Piranha Software

~ the obit ~

Piranha was a games label, not a company, and it belonged to Macmillan Publishers. It was announced in July 1986 as a "long term commitment to the game market" and its first five titles went out at the Personal Computer World Show at Olympia that September. Eighteen months after that, Macmillan decided the label was not financially viable and closed it. One more licensed game, Yogi Bear, had slipped out in the meantime.

In between, Piranha published the first video game ever made from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. It also put out two games based on the ITV animation The Trap Door and a Rogue Trooper adaptation licensed from 2000 AD. The developers it bought from were the recognizable names of the British 8-bit scene: Don Priestley, Delta 4, Design Design, Five Ways Software, The RamJam Corporation.

A publishing house with a backlist and a licensing department should have been well placed for exactly this business. Piranha's problem was never the catalog. That is the part everyone still remembers fondly. The problem was that Macmillan looked at the numbers after six quarters and did not like what the games division was costing.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ harold macmillan and clive sinclair ~

Macmillan got into software three years before Piranha existed, in 1983, jointly with Sinclair Research. Harold Macmillan had been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom until 1963 and the publishing house carried his family's name, and he turned up to launch the venture alongside Clive Sinclair. The two of them proclaimed the software a "technological advance".

What they were selling was school material: Learn To Read, built on Macmillan's own Gay Way primary reading scheme, and Science Horizons, both developed by Five Ways Software. In 1984 four mathematics titles followed, fronted by a Macmillan-owned character called Macman. The move toward entertainment came in late 1985 through two games tied to the ITV children's series Orm and Cheep, and through book-and-software packs endorsed by the Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper Ray Clemence and by The Magic Circle.

~ olympia, september 1986 ~

The bridge into real games was Popeye. Don Priestley had written it for dk'Tronics in 1985, a ZX Spectrum game famous for sprites far larger and more colorful than the machine was supposed to manage, and Macmillan re-released it in early 1986. Priestley was then asked to point the same technique at The Trap Door, a new ITV series due to start that October.

The other launch titles were commissioned the same way. Design Design took Rogue Trooper and also had to turn the 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre into the isometric style of their earlier N.E.X.O.R. Fergus McNeill of Delta 4, coming off the chart success of Bored of the Rings and The Boggit, was offered a book to adapt and picked The Colour of Magic. Five Ways Software handled the Commodore 64 and Amstrad conversions and wrote Strike Force: Cobra, the only one of the five with no license attached to it. The Trap Door took multiple awards and has been called one of the best games released for the Spectrum; it reached number 12 in the Gallup chart, with Strike Force: Cobra at 15.

~ nineteen percent ~

1987 went badly. The RamJam Corporation delivered The Astonishing Adventures of Mr. Weems and the She Vampires, a Gauntlet-alike that the press read as derivative; Zzap64 gave the Commodore 64 version 19 percent and Julian Rignall called it "simply appalling". Priestley's Flunky had giant caricatures of the royal family and puzzles nobody could follow. Through The Trap Door and Delta 4's The Big Sleaze were both received well, too late to change the arithmetic. Piranha had announced a run of tie-ins built on Fungus the Bogeyman, Roy of the Rovers and 2000 AD's Halo Jones and Judge Death, and almost none of them were made.

~ the wire coathanger ~

Alternative Software bought the back catalog and put it out at £1.99, where it did the business Macmillan had wanted at full price. Three of the titles reached the budget top ten during 1988, among them The Trap Door and Popeye. The closure took its developers down with it. Nosferatu was among Design Design's last games before the team renamed itself Walking Circles. The RamJam Corporation had already collapsed by the time Mr Weems reached the shops, and The Big Sleaze was the end of Delta 4, after which McNeill set up Abstract Concepts with Activision.

The author of the book Piranha adapted took the longest to forgive it. Several years passed before Terry Pratchett let anybody convert a Discworld novel again, and when he discussed the new Discworld game in a 1993 interview he described his old publisher as having "the marketing skills of a wire coathanger".

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