Kingsoft GmbH

» see kingsoft.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

There is a Chinese company of the same name selling office software, and this is not it. This Kingsoft was German and built around a chess engine. The sources cannot agree on the year it started: English Wikipedia says 1982 in Mulartshütte, a village in the municipality of Roetgen near the Belgian border, run by Fritz Schäfer out of his parents' house. German Wikipedia and C64-Wiki both say 1983. All three agree on who and on what, which was a chess program called Boss, written for the VIC-20 and the PET, sold direct to the customer rather than through a shop, at nine hundred marks a copy.

Then came a decade of Commodore 64 games sold mainly inside West Germany. Galaxy in 1983, Space-Pilot the year after, Emerald Mine in 1987, Locomotion in 1992. Ghost Town came out in 1985 for the C16 and the Plus/4, written by Udo Gertz, and it is the title that turns out to matter most at the end of this page. The company's only licensed game was Hägar der Schreckliche in 1991, which is Hägar the Horrible, a newspaper comic strip about a Viking.

Kingsoft moved into Aachen proper in 1987 and stayed small: around a dozen people in the late eighties, six of them full-time. Distribution abroad went through other labels, with Anirog holding the United Kingdom license, so almost nothing here reached anyone outside the German-language market under this name. So the company stayed a German fact while a few of its games became a European one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ nine hundred marks, by post ~

The price of Boss is the most revealing fact in the file. Nine hundred Deutsche Mark in the early eighties was serious money, and the thing it bought was a chess opponent for a home computer, ordered direct from a private house. There was no retail chain involved and no publisher taking a cut, which is why the company could exist at all at that size.

Boss was later renamed Grandmaster and licensed to other markets, and the direct-to-customer habit turned into the business that outlasted the games. By 1993 Kingsoft had stopped publishing and was working purely as a distributor, moving other companies' boxes to German dealers. The last C64 titles with its name on them shipped that same year.

~ what electronic arts actually bought ~

On 8 March 1995 Electronic Arts announced it had acquired Kingsoft for an undisclosed sum. The year before, the company had twenty staff and twenty million marks of revenue, and C64-Wiki counts nineteen permanent employees when the sale went through. Rushware and MicroProse are both named as having been interested. Kingsoft became the distribution arm of Electronic Arts GmbH, which is what the buyer had been shopping for: German shelf space without a middleman in it.

The name went away later that year, and the paperwork trailed it for five more. English Wikipedia lists the company as defunct in 1995 with the fate given as dissolved. German Wikipedia dates the Auflösung to 1995 as well, with the reason recorded as integration into the parent group, then says the full transfer into Electronic Arts GmbH happened in 2000. C64-Wiki splits the difference and says it was dissolved at the start of 2000. Schäfer himself had already gone, to a separate studio of his own called Ikarion, which he left in 1998 and which closed in 2001.

~ the domain is a fan page ~

kingsoft.de still answers. The site behind it is a tribute built by one person. Ingo Hinterding has used it to publish extended remakes of Ghost Town, including the first C64 version the game ever had. There is also a JavaScript port that imports the original game data and runs in a browser. His own text says the 1985 adventure was a favorite he could never finish as a child and that he went back thirty five years later and solved every room in it.

A disclaimer sits under all of it: he has no association with any Kingsoft intellectual property, and all rights, to his knowledge, belong to Electronic Arts. A C16 text adventure from a village near Roetgen is now, as far as anyone can tell, an asset on an American balance sheet, and the only person maintaining anything under the name is a fan with a GitHub repository.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »