Graftgold

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

~ the last words ~

Steve Turner left his job as a commercial programmer in 1983 to write games for the ZX Spectrum full time, under the name ST Software. He played in a rock band with Andrew Braybrook, who was writing accounting code in COBOL for GEC Marconi and games in BASIC at home, and in September 1983 he asked Braybrook to join him. The first job was converting Spectrum games to the Dragon 32. When the Dragon vanished from the shops Braybrook moved to the Commodore 64, which paid better and had more machine underneath it. ST Software became a limited company called Graftgold in 1984.

What followed is one of the best runs any two programmers had on the C64. Paradroid in 1985, where you fight through a freighter by hijacking robots one rung at a time up the ship's hierarchy. Gribbly's Day Out the same year. Uridium in 1986, a horizontal scroller across the hulls of enormous ships, running at a speed the C64 had no business sustaining. Braybrook was voted Best Programmer of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards in 1986.

Each platform change after that cost more than the last. The 8-bit games had been written by one person in weeks or months, and the 16-bit titles needed teams and budgets. Graftgold had royalties enough to make that jump and took on thirty extra people. Then the 16-bit computers aged out, the 8-bit consoles stopped selling, and by the time Graftgold had cleared its existing contracts the 16-bit console market had already been divided up by other people.

The PlayStation finished it. Development kits were expensive enough that Graftgold could afford to start only two titles, International MotoX and a conversion of Rainbow Islands, so the company's finances rested entirely on those two. MotoX sat finished and unpublished for six months while Time Warner Interactive reconsidered its software strategy, and by release it earned back its advance and very little else. Rainbow Islands did not interest PlayStation owners. Graftgold folded in 1998.

~ the record ~

~ the diaries ~

Zzap!64 commissioned Braybrook to keep a diary while he wrote Paradroid, and printed it month by month. A second diary followed for Morpheus. No magazine had much reason to print this in 1985, when the house style was screenshots and percentage scores, and it is the reason Graftgold is remembered in more detail than studios that sold more copies.

The diaries worked because Braybrook wrote about the parts that went wrong. Routines that were too slow and had to be thrown away, a week spent on an approach that went nowhere. A generation of British teenagers learned from those pages that games were made by a person sitting down and failing at the problem repeatedly, which is a more useful thing to know than any review score.

~ the cost of a dev kit ~

Graftgold's last contracted game was Hardcorps, for a small publisher called Coconuts, and the advance was far below what producing the game actually required. The company started laying off staff while trying to build it. A rescue arrived from Perfect 10 Productions, the studio behind the Discworld adventures, which put in enough money to keep Graftgold alive long enough to look for a better deal. Psygnosis was approached and the talks dragged, then collapsed. Hardcorps was never finished under Graftgold and the company was wound up.

~ the inheritance ~

The back catalog went to Jester Interactive, which put Uridium on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Most of the later work has never been reissued, because reissuing a 16-bit game means tracing who owns it through three publisher bankruptcies.

graftgold.com is still up, run by Turner as an archive of the company's work, sharing the page with a notice about office space to let in Witham. ST Software became Graftgold Ltd at roughly the time I was born, so this whole catalog is older than anything I can claim to have played when it was new. I first went online in 1998 on a dial-up modem, by which point the studio had months left and was arguing over the price of PlayStation development hardware.

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