay, but his work earlier on Batman (1986 - the first one, 3D isometric) sold A LOT more, because of the license.

That's the thing. By mid-late eighties, if you wanna sell games to the kids and teenagers, have a recognisable name. Original concepts were being shifted to your pocket money buyers, so Mastertronic and Code Masters would sweep all that up, and the budget game industry really boomed, while originality purveyors such as Hewson truly struggled.

[equinox]

If you had to succinctly describe the full-price gaming market over the Speccy's commercial life span, you'd probably go: [...]

Very interesting graph, Prodge! -- We all know that the first purpose of home computers was to play Space Invaders or Pac-Man sans coin, but the diagram makes it very apparent. Also, while some people realised early on that doing "the game of the film" was a big deal, it didn't become a conveyor belt until -- I wanted to say 1988, but the statistics say otherwise! Quite well established by 86?

(If I were shown the graph minus key -- and minus the Ocean context, oops -- I would like to imagine that the pink strips that were huge in 83-84 and died later were basically "original ideas": Trashman and Mel Croucher. As it is, one can only assume that it rapidly became clear you can't rip it off but you have to pay for it. The uninteresting Donkey Kong might be representative.) The fact that there is even a line for 1992 is rather fascinating too: I thought Ocean had given up by 1991, although their swan-song Addams Family is IMHO one of the all-time best platformers on the Speccy.

Thanks for doing the archaeology, lol.

[equinox]

If you had to succinctly describe the full-price gaming market over the Speccy's commercial life span, you'd probably go:
EMBYRONIC: Laughable coin-op knock-offs
FINDING ITS FEET: Pretty good creative original efforts
FULLY FLEDGED: Coin-op conversions and movie-tie ins
[...]
Is it really fair to treat Ocean/Imagine as a microcosm of the Spectrum games market? Well, I haven't got time to throw in every full price publisher, so they'd do! Yeah, with more time, US Gold should be in there, plus Gremlin really. [...]

By the way (quoting):

EMBYRONIC: Laughable coin-op knock-offs
FINDING ITS FEET: Pretty good creative original efforts
FULLY FLEDGED: Coin-op conversions and movie-tie ins

While this is a reasonable summary for YouTube hits, it's rather cruel, isn't it? Certainly there is a suggestion of evolution (you find your feet before walking tall), but I think 80 90% of the guys here, and probably you too Pete, would agree with me that the "creative original efforts" are much more interesting than your later category of "conversions and tie-ins", even if they made less bank.

Gremlin probably wanted to be them (do you remember the panicky rebrands and "GBH" circa 1992?) but equally they were probably better at doing slightly off-the-wall stuff like Zool. One of GG's best Speccy games may have been the weird anime thing Switchblade, which remains incredibly deep and playable... OK, Nipper II probably tickles the palate of the Birmingham type-in boy more, but.

Is it really fair to treat Ocean/Imagine as a microcosm of the Spectrum games market?

For statistical purposes absolutely

[Audionautas]

Hi

IMHO licenses and the budget games market killed full price original games. That's the reason why in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990... a lot of independent software houses creating original titles gave up the 8bit and/or the microcomputer game market: Ultimate, Gargoyle, Odin, Mikro-Gen, Vortex, Durell, Bubble Bus, Palace and Hewson, just to name a few. So, in the end, just big companies with a lot of cash could buy licenses. That's what Ocean, U.S Gold or Domark did on the Spectrum's hey-day.

