Dinamic Software

~ the goodbye ~

Dinamic went under in 1992. I was eight, and there was no computer in the house. The Spanish golden age started and finished before I had any way to be near it, on 8-bit machines that were already being cleared out of shops by the time I got online in 1998.

Three brothers named Ruiz Tejedor started the company in 1984, working out of the family house in Boadilla del Monte and moving into an office in the Torre de Madrid once there was money for one. The first release was Yenght, a text adventure with pictures. The first actual hit was Saimazoom in the same year.

What followed is most of what people mean when they say golden age. Abu Simbel Profanation and Army Moves through the middle of the decade, then Game Over and Freddy Hardest in 1987. Navy Moves in 1988, After the War in 1989. The games were famously, almost aggressively difficult, and the second loading half of a Dinamic tape generally assumed you had already suffered through the first.

Two things made a Dinamic box recognizable from across a shop. The cover art was painted, much of it by Luis Royo, and enough of a problem that British publishers repainted it before putting it on a shelf. Game Over got that treatment more than once. The other thing was athletes: Fernando Martin Basket Master put a real Spanish basketball player on the front, and every other Spanish studio copied the idea inside a year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the golden age ~

Spain's golden age of software runs from roughly 1983 to 1992, and it is a genuinely odd thing to have happened. A country with no console industry and no domestic hardware built a real games business on imported 8-bit machines, mostly the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC, and for a few years exported into Britain. Dinamic and Erbe Software were the two poles of it. Erbe distributed, Dinamic made.

Erbe set the price. It pushed its whole catalog to 875 pesetas, about 5.26 euros at the fixed conversion rate, as a direct answer to piracy: make the legal copy cheap enough that copying stops being worth the effort. It worked well enough to keep an industry alive and badly enough that nobody inside it ever got rich.

~ the decline ~

The 16-bit machines did not kill Spanish software by being better. They killed it by being expensive to develop for. A Spectrum game was a small team and a few months. An Amiga or a Mega Drive game was neither, and the Spanish houses had spent the whole 1980s optimizing for exactly the opposite economics. Most of them stayed on the 8-bit market and watched it shrink underneath them.

Dinamic tried the crossing. Narco Police shipped in 1991 and the distribution trouble started right behind it. Risky Woods in 1992 was the last one, built with Zeus Software and published by Electronic Arts, and it was the first Spanish game ported to a console. It came out to a company that was already insolvent in everything but paperwork.

~ what got buried with it ~

The 1992 bankruptcy ended Dinamic Software and did not end the brothers. They took the situation to Jose Ignacio Gomez-Centurion at HobbyPress, who offered a new company in exchange for the majority of it. Dinamic Multimedia opened in 1993 with Gomez-Centurion on seventy percent and the four remaining partners splitting the rest.

That company found PC Futbol and sold it in numbers no Spanish game had reached before, then went down itself in 2001. The people came out the other side as FX Interactive. Spain did get a second games industry eventually, and Pyro Studios in Madrid was shipping Commandos worldwide by 1998, but there is a clean break in the middle where the first one simply stopped and nobody caught it.

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