Aackosoft

~ the obituary ~

The MSX was a Japanese standard that did its best business in countries its designers were not aiming at, and the Netherlands was the clearest case of it. Dutch households bought the machine in numbers that made no sense next to the Commodore and Sinclair map of the rest of Europe, and a local software industry grew in the gap. English Wikipedia calls Aackosoft one of the biggest publishers the platform ever had, which is the standard telling rather than a measured one.

Paul van Aacken and Guurt Kok founded it in 1983 in Leiden, trading as Aackosoft International BV, and it moved around the area over the years to Zoeterwoude and Leiderdorp. It published for the MSX above all, with some titles re-released onto Sinclair and Commodore hardware, and the Dutch record of its catalog reaches further back into the Atari 8-bit and Oric machines. It also ran an educational line under the Aackosoft Edusystems name and, according to English Wikipedia, sold accounting software, though that last claim carries a citation-needed tag and I would not lean on it.

How many games it actually published is a question nobody can answer cleanly. The Generation MSX database lists 117 titles under the company and separately counts 131 published and 49 developed, figures that overlap in ways that do not reconcile. MobyGames credits it with 37. There is no headline number anywhere, so "well over a hundred" is as precise as the record allows. The in-house programming team was called The ByteBusters, and the title the company is still remembered for is a Pac-Man clone called Oh Shit!, whose joke was entirely in the title.

~ the case file ~

~ the company behind the labels ~

Aackosoft spent most of its life not using its own name on its products. Eaglesoft started as the budget imprint and quickly became the label most of the software actually shipped under. In the last two years, 1987 and 1988, three more names appeared, one of them trading under the splendid banner of Premium III Software Distribution. For a company of its size that is a lot of letterhead, and it is part of why the catalog is so hard to count today. A shelf of Eaglesoft cassettes does not announce who made them.

~ 1988 ~

The Dutch Wikipedia entry gives the cause in one sentence: as a result of the declining popularity of the MSX, Aackosoft filed for bankruptcy in 1988. No source I reached puts a month or a day on it, and the one lead that might, a brief mention in issue 23 of a Dutch computer magazine, I could not get in front of me. So the grave is filed at the year and nothing finer.

Generation MSX adds that the company restarted as Methodic Solutions and that the respite was short, with nothing published after 1988. That reading is complicated by Methodic Solutions already existing as one of the house labels before the bankruptcy, so whether a new company was formed or a surviving imprint simply carried the stationery is not something the record settles.

~ the distance ~

I came online in 1998, a decade after all of this had finished, into a Turkish house with a modem and no history of 8-bit cassettes in it at all. The MSX reached Turkey, but the thing Aackosoft actually sold was something narrower: cheap Dutch-published tapes for a machine that Benelux buyers had chosen and most of Europe had not. That market closed in 1988, before I could have walked into it.

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