HesWare

~ the eulogy ~

HesWare filed for bankruptcy in October 1984, which is roughly when I was born, so its entire world had finished before I got near a computer. The VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 did reach Turkey, but they arrived late and sideways, on cassettes copied from other cassettes by people who had never seen a box. The American business of selling software cartridges off a rack in a department store never happened where I was at all.

Human Engineered Software was started in 1980 by Jay Balakrishnan and Cy Shuster, in Balakrishnan's apartment in Los Angeles. The origin detail everyone repeats is the desk: he took the door off his bedroom and laid it across two filing cabinets, winding the cables around the doorknob. The company later moved to Brisbane, California, just south of San Francisco, and traded as HES or HesWare depending on which year and which box you were looking at.

It began as a tools company rather than a games company. Balakrishnan dug through the Commodore PET's ROM and wrote HESbal, an 8K 6502 assembler, in BASIC, with a text editor called HESedit to go with it. That let the company build things nobody else could: HEScom was software plus a user-port cable that let a VIC-20 save programs to a PET's disk drive, because the first VIC-20 had no drive of its own. Shuster soldered those cables in his garage.

By the start of 1984 InfoWorld had HesWare tied with Broderbund as the tenth-largest microcomputer software company in the world and the largest entertainment software company of all, on $13 million of sales in 1983. It was in bankruptcy court before the year was out.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hes prefix ~

The catalog was wider than the company is remembered for. There was the productivity side, with OMNIWRITER, a word processor for the Commodore 64, and Turtle Graphics by David Malmberg, which taught a generation of children what a programming language was for. There was 64Forth, a Forth implementation on a cartridge, and HesMon, a machine language monitor that serious C64 people kept in the port for years. The company also sold hardware under the same naming habit: HesModem and HesModem II.

On the games side, HesWare was the American publisher for several of Jeff Minter's Llamasoft titles, including Gridrunner and Attack of the Mutant Camels, which means a British bedroom programmer's extremely strange output about psychedelic livestock reached US shelves through a California company that had started out selling assemblers. It also published Project Space Station and Mr. TNT. Two people who began their careers at HES went on to LucasArts: Lawrence Holland, who later made the flight simulators, and Ron Gilbert, who made Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island.

~ the shakeout of 1984 ~

The home computer crash of 1983 and 1984 is usually told through Atari and the video game side of it, but it took the cartridge software publishers just as hard, and for a plainer reason. Commodore kept cutting hardware prices to win a war with Texas Instruments, which left retailers holding inventory worth less every month. The returns then came back up the chain to the publishers. A company that had manufactured cartridges in volume against 1983's sales figures was holding stock in 1984 that nobody wanted at any price.

HesWare filed in October 1984. Later that month InfoWorld ran a story headlined "HES Finds Financial Savior", reporting that Avant Garde Publishing Corp would buy the company in a straight cash deal. Doug Carlston, who co-founded Broderbund and wrote a book about the industry the following year, recorded what actually happened: the offer was blocked in bankruptcy court, and HesWare shut down.

The name did not get recycled into anything. There is a hesware.com today, but it is a "Launching Soon" placeholder on a site builder with a 2025 copyright line, which is a squatted domain rather than a revival. What survives is the software itself, in the Commodore archives where people still run HesMon and Turtle Graphics in emulators, and the two careers that started in Brisbane and ended up making the adventure games that outlived every cartridge the company ever shipped.

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