Access Software

» see accesssoftware.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In November 1982 Bruce Carver and Chris Jones incorporated Access Software with twenty-five thousand dollars of starting capital, in Salt Lake City, Utah. Twenty-five thousand dollars bought twenty-three years of trading and two game series that outlasted the company. Both series are better remembered today than the company's own name, and three renames in the last five years are most of the reason.

The money came from golf. Leader Board arrived in 1986 and is the title Wikipedia treats as the first game in what became the Links series, with Links: The Challenge of Golf following in 1990. Golf sims get no retrospectives. What they do is sell across years instead of across a quarter, and that steadiness paid for everything else the company wanted to try.

What the company wanted to do was detective stories. Between 1989 and 1997 it made five of them, built around a down-at-heel private investigator named Tex Murphy working a San Francisco that had been through a nuclear war. By April 1999 Microsoft had bought the whole operation for an undisclosed sum, and the name on the building began a sequence of changes that did not stop until there was nothing left to rename.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ leader board to links ~

The Links line is the part of this company's output that outlived it, and the reason is technical rather than cultural. Access built its own rendering for golf terrain, good enough that when the studio was finally closed the display technology went on being used commercially by somebody else. A golf engine is a narrow thing to be excellent at, and it was the one asset here that nobody ever stopped finding a use for.

Leader Board came in 1986 and Links in 1990, and the line kept producing through the nineties. Microsoft kept it going after buying the studio in 1999, which is the clearest statement anybody made about what the acquisition had been for.

~ mean streets to overseer ~

Mean Streets came in 1989 and Martian Memorandum in 1991. Then the budgets grew. Under a Killing Moon arrived in 1994 and The Pandora Directive in 1996, with Tex Murphy: Overseer closing the line in 1997. These were full-motion-video adventure games, filmed actors composited into rendered rooms. Anybody arguing that the format was capable of real work argues it from these five titles. The format itself had become an embarrassment within about five years of the last one shipping.

Five games across eight years, and the last of them landed in 1997, which is two years before the company stopped owning itself. Nothing in the Tex Murphy line was made under Microsoft or under Take-Two.

~ three renames in five years ~

Access Software had been trading sixteen years before I had a connection of my own, and it was sold the year after that. Everything it is remembered for was finished and on shelves by 1997. Microsoft rebranded it Salt Lake Games Studio in 2000, on the formation of Microsoft Game Studios, then renamed it Indie Games in 2003. Take-Two bought it in late 2004 and called it Indie Built. Wikipedia dates that sale to October and the trade press to December; either way Indie Built was the fourth name the place had carried, and the three renames all landed inside five years.

~ as of friday ~

On 1 May 2006 Game Developer reported that "Take-Two has confirmed that, as of Friday, the company has closed down its Salt Lake City-based development studio Indie Built (Amped 3), with the loss of an unspecified number of jobs." Wikipedia puts the closure at a "re-alignment of its business strategy to overcome the weak fiscal year." Take-Two's Jim Ankner said employees were "being offered packages including continuation of salary and benefits, as well as other opportunities within Take-Two as appropriate." Amped 3 had shipped to lackluster sales and Top Spin 2 had only just arrived.

Most of the staff went to TruGolf, the simulator company already using the display work from the Links games. Jones and Aaron Conners started Big Finish Games in 2007 specifically to keep making Tex Murphy. Both of those are better outcomes than most closures produce. Neither of them is Access Software, though: the company that died in 2006 had not been allowed to use its own name for six years.

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