Acornsoft

~ the last words ~

Acornsoft was set up in late 1980 in Cambridge by two directors of Acorn Computers, Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry, with David Johnson-Davies running it day to day. It was not built to be a games publisher. It was built because Acorn was about to sell a lot of machines and those machines needed something to run.

So the catalog came out looking like nothing that exists now. The same label that put out arcade conversions also put out BCPL and Lisp for the BBC Micro, plus View, the word processor people wrote their letters in. A single publisher covering both the toy and the tool is a thing that only makes sense when the publisher belongs to the company that made the computer.

The games were still good. Aviator in 1983 and Geoff Crammond's Revs in 1985, plus a long run of text adventures with names like Countdown to Doom. And then on 20 September 1984 the label published Elite, written by two Cambridge students called David Braben and Ian Bell, and the ordinary history of a small British software house stops there.

Acorn spent about fifty thousand pounds launching it, which was a serious number for a home computer game in 1984, and ran the launch event at Thorpe Park. The box came with a novella by Robert Holdstock and a sixty four page flight training manual, because the game itself had no room left for explaining anything. The BBC Micro version sold 107,898 copies.

The BBC Micro was a piece of British policy before it was a product. A broadcaster ran a computer literacy program, picked a machine to go with it, and the machine went into classrooms because the program did. Nothing shaped like that reached Turkey. My first machine and my first phone line both showed up in 1998, twelve years after this label stopped existing, on a platform that had never heard of it. i met Elite backwards, the way an engineer meets an old paper: as a technique first, and only later as a game somebody actually played.

~ the record ~

~ the twenty two kilobytes ~

Elite ran on a machine with about 22 KB free for the whole program and it contained eight galaxies of 256 planets each. It did that by not containing them. A single seed number goes through a fixed algorithm and comes out as a name, a government type, a tech level and an economy, deterministically, every time. Nothing is stored because nothing needs to be. Run the same seed tomorrow and the same planet is there.

The other half was the wireframe 3D with hidden line removal, running fast enough on a 2 MHz processor to feel like flying. Both halves are still the standard answer to the same problem, which is why the technique outlived the publisher by forty years and the phrase "procedurally generated" is now a bullet point on games with a thousand times the budget.

~ how it actually ended ~

David Johnson-Davies left in January 1986 and Acornsoft stopped operating as a separate company at that point. There is no bankruptcy here and no bad quarter to point at. Acorn had decided it wanted to be a hardware company, so the software arm went back inside the parent and the catalog was left sitting there with nobody to sell it.

Superior Software took the license later that year. Elite and Revs came back out on a joint Superior Software and Acornsoft label, and the old titles were repackaged into compilations under names like Play It Again Sam. Part of the deal put the Acornsoft name on the boxes of games Acornsoft had nothing to do with, which is how a dead publisher kept printing for years after the office had been emptied.

~ the long tail ~

The name came back briefly in 1997 for some RISC OS software and was finally recorded as defunct in 2013, twenty seven years after it stopped meaning anything. The interesting inheritance is not the trademark. Braben built Frontier Developments and kept making the same game for the next thirty years, up through Elite Dangerous in 2014, which is a longer continuous run than most publishers get.

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