There are several interviews to programmers where they talk about the declining sales of their games. One of those is Steve Turner (but it was similar to Costa Panayi and others). For instance, his Seiddab Tetralogy sold a lot more and was developed in less time than Quazatron, Ranarama, Magnetron, etc., that were developed over eight months or more. He complained that his games were selling fewer copies on each release, despite being better games overall than his previous efforts. As the time went on the games were more and more complex and sophisticated and that required time and money. Also, when you had an original idea for a game, it was very difficult (almost impossible) to compete with licenses based on arcade coin-ops or movies that had a very recognisable IP. In the case of movie licences, the marketing campaign is all over the place and done by the Hollywood studios months in advance, for instance, Batman, Robocop, Total Recall, etc., So if Ocean invests, let's say £250,000 buying the license for a foreseeable blockbuster like Batman or Robocop, they know for sure that the resulting games will sell like hot cakes, as they did, and will be profitable. That amount of money (according to some sources that was the price for licencing a top notch movie in the late 80s), was an astronomical sum for any independent software company, therefore they couldn't access that business area.

On the other hand, Hewson, for instance, a humble Oxfordshire independent company which employed a team of 15 or so, could only rely on the quality of their output, because Exolon, Zynaps, Cybernoid or Stormlord are great games, but sadly, behind them there are not a recognisable IP for the teenagers that bought games back in the day. In the end, it was like a vicious circle for those independent companies: you release an original game, a great game with amazing reviews (Crash Smash, Sinclair User Classic, Your Sinclair Megagame, etc), but sadly is not based on the most played coin-op in the arcades or the latest blockbuster, the public have not a previous idea of what is about, so your sales are not good enough and you don't have enough profits. So you have less money to invest in marketing and ads for your next game. You release your next original game that previously nobody knew anything about (starring another unsung hero), but your previous game was a failure, so you have less money for advertising, so less public will know the game, and so on and on and on. You search for alternative ways of earning income like creating a budget label, licencing back catalogue games to magazines or even licencing some hits like Uridium, Cybernoid or Nebulus to Nintendo to keep your business alive. But at the same time, if you want to be relevant on the videogame market you have to produce 16 bit games, that have higher production costs than 8-bit and longer development periods, but they don't sell well enough and you can't cover production costs. So, you struggle to avoid bankruptcy. And that's the reason why Hewson survived walking over a long thin wire until early 1991, but they had a hard time for quite some time to keep balance and they finally fell down anyway.

Best regards

PS. I would love to know how many copies sold titles like Exolon, Zynaps, Cybernoid, Marauder, Netherworld... compared to any average coin-op or movie license of the time released by U.S. Gold or Ocean. Probably a lot less.

[equinox]

!! Extremely high-quality and informed post, thank you. (and addresses the issue of why all those favourite software houses disappeared in the middle of the 80s)

I will just add that I sometimes think that these "microcosm" studies might benefit from looking at platforms everybody hated (e.g. Dragon, or the BBC *outside of schools*, that's a very sad game desert if you don't want to play Arkanoid or Pac-Man). Not on the commercial side (how many movie tie-ins came out on your Beeb?) but on what would actually sell -- if your entire business was writing for an "uncool" computer (and I don't mean the Speccy, which was possibly uncool in the playground but *stormed* the UK) imagine the horror. I guess they just gave up eventually and started writing wordprocessing tools.

[PeteProdge]

While this is a reasonable summary for YouTube hits, it's rather cruel, isn't it? Certainly there is a suggestion of evolution (you find your feet before walking tall), but I think 80 90% of the guys here, and probably you too Pete, would agree with me that the "creative original efforts" are much more interesting than your later category of "conversions and tie-ins", even if they made less bank.

Oh, absolutely, I certainly gravitated towards them because... I was considerably less well-off than other kids at my school, so I'd be getting the budget games, which were almost always original efforts. It's an utter rarity to get any licenses at the budget end of the market, but hey, we did get Bosconian '87!

But yeah, if you're a big software company wanting to make big profits, your priority at this point in time should be coin-op and movie/TV licenses. Sorry, but that's the cold hard truth. It's what the consumers wanted and I know it's not reflective of this online group of Speccy users who love delving into the more quirkier stuff

Gremlin probably wanted to be them (do you remember the panicky rebrands and "GBH" circa 1992?) but equally they were probably better at doing slightly off-the-wall stuff like Zool. One of GG's best Speccy games may have been the weird anime thing Switchblade, which remains incredibly deep and playable... OK, Nipper II probably tickles the palate of the Birmingham type-in boy more, but.

