Melbourne House

~ the goodbye ~

A game you have to type English sentences at does not travel. The Hobbit came out in 1982 with a parser that took whole commands instead of two words, and with characters who wandered off and did things while you stood there deciding. It sold more than half a million copies to people who already spoke the language it was listening in. That was not the room I grew up in.

Melbourne House was set up in London in 1977 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen. They published books before they published software, and the Melbourne in the name was where they were from rather than where the company sat. The development side stayed in Australia under the name Beam Software, an acronym assembled out of their own surnames.

The Hobbit is the one everybody names, and the reason is the parser rather than the license. Text adventures of that period wanted a verb and a noun and got confused past that. This one accepted sentences, and the other people in the world moved around on their own clock instead of waiting for you to arrive. It shipped with a paperback of the book in the box, which was the sort of thing a publisher who had started in books would think of.

Three years later The Way of the Exploding Fist did the same trick in a different genre. Two fighters and a full set of moves off one joystick, scored the way karate is actually judged rather than by a health bar draining across the top of the screen. It took Best Overall Game at the Golden Joystick Awards and it is the reason home computer fighting games look the way they do.

Turkey in 1985 had almost no home computer market for any of this to land in. The games that eventually reached me arrived a decade later on a PC, in a country where the first job with any of them was working out what the English on screen meant. A company whose best product was a machine that read English back at you was aiming somewhere else entirely.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

The shape of the business was unusual for the time. Publishing sat in London and the code was written in Melbourne, which meant the company was running a fourteen-hour time difference through the post at a point when most British labels were operating out of one room. It worked because the two halves were owned by the same two people.

The catalog past the two famous titles was wide rather than deep. Sherlock in 1984 tried to run the Hobbit engine at a harder problem. There were arcade conversions and licensed properties and a long list of Spectrum releases that nobody has thought about since. What kept the label credible was that when it was good it was good at something no competitor had built.

~ how it actually ended ~

In 1987 the UK publishing arm was sold to Mastertronic for 850,000 pounds. Milgrom's own reason for it was that the industry was moving from 8-bit to 16-bit machines, and the company did not have enough management to run a publisher and a development studio through that at the same time. So he kept the studio and sold the publisher.

Mastertronic stopped using the name. That is the actual death, ten years in, with nobody writing it up as one. The Melbourne House label went quiet in the middle of the decade it had helped define, and the games that had made it famous were already three and five years old.

~ the long tail ~

The name came back in 1997 when Beam retired its Laser Beam Entertainment branding and put Melbourne House back on the door. What went out under it that time was KKND and its sequel, real-time strategy for the PC, which has nothing to do with anything the name meant in 1982. Infogrames bought the studio in 1999 and the sign read Infogrames Melbourne House. In 2003 it read Atari Melbourne House.

Krome Studios took the building in November 2006 and renamed it after themselves, which is when the words Melbourne House left the world for good. The studio itself lasted another four years and shut on 15 October 2010 along with Krome's Brisbane office. By then the name had been through four owners and two languages of business, and the only thing anyone still meant by it was a cassette from 1982 that could understand a whole sentence.

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