What, in your eyes, is the worst games software house?

[PeteProdge]

I'm looking for something that's the opposite of Ultimate Play The Game.

In my mind, I think I can point to The Power House and TyneSoft as notorious proprietors of dismal digital garbage.

[Mpk]

I'm looking for something that's the opposite of Ultimate Play The Game.

In my mind, I think I can point to The Power House and TyneSoft as notorious proprietors of dismal digital garbage.

Thor.

Although they did publish Arc of Yesod, which might make up somewhat for the Giant's Revenge cycle.

[Mousey]

A large percentage of CRL’s output was pretty bad.

[Andre Leao]

Pirate Software and Power House springs to mind.

Ultimate had some good games, but their latest games are terrible and their choice of keys is appaling. They artificilally made their games more difficult because of the insane choice of keys. Not on my top of the list of software houses. But I do love Jetpac and Alien 8.

[Nick]

I would add Top Ten Software to that list.

There was also a company called C-Tech, which I came across due to a thread on WOS where people reviewed games from a particular year. They existed from 1983-84 and were one of those companies that released unofficial versions of popular arcade games of the time.

[Matt_B]

A large percentage of CRL’s output was pretty bad.

True, but they also made some very good games, like Tau Ceti, Formula One and Juggernaut. Even if you're not a firm believer in judging them at their best, that ought to drag the average up enough to take them out of contention.

Also, The Power House was a budget label of theirs, rather than a software house in its own right. If we're talking worst labels though, it's a definite contender.

[equinox]

TyneSoft is a very good call.

I'd also say IJK but I think there's some subtlety here -- they obviously had Harry S Price on the Speccy, but I believe they were just a general budget house on other platforms (Beeb?) and didn't know he was a rip artist.

Mastertronic were pretty sh*t, and "M.A.D." didn't help much. If you're super hardcore you may remember the pre-Mastertronic "Virgin" software like that stupid 1982 Fishing game. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
On the other hand Mastertronic did have a budget and did release some gold -- I guess it depended who saw their classifieds and sent a tape.

[equinox]

Also "Blaby Computer Games", even the name is depressing.

Pete asking for "the opposite of Ultimate Play The Game", as though he's about to do some ****ing Charlie Brooker special. Well: Blaby DON'T Play the Game, based in Ashby-de-le-OUCH.

[equinox]

Kuma Computers

[equinox]

Since I can't stop: what about the Shaw Brothers? (I'm gonna get my arse kicked.) Atlantis realised at some point (1990ish) they could pump unlimited probably frickin BASIC compiled games out of these guys. I especially LOVE the one who wrote the "music".
Around the same time they were producing zines (Sick Happy Idle) which were much more important than the ZX Spectrum.

Anyway Atlantis was always bordering the edge of sh*t games and when they "Shawed" they tilted over the cliff. Around the time when magazine cover-tapes were half "a demo we found somewhere" and half Theo Develegas.

But Hi-Tec was brilliant, they did the same monochrome scroll routine 30 times, I assume it was expensive to go to America and get it officially approved by Hanna-Barbera.

[equinox]

Someone's gonna say "ok equinox do you actually like anything at all?"

yes I like:
Pete Cooke
Infogrames
Benn Daglish (RIP)
Mel Croucher (maybe)
Oliver Twins (sometimes)
Hard Drivin' (ironically)
Bubble Bobble
Beach Buggy Simulator
Driller
3D Death Chase
Animator-1
Falla out of Grell and Falla, she is hot

what is your problem

[Juan F. Ramirez]

Century City Software was an early company with very poor games. Only most artwork of their inlays would pass

[Turtle_Quality]

Someone mentioned them already, but C-Tech, by some distance. They made awful knockoffs of the popular arcade games of the time, always character movement, no animation, no evidence of play testing, no effort on sound effects - just clicks and beeps. That's as I remember them - I'm not going back to do any research as it's too depressing.

Since they were around in the very early days, I think they were able to make quite a few sales despite their reputation, which was so dismal that C-Tech became a byword for rubbish at my school - "Where did you get that haircut ? Why ? It's absolute C-Tech, can't you get a refund or wig or something ?"

Ironically after I moved to Finland I joined an engineering design company called Citec (so it's pronounced the same way) and have been working with them for nearly 12 years.

[5MinuteRetro]

Did Macsen ever produce anything even halfway decent? I’m not sure it did.

