Personal Software Services

~ the eulogy ~

The best-known thing this company ever shipped had a feature you could only reach by telephone. Theatre Europe put NATO against the Warsaw Pact across a map of Europe, and the chemical and nuclear options stayed locked until you rang a number printed with the game. You sat through a recorded montage of sirens and crying, and the code word came at the end of it. The number was a British landline. Whatever that mechanic was doing to a fourteen-year-old in Coventry in 1985 could not be done to anyone outside the country, and it was never going to be attempted from Turkey at international rates on a game that had arrived on a copied cassette with no inlay card anyway. This is a company whose signature move was structurally unable to leave Britain.

Personal Software Services was founded in 1981 in Coventry by Gary Mays and Richard Cockayne, and it settled quickly into being the wargame house of the British 8-bit industry. Falklands '82 went out while the war was three years in the past. Battle of Britain and Bismarck followed the same instinct, and there was a Swords and Sorcery line off to one side for people who wanted a map without a real army on it. The games ran on the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 first, with Amstrad CPC versions close behind. The Atari ST and the Amiga came later, as the market moved underneath them.

Sales held up through the middle of the decade while the finances underneath them got worse. Mirrorsoft bought the company in February 1987 and folded the name into its own operation as a strategy label, which is the form PSS existed in for its last four years. The final game under the name was J. R. R. Tolkien's Riders of Rohan in 1991. By the end of that year Mirrorsoft had stopped being able to pay people, for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with games.

~ the dossier ~

~ midnight sun ~

The Theatre Europe backlash was the largest thing PSS ever generated. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament objected to a nuclear exchange being a win condition and The Sun ran it as an outrage. Boots and John Menzies both declined to put it on shelves, which in 1985 Britain removed a serious fraction of the available retail. The reviewers went the other way. The telephone gate is the part worth keeping: before the game would let you end civilization, it made you get up and do something deliberate in the physical world. Reviews praised the accuracy of the order of battle, and the game took Best Strategy Game at the 1985 Golden Joystick Awards with a nomination for Game of the Year.

~ under mirrorsoft ~

Mirrorsoft was the software arm of Robert Maxwell's publishing empire and it ran three labels. Image Works handled original games and Mirror Image handled budget re-releases. PSS was where the strategy titles went after the 1987 purchase, which means that most of what carries the PSS name in the back half of its catalog is a Mirrorsoft product wearing a brand Mirrorsoft had bought.

This was a reasonable place to be for a while. Mirrorsoft reported profits of £806,000 on turnover of £8.01 million as late as 1990 and had the kind of licensing reach a Coventry wargame house on its own never would have. It also had a parent company that was systematically not what it appeared to be.

~ the lady ghislaine ~

Robert Maxwell went into the Atlantic off the back of the Lady Ghislaine and was found on 5 November 1991. The inquest recorded a heart attack and accidental drowning. What came out over the following weeks was that he had taken hundreds of millions of pounds out of his own companies' pension funds to hold the group together, and once that was public the whole structure stopped functioning at once. Mirrorsoft could not meet payroll or royalty commitments and had effectively shut down by the end of the year. Kevin Maxwell was declared bankrupt in 1992 with debts of around £400 million, the largest personal bankruptcy recorded in Britain at that point.

So the label died of something entirely outside its own industry. PSS had survived its own bad years and sold itself to the one buyer available, then run as a going concern for four more. A man who had never designed a wargame in his life went off a boat in the Canary Islands and the payroll stopped. Of all the ways a British software house of that generation could go, this is the only one where you have to explain a pension fund to tell the story.

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