Palace Software

~ the obit ~

The scandal that made Palace Software famous was a British scandal and it did not export. Barbarian was advertised in 1987 with a Page 3 model in a bikini and a bodybuilder in a loincloth, and the row that followed ran on a tabloid culture with no Turkish equivalent. The part Britain still argues about is exactly the part that stayed home. What crossed the border was the game.

Palace Software was the games arm of a film company. Palace Pictures ran video distribution out of London and held the UK rights to The Evil Dead, and in 1984 somebody there decided the obvious next move was to turn it into a Commodore 64 game. Pete Stone, who ran the software side, talked about games as an extension of films, which in 1984 was either far-sighted or the only frame available to a person who came from film.

The Evil Dead shipped in 1984 and a Halloween game was in development around the same time and never came out. Then came the part that worked. Cauldron in 1985 and Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back in 1986, a witch and then a bouncing pumpkin, both hard in the way British 8-bit games were hard on purpose. The Sacred Armour of Antiriad followed in 1986 with comic-book art that made it look more expensive than it was.

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior arrived in 1987 and went to the top of the all-format chart. Steve Brown worked out sixteen sword moves and filmed himself practicing them with wooden swords to get the animation right. It had a decapitation, and when you landed it a goblin came out and kicked the head across the arena. Germany's youth media board banned the game. A version with green blood was approved later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the funny part ~

The advertising worked exactly the way its critics said it would. Richard Leinfellner, who co-founded the company, said later that the controversy lifted sales and profile enormously and that royalty checks kept arriving for about seven years. Nobody at Palace had to defend the ad on artistic grounds. It sold cassettes and the sequel reused the same campaign, and the game underneath was good enough to survive the association.

The other funny part is that a company set up to turn films into games is remembered for the things it made up itself. Nobody talks about The Evil Dead on the Commodore 64. Everybody who was there talks about the pumpkin and the man with the sword.

~ what really happened ~

Palace sold the software company to Titus in 1991 and it became the French publisher's UK office, which it stayed as into 1992 before being closed. That is the paperwork version. The real version is that the parent went down with it: Palace Pictures collapsed in 1992, and a games label attached to a failing film distributor does not get rescued on its own merits.

The 8-bit market Palace was built for was finishing at the same time. Barbarian topped the chart on machines that were about to stop mattering, and a company whose identity was one arena fighter on a Spectrum had a narrow path into the sixteen-bit era. Titus bought a name and a back catalog. It did not buy a future for either.

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