[TMD2003]

Despite all the above, I'd still go for The Power House purely on caring so little about the quality of their products - i.e. presumably not at all - that they let Sqij! through the net... twice! Still, we did get a couple of much-improved homebrews out of it, and 37 years' worth of cheap jokes at its expense.

Looking at Macsen, that's either someone who spent two much time watching TV and not enough time learning Z80 machine code, or was paid so little by the TV companies to make the games that the effort given reflects that meagre payment.

I am just about prepared to give C-Tech a pass - crap though their output is, about half it was from 1982, a time when it was entirely legitimate to release a Spectrum game that was partially, mostly or entirely written in BASIC, and was little more than a ZX81 game with colour, sound and UDGs. Anything released in 1983, at least if it was a couple of months after Jetpac, there's less excuse for that.

Throwing a new name into the ring: did Richard Shepherd Software ever release anything worthwhile? Transylvanian Tower is one of his, and while I've busted various body parts making the RZX of that (admittedly because it's a game I knew reasonably well from back in the day and nobody else was prepared to do it), it is still... horrible. 1982, though, so again there's that excuse that it looks like BASIC and most probably is, not even run through a compiler, even though it was "protected" with LOAD "" CODE.

EDIT: I just looked up Century City. And here we have a genuine candidate - see above, they'd have got away with doing what they did - both games and loading screens - in 1982, but 1984-85? Get absolutely bent. Some of them are just about acceptable, but after a point (because all the really, really awful games are from 1985) they were blatantly not trying and just trying to sucker kids of the day out of their pocket money. Anything with the "vinyl record made by CIRCLE in a FOR... NEXT loop that a novice programmer could have made in five minutes" loading screen is nothing more than a type-in from 1982 repackaged and not worth the tape it was recorded on, denying the end user the pleasure (and pain)of typing in the game manually.

Obviously, I say all the above as a prolific CSSCGC author of modern times, but at least I know what my programming efforts are destined for, and the joy of programming and making something work to more-than-CSSCGC standards is its own reward (as well as subjecting the host to the final product).

[Mpk]

Throwing a new name into the ring: did Richard Shepherd Software ever release anything worthwhile?

Urban Upstart is a solid gold classic.
Also continues the emerging trend of Pete Cooke saving dodgy software houses from their shame.

[toot_toot]

I think it’s maybe too easy to go with something like The Power House or Tynesoft, because even at the time you knew the majority of their output was utter rubbish. I never bought a game by either of those publishers and my only real experience of Tynesoft was in the really terrible Dixons +2 games pack with the Harry S Price games or with my friend buying Super Gran (The Action Game) which was utter drivel.

For me, the worst games software houses were the ones where you were tricked into believing you might get a good game and I’d go as far as say the root cause of my two selections is a single programmer. Anthony “Tony” Crowther.

Now you might say, but Tony Crowther was a highly respected developer from the 8-bit home computer days and you’d be right. But mostly for his original Commodore 64 games. The thing was that Tony Crowther jumped between a few different publishers when releasing C64 games and those publishers usually really struggled in converting the games to the Spectrum. You’ll also find these publishers are usually more well regarded on the C64, but their Spectrum output was pretty dire in comparison. And that’s why I’m choosing them, because you’d play one of the original C64 classics and buy the Spectrum version and realise it was an utter piece of dog dirt at worst and mildly passable at best. But you’d paid full price and couldn’t get your pocket money back and were stuck with that turkey!

In alphabetical order, I choose these two software houses

1 Alligata https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=758
Definitely well remembered on the C64 for some early classics, but if you take away the games that were originally published by someone else, the Spectrum output is pretty dire. Show Jumping is about the only original Spectrum I can see that is kind of decent. But the rest are poor like Who Dares Wins II, a cracking game on the C64 but really average on the Spectrum. And the Speccy should have easily coped with a decent conversion. Same with Son of Blagger. However, Alligata’s early ish output came in really nice clam cases which made it even more annoying when buying a Spectrum version of a C64 classic, with the lovely clam case it really was a t*rd rolled in glitter!

