Hewson Consultants

~ the eulogy ~

Andrew Hewson was a chemical physicist who learned to program when the British Museum took delivery of its first computer. He wrote a book of programming tips for the Sinclair ZX80, then more of them for the ZX81 and the Spectrum, and sold them by mail order out of his own house. That mail-order operation is dated to 1980 and is where the company begins. By 1982 it had premises and a name on the door, at Hewson House on the Milton Trading Estate outside Abingdon, an address that appeared in the back pages of every British computer magazine for the rest of the decade.

What turned a book business into a games label was the post. Readers who had bought the tips books started mailing Hewson cassettes of the games they had written, which he had not asked for and could not have commissioned. He published them. The catalog that came out of this runs through Technician Ted in 1984, Paradroid in 1985, Uridium and Quazatron in 1986, then Exolon, Ranarama, Cybernoid and Nebulus in a single extraordinary run across 1987.

Hewson was never a big publisher. It had a fraction of the staff and none of the licensing money of Ocean or US Gold, and it competed on one thing, which was that its games did something the hardware was not supposed to be able to do. Paradroid gave a home computer a genuinely readable interface for a strategic game. Nebulus rotated a tower in real time on a Spectrum. Andrew Hewson was also among the founders of ELSPA, the British trade body for games publishers, which is the sort of thing the head of a small firm does when the industry he is in has no rules yet.

The label closed in 1991, seven years before I first dialed a modem, and the machines it wrote for were never in Turkish homes in any quantity. There is a second reason the name does not register here, and it is the more interesting one. Hewson's only real asset was a reputation for technical quality, and that reputation was manufactured monthly in the British games press, in CRASH and Zzap!64, by reviewers who tracked which publisher was worth watching. Turkey had no 8-bit magazine culture of that kind. The computer press here arrived later and arrived for the PC, by which point Hewson had already been shut for years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tapes in the post ~

The unsolicited-cassette pipeline was not a quirk, it was the business model, and for most of the 1980s it worked better than commissioning would have. Hewson took Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook's work from Graftgold, which had been ST Software until it incorporated in 1984, and Raffaele Cecco wrote Exolon and Cybernoid for the label while still in his early twenties. John Phillips delivered Nebulus. Graftgold was a separate company and Cecco worked freelance, so most of the catalog's best-known work was made by people Hewson did not employ.

That arrangement had an obvious failure mode and it arrived at the end of the decade. When Hewson's finances started to look uncertain, Graftgold went looking for a publisher with a steadier balance sheet, and the salaried programmers Dominic Robinson and John Cumming left to join them. The label's strongest outside team was gone before the decade ended, and two of its own staff went with it.

~ the rack-it deal ~

In October 1987 Hewson launched Rack-It, a budget label that Mastertronic ran on its behalf. The logic was straightforward: Mastertronic had spent four years proving that a game could sell in a newsagent at under two pounds, and Hewson had a back catalog that had already earned out at full price. The full-price market was getting harder every year, and by 1987 the budget shelf was where the volume had gone.

~ the hotel suite ~

The end came through Germany. Hewson's German distributor asked him to come up to London, and in a hotel suite told him that he could not pay what he owed and was going bust. Hewson has been unusually honest about what happened next in interviews since: he thinks that if he had been in a better frame of mind he would have fought through it and probably survived, and instead he decided not to. His own summary is that it was not his finest hour. The company went into receivership in 1991.

Three weeks later he was at a social event in his village when a friend asked him how much it would take to restart the thing. He gave a number, the friend thought it sounded reasonable, and raised both the finance and a support team. That became 21st Century Entertainment, which sold well over half a million copies of Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies on the Amiga before it too closed. The Hewson name came back a second time in 2013, registered as a new company by Andrew's son Rob to publish a book about the era, and later used as a label again. The original firm has no legal continuity with either of them. It ended in a hotel room in 1991 and everything since has been the name traveling on without it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »