Black Legend

» see blacklegend.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Black Legend was started in Switzerland in 1992 by Richard M. Holmes, who was twenty years old. In 1993 it attached itself to the British distributor Kompart and moved to St Albans, with Holmes sitting as a director of both companies alongside Steven Bailey and Duncan Lowthian. The year after that it moved again, to Fulling Mill Barn in Welwyn, which is the address printed in CU Amiga's review boxes through 1994, with a Hertfordshire phone number under it. A German office opened in Mülheim an der Ruhr, staffed with people out of Blue Byte.

What it did was publish Amiga games, twenty-one of them between 1993 and 1996. The work came from other people's studios, mostly small ones, and Black Legend put it in boxes. Tower of Souls came from Parys Technografx and Behind the Iron Gate from a team called Ego, while Crystal Dragon came from Magnetic Fields. There was a football management series, Tactical Manager, and a scattering of games with titles like Fatman: The Caped Consumer and Hungary for Fun that tell you roughly what the budget was.

The Amiga was dying underneath all of it. Commodore had gone into liquidation in April 1994, a year after Black Legend started publishing, and by 1995 Kompart had decided the market was finished and that the label would close. It took until 1996 to happen. In early July a receiver knocked on the door of the German arm, and Amiga Joker ran the news in its next issue under the headline LEGENDÄRE PLEITE, legendary bankruptcy.

~ the dossier ~

~ croatia ~

The best thing Black Legend ever did was go talent-hunting in the former Yugoslavia. CU Amiga reported it as it happened in September 1994: there was a lot of programming talent in Croatia at the moment, the magazine said, as Black Legend had discovered, and on a visit there they had struck gold with a company called Croteam and signed them up. The game was Football Glory, a Sensible Soccer-shaped thing that came out on the Amiga on 6 November 1994 and on MS-DOS the following May. Croteam was a handful of people in Zagreb working through a war.

Five years later the same studio shipped Serious Sam, and the shape of my own decade connects to this story at exactly that point. The internet cafes I was in around Ankara between 2002 and 2005 ran Counter-Strike more or less continuously, and Serious Sam, which arrived in 2001, was built for exactly that kind of room: a hundred enemies coming at you across an open courtyard on hardware that should not have managed it. Nobody in those rooms had heard of Black Legend. A dead British Amiga publisher is the reason anyone outside Zagreb had heard of Croteam in the first place.

~ the funny part ~

Black Legend had a reputation in the British Amiga press, and it was not a flattering one. In July 1995 CU Amiga noted that the publisher had just taken an enormous advertisement in the trade press, under the banner A whole new ball game, to promote Tactical Manager 2 and to answer an earlier review that had given the game twenty-five percent. The magazine's tone suggests this was not a normal use of a trade advertisement.

The same issue of the same magazine ran a joke in which readers scored points for predicting review outcomes, and any review that was not a Virgin, Gametek, Black Legend, Anco or MicroProse title was worth one point. The German press was kinder. Amiga Joker gave Behind the Iron Gate 68 percent and Citadel 77 percent, and Tower of Souls got as high as second in its reader chart.

~ anfang juli ~

Two consecutive issues of Amiga Joker tell the ending by themselves. In its June 1996 issue Amiga Joker reviewed Football Glory Indoors warmly, calling it a clone of Sensible Soccer as funny as it was playable and saying the indoor version was a delight too. The very next issue carried the receiver. The piece asked the obvious question: what happens now to the already-finished Amiga games, to Evil's Doom and to Fußball Total Indoors? Both were done. Neither shipped. Talks to sell them on, including to Stefan Ossowskis Schatztruhe, had already failed by the time the item ran.

There is no day-precise date for any of this, and there will not be one. The free Companies House register only keeps dissolved companies back to 2010, so the British entity has been purged and the officers with it; there is no Duncan Lowthian on the officer register and no Black Legend on the company one. By September 1996 CU Amiga was noting that the back catalog was being reissued on budget by Hit Squad, under licence from Black Legend Software, four months after the receiver. The name is loose now: blacklegend.com serves a 114-byte parking redirect, and the Kompart name belongs to a British fire-safety software startup incorporated in March 2026.

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