Oh, Gremlin was so good at that stuff. Switchblade is very underrated, and I loved loading up Jack The Nipper 2 just for the exploration alone. They were like a more appealing Hewson.

[PeteProdge]

...you release an original game, a great game with amazing reviews (Crash Smash, Sinclair User Classic, Your Sinclair Megagame, etc), but sadly is not based on the most played coin-op in the arcades or the latest blockbuster, the public have not a previous idea of what is about, so your sales are not good enough and you don't have enough profits. So you have less money to invest in marketing and ads for your next game. You release your next original game that previously nobody knew anything about (starring another unsung hero), but your previous game was a failure, so you have less money for advertising, so less public will know the game, and so on and on and on. You search for alternative ways of earning income like creating a budget label, licencing back catalogue games to magazines or even licencing some hits like Uridium, Cybernoid or Nebulus to Nintendo to keep your business alive.

As you illustrate, it was getting commercially much more risky to be a full price label only dealing in original output. The budget side of things absolutely thrived, much of it without licenses. I think what worked out well there was coming up with a 'quasi-license' for a few things - a familiar name that had fallen into the public domain. The Oliver Twins stated that Super Robin Hood was their way of making a game without the need for license. And then of course, inventing your own franchise. Dizzy is freaking huge, isn't it? And other budget labels were building up familiarity, like the Magic Knight series, the Joe Blade series.

[PeteProdge]

I will just add that I sometimes think that these "microcosm" studies might benefit from looking at platforms everybody hated (e.g. Dragon, or the BBC *outside of schools*, that's a very sad game desert if you don't want to play Arkanoid or Pac-Man). Not on the commercial side (how many movie tie-ins came out on your Beeb?) but on what would actually sell -- if your entire business was writing for an "uncool" computer (and I don't mean the Speccy, which was possibly uncool in the playground but *stormed* the UK) imagine the horror. I guess they just gave up eventually and started writing wordprocessing tools.

I think the early 8-bit casualties like your BBC, Acorn, Oric, Dragon, etc, had such a paucity of games and I guess the serious side of things (business software) were meant to be the real attraction... that these computers wanted to be what we regard as PC nowadays. Of course, you can't really do much in the way of accountancy or record-keeping on a primitive 8-bit machine. The ones with disk drives had a bit more luck in that department, then later on you had ones with a bit more clout as Alan Sugar tried to take on IBM and their clones, and well, we know how that panned out.

Sir Clive Sinclair thought he came up with a serious home computer, but really, 95% of its user base treated it as a games console!

[Audionautas]

As you illustrate, it was getting commercially much more risky to be a full price label only dealing in original output. The budget side of things absolutely thrived, much of it without licenses. I think what worked out well there was coming up with a 'quasi-license' for a few things - a familiar name that had fallen into the public domain. The Oliver Twins stated that Super Robin Hood was their way of making a game without the need for license. And then of course, inventing your own franchise. Dizzy is freaking huge, isn't it? And other budget labels were building up familiarity, like the Magic Knight series, the Joe Blade series.

Yeah, I think that's right. Also I think that the game market changed very quickly. During the early years of the industry there was a lot of inexperience on the marketing side, there was not a lot of money yet, licenses were 'stolen', so there was a lot of ground to cover and original games dominated the early years. Also the games were aimed at very different types of audiences, of very different ages. You had games aimed at children and early teenagers, but there were a lot of games really for late teenagers and adult audiences as well. Genres such as text and/or graphic adventure games, strategy, flight simulators, etc., were more focused on an adult audience. Gradually this changed and by 1987 the game market was already mostly focused on children and teenagers, and that audience wanted straightforward games, mainly arcade games. That is the reason why many of the genres previously mentioned as adult, became niche genres, even the arcade-adventure genre that were so successful for a few years, practically disappeared. In the 80s there was a fever for the arcades. Any teenager invested several hours a day in them, therefore, some software companies that knew how to take advantage of that and that in previous years had had some success with original software started to buy licenses for arcade machines and soon after movies or TV series. And they no longer looked back and the original software was gradually left out. It was fairly easy for them on the marketing side: the work was already done by the Hollywood studio, the TV channel, etc.

