Big Red Software

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

~ the eulogy ~

The Big Red Software Company Limited was founded by Paul Ranson in October 1989 and worked out of Leamington Spa, in Warwickshire. Its chosen market was the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, which everybody else was in the middle of abandoning. That left the publishers who still wanted 8-bit games with very few doors to knock on, and Big Red was one of them.

The publisher was Codemasters, a few miles up the road in Southam, and the relationship got close enough that when the Oliver Twins moved on from the series they had created, Codemasters handed Dizzy to Big Red. Magicland Dizzy came out in 1990 and the studio kept the egg going for two more years alongside the Seymour and CJ's Elephant Antics series, plus Fun School 4 for the education shelf.

When the 8-bit market finally emptied, Big Red moved onto the PC without much drama. It did the MS-DOS port of Micro Machines in 1994, then Tank Commander and Big Red Racing, both published by Domark, the second of them reviewed in PC Zone in April 1996.

Domark was by then being assembled into something else. On 25 September 1995, the publicly traded Eidos plc bought Domark, Big Red Software and Simis for £12.9 million between them, of which Big Red's share was £350,000. Eight months after that the three were folded into a single company.

~ the dossier ~

~ the dizzy baton ~

Amstrad Action put it plainly in 1992, in a retrospective of the whole series: "The Olivers passed the Dizzy baton on to Big Red Software, who kicked off their reign with this neat game." The game was Magicland Dizzy, the wizard Zaks back from the grave and Daisy kidnapped again, and taking over somebody else's beloved character without wrecking it is a harder job than inventing one.

It worked. When Retro Gamer produced a Your Sinclair retrospective in 2004 and ranked the top fifty Spectrum games ever made, Magicland Dizzy came in at number twelve. The studio stayed in that register for three years, on cassette, at budget prices.

~ eighty pence a balm cake ~

Asked for a closing word on Dizzy by Amstrad Action, Paul Ranson did not talk about the games at all. "While we were programming Magic Land Dizzy at Big Red, we spent a lot of time eating Donahue's balm cakes. They're the biggest balm cakes in the world, and they only cost 80p each. They were served by a woman who only had one eye. She'd be pointing at you and you wouldn't know where she was pointing." The magazine printed the whole thing and then handed the last word to Andrew Oliver instead.

~ what the register says ~

The exact date is on the UK company register, under a company that is still trading. Number 01804186 was incorporated on 29 March 1984 as Antrocrown Limited, became Domark Limited six weeks later, became Domark Group Limited on 26 October 1990, and on 31 May 1996 became Eidos Interactive Limited. It has been Square Enix Limited since November 2009. That single line in the previous-names table is where Big Red Software and Simis stop as well, on the same day. Big Red's own company number, 02432568, is no longer on the public register at all, and a Big Red Software Assets Limited incorporated in 2020 has no visible connection to the studio.

Dizzy is a British object. The egg was on the covers of magazines I have never held, on machines Britain bought by the million and that were scarce where I grew up, and the series had finished before anything with a keyboard arrived in my house. What reached me later, on a PC, was what Eidos turned into: the Tomb Raider company, with no hint anywhere in it that a part of it used to be a studio in Warwickshire making games about an egg.

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