Datasoft

~ the last words ~

Pat Ketchum's second company already has a grave here. Cyberdreams was the one that rented H.R. Giger and Harlan Ellison for adventure games in the nineties and went under in 1997. This is the first one, and it was a different animal entirely: bigger, and built on the assumption that whatever was already popular somewhere else could be sold again on a home computer.

Datasoft was incorporated on 12 June 1980 in Chatsworth, California. The catalog ran from 1982 to 1988 and covered two businesses at once. One was arcade conversions, where the company held the home rights to Pac-Man on the Atari 8-bit machines and to Zaxxon. Pole Position followed in 1983. The other was productivity software, which nobody remembers but which paid bills: Text Wizard and Spell Wizard were word processors, and there were development tools alongside them. From 1983 a budget imprint called Gentry Software handled the cheap end.

Sales never really grew past the middle of the decade. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1987. Two of its executives, Samuel L. Poole and Ted Hoffman, bought the name and the finished games out of the proceedings and renamed the operation IntelliCreations, which was a publisher and nothing else. It shipped the existing Datasoft library for about a year and closed in 1988.

~ the record ~

~ the licensing habit ~

The license list reads like a rack at a video store. Conan came off the Robert E. Howard property and Zorro arrived in 1985. The Goonies followed the same year, off a film that had been in theaters months earlier, which was about as fast as a licensed game could move in 1985. 221B Baker Street took its cue from the Sherlock Holmes board game. Alternate Reality, the one genuinely strange thing in the catalog, was an original: Philip Price's unfinished multi-part RPG where you walked around a city that was supposed to eventually become several connected games and mostly did not.

Buying recognition was a rational strategy for a company with no franchise of its own, and the arithmetic worked while home computers were new enough that a familiar name on the box was the only marketing anybody could afford. It stopped working when the licenses got expensive and the games behind them kept being fine rather than good.

~ bruce lee ~

Bruce Lee shipped in April 1984 on the Atari 8-bit machines, written by Ron J. Fortier with graphics by Kelly Day. John A. Fitzpatrick wrote the music. It is the Datasoft game that outlived the company by decades: twenty single-screen chambers in a wizard's tower, lanterns to collect, and a sumo wrestler and a stick-wielding ninja coming after you the whole way. A second player could take the ninja. It went onto nearly every home computer sold at the time and it is still being ported by hobbyists to machines that did not exist in 1984.

The interesting distance on this one is not the film. Bruce Lee's movies were everywhere in Turkey, on television and on tape, and the name needed no introduction here at any point in the eighties or after. What did not exist was the market Datasoft was actually selling into. The arcade was not something you replaced at home in Turkey, it was where you went, and the oyun salonu in the passage stayed the place people played well into the nineties. A company whose entire business was moving the arcade into the living room had nothing to sell to a country that had not stopped going to the arcade.

~ the name changed hands ~

IntelliCreations is the part worth noticing, because it is a shape that keeps recurring in this era and rarely gets named. The company did not vanish at the bankruptcy. The valuable thing left in the estate was the back catalog and the word Datasoft on the spine, and two people who had run the place bought both and spent a year selling inventory that was already made.

That is why the dates disagree depending on where you look. The business stopped in 1987. The name kept appearing on products into 1988, attached to a company that had never developed any of them. This grave is filed on the later date, because the label outlived the firm and the label is what people bought.

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