Ariolasoft

~ the last words ~

In 1982 Bertelsmann looked at the money moving through video games and told Ariola, its record label, to open a department for distributing them. The first thing that department sold was Activision's Atari VCS catalog, exclusively, in Germany. Trading began in 1983 under the name Ariolasoft, and when the 8-bit home computers arrived, the Commodore 64 above all, it walked into that market too.

The timing was the business. Electronic Arts and Broderbund had no European offices yet and no immediate plan to build them, so they handed their products to whoever was already standing in the local market. Increasingly that was Ariolasoft, which also took on COSMI, Starlight Software, Synapse Software, HESware and Creative Software. The work itself was unglamorous: a German box around an American program, and the program itself moved off whatever medium it arrived on and onto the 5.25-inch disks and cassette drives that German home computers actually had. It ported titles in-house as well, often to the Amstrad CPC, which Germany bought in quantity under the Schneider name.

Bertelsmann split the software side away from the music side in 1986 and gave it its own legal existence: Ariolasoft GmbH was entered in the commercial register at Rheda-Wiedenbrück on 5 March 1986, seated in Gütersloh, with Hans-Joachim Krusche as managing director. The seat moved to Rietberg-Varensell in October 1988. Within a year of that move Bertelsmann changed its mind about the category entirely and sold the company to Krusche in a management buyout. The name was the one asset that stayed behind.

~ the record ~

~ what it was actually carrying ~

The catalog reads as a map of who had not yet opened a European office. Archon, Adventure Construction Set, Skyfox and Hard Hat Mack reached German buyers with Ariolasoft's name on the box. So did Broderbund's Karateka and Raid on Bungeling Bay. From the summer of 1986 the company widened past games into home productivity, carrying Printmaster and the Electronic Arts Deluxe line for the Amiga. Its own German releases ran heavily to economic simulation: Kaiser, Hanse, Airline, Vermeer, Reederei. The licensed-in side brought Llamasoft's Batalyx and the Dragonware adventure Ooze.

In November 1985 it added a second label, Axis, for software written by German programmers on the C64 and the Atari XL and XE. The programmers behind it were mostly part-timers who had organized themselves into an interest group and used Ariola's software department for distribution, and for development help when they could not manage it among themselves. By 1989 two more German labels had been set up, Art Edition and Thalion.

A distributor is the least visible company in software. Ariolasoft's job was to stand between a programmer in California and a shop in Munich, re-cut the thing for whatever drive the buyer happened to own, and wrap a German box around it. I came up in a market where almost none of that work was visible, and where software mostly arrived with no publisher attached to it at all.

~ the console it could not sell ~

At the end of 1986 Sega was looking for distributors to launch the Master System in North America and Europe at once, and Ariolasoft was the first company it signed for Germany. The campaign started before the year was out, and German magazines got their first look at the console through it. By 1988 the German numbers were far behind what Mastertronic was doing with the same machine in Britain, and the contract was not renewed. British trade press from September 1986 also has Ariolasoft appointed as the Master System's UK distributor, which German sources do not mention, so the likeliest reading is that each arm held its own territory.

~ london, shut at the end of march ~

Ariolasoft UK opened in 1984 under two former CBS managers, Ashley Gray and Frank Brunger, and published in Britain under its own name as well as the labels Reaktor and 39 Steps. Crash magazine printed the death notice in its March 1988 issue, in a two-paragraph item headed "TWO DOWN": West German-owned Ariolasoft would close its UK operation at the end of March, probably selling its software titles to a British house first, and the move followed disappointing sales the previous autumn. No source has ever named the buyer. By then the British arm was run by Willi Carmincke, whose surname English Wikipedia spells Carminke, and the German parent had a plain reason to stop funding it: the coming 16-bit market at home was reckoned to be three times the size of the English one.

~ what the buyout could not buy ~

Krusche gave the interview himself, to Happy Computer, in the issue dated August 1989, under the headline "Ariolasoft is dead, long live United Software". His explanation was procedural rather than sentimental. The company had been split off from Bertelsmann, it therefore had nothing further to do with Bertelsmann, the name Ariola belonged to Bertelsmann, so another name had to be found. He picked United Software for the number of foreign houses the business was by then representing: Cinemaware, FTL, Grandslam, Hewson, Ocean, Sierra. Asked whether he was the market leader, he would not say yes, and described the position against Rushware as a constant up and down.

The paperwork lags the announcement by a year, and the sources do not reconcile it. Krusche says in August 1989 that the name comes off the register on the first of the month; the German register entry for the rename is dated August 1990. The 1989 date has a contemporary magazine and a United Software advertisement from the same year behind it, so that is the one on this page.

United Software was taken over by MicroProse Germany in 1993. MicroProse went to Hasbro in 1998, Hasbro's games division to Infogrames in 2001, and Infogrames renamed itself Atari SA in 2003. The German trademark did not follow any of it. Wordmark 1059522 was filed on 10 January 1984 and registered that February, with the owner of record given as Ariolasoft GmbH of Gütersloh, a company that would not legally exist for another two years. Protection ran out exactly ten years after the filing date, nobody renewed it, and the mark was formally deleted in November 2000. The register now records the file itself as destroyed.

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