There's a very interesting bunch of specials about the topics discussed here worth reading about (linked at the bottom). Some marketing executives talk about that, and even in 1988 or earlier, they said that the 'full price' software market was into a terminal decline. If you look closely at the charts or at your own Ocean's analysis, you will come to the conclusion that 1986 was the last really strong year for original software and the last year in which there was a balance between original software and licences (that were growing up really fast from the two previous years). I think this can be extrapolated to the 8-bit software market as a whole. From then on licences totally dominated the 'full price' 8-bit market.

On the other hand, the budget labels, in general, took many ideas from companies releasing 'full price' titles. We all know dozens of clones of the most famous arcade machines: Operation Wolf, Gauntlet, Combat School, Rainbow Islands, Super Sprint... but they also copied hits from independent companies such as Uridium, Cybernoid, Exolon in Hewson's case. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the 'Magic Knight' saga or what the Oliver Twins achieved with a franchise-character like Dizzy, but in general these are exceptions in a panorama full of games derived from 'full price' titles and many games of low or very questionable quality. In the last few years, when the 8-bit market was practically divided into 'full price' licences on the one hand and the budget market on the other, the general quality of budget software improved, although the games basically applied pre-established formulas, as was the case with the Hi-Tec licences from Hanna Barbera, and certainly didn't bring originality at all. Sadly, if you were a bedroom coder in the late 80's or early 90's who had developed a very original game, the only chance you had to see your game published was a budget label or the covertapes of the main Spectrum magazines.

Links:

* The Budget Boom. Crash issue 45 (1987).

* Is Small Beautiful? Crash issue 41 (1987).

* Software advertising. Crash issue 35 (1986).

* The Marketing Mix. Crash issue 34 (1986).

* License To Thrill? Ace issue 10 (1988).

* Game Over? Ace issue 6 (1988).

* Software Houses '88 Big Bucks or Big Bust? (1988).

[StooB]

PS. I would love to know how many copies sold titles like Exolon, Zynaps, Cybernoid, ... compared to any average coin-op or movie license of the time released by U.S. Gold or Ocean. Probably a lot less.

If you look at Exolon and Zynaps' chart performance over the summer of 1987 and compare it with the licensed releases out at the same time, Hewson's games were actually far more successful, outperforming Slap Fight, Tank, Athena, The Living Daylights and MetroCross. The same is true in March 1988 with Cybernoid up against Rolling Thunder, Rastan and Arkanoid Revenge of Doh.

Licensed games certainly didn't automatically translate into hits. They were actually only really successful in the run-up to Christmas, a market Hewson never really tried to compete in, and even then it wasn't guaranteed.

Hewson's eventual failure has very little to do with licensing - they simply didn't release enough games to compete in a market where a typical games shelf-life is a couple of weeks. In 1988, Ocean published 16 full price Spectrum titles and US Gold published 24. Hewson published four, and the harsh reality is that after losing Graftgold most of the games they released just weren't at the same level.

[PeteProdge]

...Genres such as text and/or graphic adventure games, strategy, flight simulators, etc., were more focused on an adult audience.

Ah yes, text adventures were fairly mainstream in the early 80s, but they gradually became shunned and their reviews would be pushed over to the black-and-white pages of games magazines, with much of their wares only available via mail order. I know the world of "GIVE TROLL COIN" and "GO NORTH" isn't for everyone, I don't know of any school kid who talked fondly of a text adventure.

