Ocean Software

» see oceanonline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ocean software sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. the studio shipped most of its work for the zx spectrum and the commodore 64, on british home computers i never owned. by the time i first booted a pc in turkey in 1998, ocean had just been renamed infogrames uk a few weeks earlier. the name on the cardboard sleeve had already been swapped.

ocean was founded in 1983 in manchester by david ward and jon woods, originally under the name spectrum games. the name confused retailers who sold non-spectrum machines and assumed the games would not run on them, so ward and woods renamed it ocean. the company's offices stayed at 6 central street in manchester for most of its run.

this part i was not around for. ocean's commercial logic was the licensed property. they would buy a film or arcade-machine license and build a game around the title. then they shipped it onto every british home-computer platform in the run-up to the film's release. that pipeline worked because the british home-computer market was huge and the films came with built-in awareness. ocean ran a small in-house team plus a stable of contracted developers willing to do tight-deadline conversion work.

the catalog through the 80s was robocop, batman, rambo, the terminator, head over heels, operation wolf, arkanoid, renegade, the new zealand story, chase hq, cabal. robocop on the c64 in 1988 was the breakout. it sold so well that the trade press of the time called it the most successful movie license in the history of british home computing to that point.

~ the record ~

~ the manchester years ~

by the late 80s ocean had moved from being a small mail-order outfit into the largest software publisher in europe. in those days. they bought the rights to the imagine software brand out of liquidation in october 1984 and used it as a second imprint for cheaper releases. they had distribution into every high-street british chain that carried home-computer software, w h smith, dixons, comet, currys.

the model that worked on the spectrum and c64 was hard to scale to the 16-bit era. when the amiga and atari st arrived, every other house had to compete on graphical quality, and the rough-and-ready licensed-tie-in approach started looking dated. ocean's mid-90s catalog leaned harder on snes and sega conversions to keep up.

~ the licensed tie-ins ~

this part you mostly experienced through the magazine covers, not the games. the licensed-tie-in model put ocean's logo on every big movie of the era. batman in 1989 was a critical and commercial hit alongside the burton film. jurassic park in 1993 sold across spectrum, amiga, mega drive and snes. the addams family series ran across the early 90s. lethal weapon, total recall, beverly hills cop, every action license that came out of warner and paramount in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to have ocean's name on it somewhere.

this part i was not around for either. the actual gameplay of those tie-ins was famously hit-or-miss. some were excellent. some were widely understood at the time to be filler shipped to meet the film's release window. that was the deal with the licensing model. you bought the recognition, you shipped on time, you accepted that not every title would be remembered fondly.

~ what really happened ~

this part i was not around for. by 1996 ocean was being eyed by french publisher infogrames as a way into the uk market. the parent group ocean was inside got bought by infogrames in 1996 for around 100 million pounds. ocean itself kept operating under its own name through 1997 while infogrames worked out the integration.

on 8 february 1998 bruno bonnell (the infogrames ceo) announced that ocean software limited would be rebranded as infogrames united kingdom limited. the last ocean-branded title shipped that same year, gt 64 championship edition for nintendo 64 in north america. the studio kept operating under the infogrames uk name for several more years before being folded into the company's wider restructuring. the brand never came back.

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