Krisalis Software

» see krisalis.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Krisalis Software Limited died on 27 April 2001, in the legal sense that is the only sense available here: at an extraordinary general meeting held that morning its members passed a resolution that the company "cannot, by reason of its liabilities, continue its business, and that it is advisable that the same should be wound up". Derek Leslie Woolley and Allan Cooper of Poppleton & Appleby were appointed liquidators the same day, by both the members and the creditors. The company number was 2204069 and the nature of business, as the notice records it, was Computer Software Development.

It had started fourteen years earlier in Rotherham, in 1987, under the name Teque Software Development Limited. Tony Kavanagh founded it with Peter Harrap and Shaun Hollingworth. Wikipedia gives no date for the switch to Krisalis and dates the logo it reproduces from 1995 to 2001, so the rename is undated, parked between 1987 and 1995. The work was licensed sports titles and conversion jobs. The studio's credit list ends with a PlayStation version of Bullfrog's Theme Hospital in 1998.

The games people remember are the football ones. Manchester United arrived in 1990 on the Acorn Archimedes, the Amiga, the Amstrad CPC, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum, six machines for one title, and the series ran on through Manchester United Premier League Champions in 1994 and Manchester United: The Double in 1995. Soccer Kid, from 1993, went furthest: the Amiga CD32, the SNES, the PlayStation and eventually a Game Boy Advance release. Arabian Nights came the same year.

~ the case file ~

~ the manchester united years ~

A licensed football game in 1990 was a different product from a licensed football game now. You were buying a club badge on a box and a squad list that went out of date in August. Six or seven people in a Yorkshire office built it, and the engineering problem was fitting the thing onto six machines with nothing in common. That kind of work pays a payroll without making a studio famous. Krisalis shipped titles in the series across six years, from the first in 1990 to The Double in 1995.

Every platform printed on that 1990 box was finished as a games machine before I had anything to run software on. The Acorn Archimedes never had much of a market outside Britain, and the CPC and the Spectrum belonged to the decade before. The latest thing on the studio's list that could have landed in front of me is the Game Boy Advance release of Soccer Kid, a handheld port of a 1993 Amiga game. I know this studio through credits lists.

~ what the infobox says ~

English Wikipedia gives a defunct date of 30 November 2001 and a fate of "dissolved", with no citation, and the article body never mentions the ending at all. That date is not a dissolution of this company and the Gazette proves it, because a company dissolved in November 2001 cannot hold a final meeting of creditors in 2005.

The real shape is in four notices. A section 98 notice signed by A. J. Kavanagh as director on 9 April 2001 and published on 23 April called the creditors to 93 Queen Street for 27 April at 11.30 a.m. The winding-up resolution and the appointment of liquidators were both published on 9 May, issue 56198. The company is no longer on the Companies House register at all, purged long ago, so the Gazette is the only place the dates survive.

~ 93 queen street ~

The address in all four notices is not a studio. 93 Queen Street, Sheffield S1 1WF was Poppleton & Appleby, the insolvency practice, and by the time the liquidators were appointed it was Krisalis Software's registered office too. The notice offered the list of the company's creditors for inspection there between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on the two business days before the meeting. The last thing the studio published was a list of who it owed money to, readable by anybody who walked in on 25 or 26 April 2001.

~ four years in liquidation ~

The winding-up ran until 2005. On 24 February that year D. L. Woolley signed a section 106 notice, published on 3 March, calling the final meetings of members and creditors for 12 April 2005 at 3.00 pm and 3.15 pm, fifteen minutes apart, to receive an account of how the company's property had been disposed of. Poppleton & Appleby had become The P&A Partnership in the meantime. Nearly four years passed between the resolution and that account.

Look at who signed these notices. The one that called the creditors to Sheffield reads "By Order of the Board. A. J. Kavanagh, Director, 9th April 2001", and the winding-up notice carries the same name as chairman of the meeting that voted. Wikipedia's founding line gives the first name as Tony, and nothing in either record suggests a second Kavanagh. A founder signed the paperwork that ended his own company, and the Gazette keeps both signatures in the same hand.

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