Coming to the Speccy right in its commercial mid-point, it was only until I got onto this new-fangled internet that I saw that the likes of Ocean and US Gold had put out text adventures! It doesn't seem right that such a thing ever happened, you always associate them with action games.

Strategy games went a similar way. I remember picking up Your Sinclair and there were enough strategy games to sustain an actual section (On The Warpath). C.C.S. and Lothlorien really cleaned up there.

With strategy and adventure silo'd away in their ghettoes, much of the general reviews were very much weighted to the full price releases, many of them being coin-op and movie licenses. You'd get budget games in there, and your pointers to the 1987-88 magazine pages on the budget 'invasion' shows how ridiculous this was, with budget becoming more dominant than full price - 60% of the market! But hey, budget companies rarely splashed out on advertising, so it'd be the big ad spenders getting the full colour spreads.

...the general quality of budget software improved, although the games basically applied pre-established formulas, as was the case with the Hi-Tec licences from Hanna Barbera, and certainly didn't bring originality at all.

Ah yes, the licenses that were dead cheap! In this case, those Hanna Barbera cartoons usually shown as a five-minute filler before the BBC News at 6pm that dropped out of the public consciousness years ago when the Beeb stopped doing those kind of schedules and made Eddie Large's Deputy Dawg impersonations quite an anachronism.

Sadly, if you were a bedroom coder in the late 80's or early 90's who had developed a very original game, the only chance you had to see your game published was a budget label or the covertapes of the main Spectrum magazines.

As a consumer, I loved this era. Pay a few quid, get tonnes of games, many of them really quirky and creative!

[Audionautas]

If you look at Exolon and Zynaps' chart performance over the summer of 1987 and compare it with the licensed releases out at the same time, Hewson's games were actually far more successful, outperforming Slap Fight, Tank, Athena, The Living Daylights and MetroCross. The same is true in March 1988 with Cybernoid up against Rolling Thunder, Rastan and Arkanoid Revenge of Doh.

Licensed games certainly didn't automatically translate into hits. They were actually only really successful in the run-up to Christmas, a market Hewson never really tried to compete in, and even then it wasn't guaranteed.

Hewson's eventual failure has very little to do with licensing - they simply didn't release enough games to compete in a market where a typical games shelf-life is a couple of weeks. In 1988, Ocean published 16 full price Spectrum titles and US Gold published 24. Hewson published four, and the harsh reality is that after losing Graftgold most of the games they released just weren't at the same level.

I love your post @StooB. Really great.

Firstly, I don't believe too much in charts, really. I remember some articles from back in the day, where several representatives from all kind of companies (full price and budget) complained about the way the actual sales were audited by Gallup and especially the places where the samples were taken. In Spain, for instance, we didn't have a proper polling and analysis company and the "unofficial" charts were those from Micromanía (a popularity chart selected by the magazine team) and the slightly more reliable Microhobby chart based on sales in El Corte Inglés, the main department stores chain here. Despite being popular games in Spain, Impossaball, Ranarama, Gunrunner, Exolon and Zynaps charted for a short period of time and even a "supposed success" like Nebulus didn't chart in the Top 20, if I remember correctly. ERBE Software, the main software distributor, had 5.000 selling points all over Spain, but the only chart we had was a sample from a department store with around 20 stores located on the main Spanish cities. So, more than 4950 selling points were left out of the sample. Anyway, I think in the UK the sample was wider and probably more reliable.

For me, charts are interesting to analyze trends, but we can't blindly trust them, especially when is not only important the highest chart position achieved, but the weeks in the charts for any game are very important too. Some games chart really high, even at number 1, but they fall down, and after a few weeks disappear completely from the charts. Andrew Hewson talked about Uridium on C64 on his book Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, and he bitterly commented the success of Uridium the first month, becoming a blockbuster for Hewson (their best-selling 8-bit game ever), but the second month after its release it sold half as much as the first and so on. One of the things that are a bit difficult to understand about Hewson in 1986-87 is if the company had great games, the press loved them, and they supposedly were selling games like hot cakes, why they were having a hard time financially? And you probably @StooB have the answer. The market changed very quickly. Hewson had the infrastructure of a small, family-owned company, probably adequate to stay well in the market until 1986, but not much beyond.

