Gremlin Interactive

~ the eulogy ~

Wanted: Monty Mole went on sale on 25 July 1984, which is the year I was born, and that is most of the distance between me and this company said in one line. Gremlin Graphics had started that year above Just Micro, a computer shop in Sheffield where the people writing games for the local machines stood around all afternoon, and the first thing it published was a platform game about a mole crossing a picket line.

The miners' strike was four months old at that point. Monty was a strike-breaker collecting coal to feed his family, the end boss was a caricature of Arthur Scargill, and the television news ran footage of the game while the strike was still going on. Gremlin publicly promised five pence a copy to the Miners' Welfare Fund. The fund turned the money down and did not say why.

Nothing else it made was anything like that. Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn built an ordinary British software house on the back of it: Thing on a Spring and Bounder on the 8-bit machines, then Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge and Premier Manager once the Amiga arrived. Zool came in 1992 as the Amiga's answer to Sonic, sponsored by a lollipop company. The name became Gremlin Interactive in 1994 and Actua Soccer put a fully 3D football game on the PlayStation the year after that.

Infogrames announced it was buying the company on 24 March 1999 and paid £22.9 million in cash. The Sheffield office became Infogrames Sheffield House, then Infogrames Studios Limited in 2000, and the Gremlin name stopped appearing on anything. The studio was closed in May 2003, by which point the parent had renamed itself Atari.

By the time I was old enough to wonder who made a game, this one had been renamed twice and shut. My own machine years start in 1998 on a 33.6k line, a full generation behind the hardware Gremlin was actually good at, so this is written out of the archive rather than out of memory. The part I can still check is the part that did not die, which is the town.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shop upstairs ~

Just Micro sold computers and let the people who wrote games for them hang around in it. That was the entire recruitment pipeline of the British industry in 1984, and Gremlin is the clearest version of it: a retailer becoming a publisher because customers kept handing over cassettes they had written at home. No venture money was involved. A game took one or two people a few months, sold for a few pounds, and the company kept the difference.

It is also why so few of those companies got out of the eighties alive. Surviving meant growing faster than the market changed underneath you. Gremlin made the 8-bit to 16-bit jump and then made the jump to 3D, from a standing start, in the same building, which is more than most of its neighbors managed.

~ what infogrames bought ~

£22.9 million in 1999 bought a 3D football engine and a management series that sold a new edition every season. Infogrames was assembling a publisher out of other people's companies that year, and Sheffield got the treatment most of them got. The name went first, in 2000. The building went in 2003, and the parent carried on calling itself Atari.

Nothing dramatic is recorded about the closure. No lawsuit and no public row. A French publisher with cash flow problems shut an English studio it had bought at the top of the market, and the people in the room found out the way people always find out.

~ what walked out ~

Four of the managers, Carl Cavers, Paul Porter, Darren Mills and James North-Hearn, started Sumo Digital in Sheffield later that year and took much of the staff with them. Ian Stewart went the other way and set up Zoo Digital, which bought the Gremlin back catalog from Atari that October, so the founder ended up owning his company's history if not its name.

Sumo grew into one of the largest games companies in the north of England, doing work on Sonic and LittleBigPlanet for other people, and Tencent bought it in a deal worth £919 million that closed in January 2022. That is forty times what Infogrames paid for the studio those same people had been sitting in twenty-three years earlier. The building Gremlin ended up in, near Devonshire Green, has since been demolished.

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