2) Ariolasoft https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=1254
Maybe a little bit more controversial, but in my opinion maybe even worse than Alligata. The original Ariolasoft label had the rights to publish some US games in Europe, kind of similar to US Gold. On the C64 you got some good EA developed games, but on the Spectrum the limited number of conversions they did were poor - One on One and Realm of Impossibility. There was the odd decent game by the RamJam corporation like Panzadrome, but when you got to the Reaktor label, once again Tony Crowther strikes again! By this point I think his output on the C64 had dropped in quality, but the Spectrum conversions were really poor - The Centurions, Challenge of the Gobots, Killer Ring were all really crap on the Spectrum. The rest of the output was mostly poor, but there were a couple of exceptions like Starfox and Deaktivators. But that makes it worse IMHO because the rest of the output was so bad, it could easily trick young kids into parting with their pocket money. Won’t someone think of the children?!?!??!?!?

[worcestersource]

K-Tel were truly dire. We could get their games at the market for 50p, so did so to see how terrible they were.

Looking at the database, they somehow managed to publish Boulder Dash? However, I don’t think that should void my nomination!

[PeteProdge]

K-Tel were truly dire. We could get their games at the market for 50p, so did so to see how terrible they were.
Looking at the database, they somehow managed to publish Boulder Dash? However, I don’t think that should void my nomination!

I think K-Tel was an imprint of the Prism Leisure Corporation, or even an alias. Anyway, there's some kind of connection there. Prism own Front Runner, the original publisher of ZX Spectrum Boulder Dash. Also, Prism was one of a few companies that rereleased it. It's convoluted, I know...

[Timmy]

If you ask me, I'd say it's the ones that release games but the developers didn't got paid?

I can't remember the name of the software house right now, but you probably know which one I meant. Also, I only heard of the stories about it from the forums, so I'm not sure if it was true.

[PeteProdge]

If you ask me, I'd say it's the ones that release games but the developers didn't got paid?

I can't remember the name of the software house right now, but you probably know which one I meant. Also, I only heard of the stories about it from the forums, so I'm not sure if it was true.

I've heard stories. Here's one about Fantasy Software. And another one about Martech-connected developers Emerald Software.

Also I'd love to have an edgy conversation about the issue with this guy...

[TMD2003]

I've heard stories. Here's one about Fantasy Software. And another one about Martech-connected developers Emerald Software.

I have always been wondering about this...

"martek" was the invulnerability-mode cheat code in the "retail beta" version of Heretic. By the time of the full version, not least because there were enough people who'd played the "retail beta" and knew the code, it had become the instant-suicide code instead. Someone, somewhere, at Raven Software must have had fun with the Spectrum back in the day, because the character set for both Heretic and Hexen is the same as that for Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge - go into chat mode on either game and type some shift-plus-number characters, not least the dollar sign, and you'll recognise them as Spectrum characters.

Given the Spectrum connection, is there a chance that someone at Martech had caused grief to someone in the Spectrum's commercial era who would then go on to work for Raven Software, and might this have been intended as a jab at Martech, just with the spelling changed so there was no legal action? It's not as if this didn't happen ("Eugene" being the example everyone will be familiar with).

[toot_toot]

I've heard stories. Here's one about Fantasy Software. And another one about Martech-connected developers Emerald Software.

Interesting going back to that thread, because it made me think of another contender, which might be controversial.

Software Projects

Yes, they released the absolute classic Jet Set Willy. But what else was actually any good? Lode Runner was a fairly decent conversion, although it wasn’t really that difficult a game to convert seeing as it was ancient by the time it was converted over! Thrusta was quite good fun, but quite limited for a full price (at the time game). Hysteria is OK, but it’s not Joffa’s best. Tribble Trouble.. poor. Jet Set Willy II was basically an enhanced Jet Set Willy.

The thing with Software Projects was that the covers were really, really good. Plus it was the company that made Jet Set Willy. So you felt the game had to be good.

Here’s an example



I remember getting this and thinking “this has to be good”, it sounds like it’s some sort of arcade adventure. But look at the cover! It’s featuring some crazy Scotsman and the cover is VERY similar to the Jet Set Willy cover, so it has to be good!

So I rush back home to load it up and get this:



Yeah, it’s a text adventure. A really, really BAD text adventure.

And how many more games from Software Projects had the same problem? Great looking cover, from the publisher that brought you “Jet Set Willy”. And utter dog dirt when you play it.

And then you could even go one layer down and take a look at Software Project’s budget label, Software Super Savers.

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/list?label_id=13540

Out of all the games, only 1 got more than 50% in magazine reviews, Shuttle Shock, which got a whopping 66%.

[worcestersource]

Hehehe. I liked Tribble Trouble. It’s quite old school being mini-game driven but offers variety and a small challenge. Not a bad way to unwind with.

[Turrican]

Titus