I agree with you @StooB that they couldn't release 15 or 20 games a year, like Ocean or U.S. Gold did. If they released six or seven was a very good year for them from a production point of view. That's absolutely true. Hewson was tiny and humble and always arrived late to trends in the industry, and that's because the company couldn't grow from an independent software house to a medium company at least. They also couldn't establish a stable in-house development team, they always had issues on releasing all the 8-bit versions at the same time (which the big names did easily), For example, all Uridium versions were released over a 2-year period!!!

Obviously, Graftgold's departure was a big loss for them and Raf Cecco was the only one holding the Hewson flag on the 8-bit market for three years. Other games like Marauder, Netherworld or Eliminator were good, but probably not up to the usual Hewson high standards. The reason why Hewson published only four games in '88: Cybernoid, Marauder, Cybernoid II and Netherworld on 8-bit is because the company started a second production line with the Rack-It budget label (that it was a way of having games spread all over the year), but above all, the main reason was that they were putting their efforts into the 16-bit market, for instance, in 1988 they released a lot of average ports of their 8-bit hits and Hewson released their first 16-bit original, Eliminator, that was converted to 8-bit in early 1989. That year they released only three 'full price' games for 8-bit: Eliminator, Stormlord and Maze Mania, but on the other hand, they released Custodian, Astaroth and Onslaught (three 'full price' releases but on the 16-bit market), and several Rack-It games for C64 converted to Amiga and Atari ST at 'full price' too: Battle Valley, Slayer, Steel, 5th Gear. So, it was a lot of pressure for a company of Hewson's size IMHO. They didn't understand the 16-bit market and they didn't have the money to enter this market with any chance of success, so the sales were generally disappointing. The only way they had had any success on the 16-bit would have been retaining Graftgold and the very talented and tiny in-house team (Dominic Robinson and John Cumming), but that was one of the secondary reasons why they left: Steve Turner wanted to enter the 16-bit market, but Andrew Hewson thought it was too early and wanted them to stay making 8-bit games (oddly enough with Telecomsoft Graftgold spent almost two more years programming for 8-bit machines).

Your comment about licensed games and their level of sales is also true. Normally, companies like Ocean or U.S. Gold when they negotiated with Konami, Sega, Capcom or other Japanese companies they bought packs for several arcades, including two or three big hits, three or four second tier games or minor hits and probably three or four average games. This way, they could dominate the market all over the year, not only on Christmas but in the Summer and other periods with less software sales. Obviously they focused their greatest hits on the Christmas campaign. The only way Hewson could stand out was releasing their Christmas hits in October/November or January/February, and they also tried the Summer season, especially with some compilations, but it was very difficult for them anyway.

Best regards

[PeteProdge]

I've just examined Ocean's quasi-rival, US Gold (including their short-lived imprint, Go!):



Now, what really dominates here is the 'game licenses', that is, US Gold licensing other company's games that succeeded on popular computer/consoles in the USA. That was really US Gold's raison d'etre, bringing American games to the UK market - the clue's in their name! Hence, that dark red makes up a lot of the output in the early days - games licensed from the likes of Epyx, Access and Datasoft.

Of course, by the mid Eighties, you've got a strong demand for coin-op conversions, and US Gold was usually front of the queue for Sega's licenses, so that bright red becomes pretty dominant.

As you can see, genuinely original games are quite a rarity here. You also get the odd license here and there of things well outside the coin-op/American game market, like the Dungeons & Dragons efforts, Masters Of The Universe games and other things.

But yeah, it's mainly conversions of USA games and coin-ops.

With that 1993 line (of just one game - Street Fighter II - let's not remember them that way), you can see the label stuck around longer than Ocean, but then, started a year later anyway.