Quicksilva

~ the eulogy ~

Quicksilva was selling cassettes by post before there was a British games industry to sell them into. A tape in a plastic bag and an address in Southampton, ordered off a coupon clipped out of a hobbyist magazine. The name came off a guitar solo on Happy Trails, the Quicksilver Messenger Service album, which is roughly the amount of thought a two-person operation gave to branding in 1980.

Nick Lambert started it and John Hollis wrote code in the early days. The company was incorporated in 1981, which is why the founding year moves around depending on which account you read. The first machine was the ZX81, a computer with a kilobyte of memory that Britain was buying in numbers nobody had planned for. Quicksilva was one of the handful of outfits that noticed those buyers had money and nothing to spend it on.

Time-Gate reached the top of the Spectrum chart in December 1982. Ant Attack followed in 1983, Sandy White's isometric city rendered in a way nothing else on the machine looked like. Gridrunner came from Jeff Minter the same year, and Bugaboo arrived from Spain, which was unusual for a British label at that point. By the middle of the decade the catalog ran past fifty Spectrum titles with more than twenty on the Commodore 64.

In 1984 Argus Press Software bought the company, reportedly for 1.25 million pounds after eight months of negotiation. That is the year I was born. Everything Quicksilva is remembered for was already finished before I could read, and a mail order coupon at the back of a British hobbyist magazine was never a channel that reached Turkey in any case.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The thing worth remembering about the early catalog is how little of it was designed by anyone at Quicksilva. The company published what came in over the transom from hobbyists who had written something on a home computer and had no idea what to do next. Ant Attack was one person. Gridrunner was one person. That model built the British industry, and it worked because the machines were small enough that a single person could still fill one.

Quicksilva also took packaging seriously earlier than most. Cassette inlays with real artwork, boxes that looked like they belonged in a shop rather than in a classified advert. When the high street chains started stocking software, the labels that already looked like products were the ones that fit on a shelf.

~ the unraveling ~

Selling in 1984 looked like a win and mostly was, but it took the company out of its own hands. Argus moved the operation from Southampton to its London offices in June 1985. Paul Cooper and Rod Cousens had already left to start Electric Dreams Software. What remained was a label name attached to somebody else's release schedule.

Argus Press Software later became Grandslam Entertainment, and Quicksilva ran on inside it as a badge rather than a business. The last game to carry the name was a Pac-Land conversion in 1989. The company was gone by 1990, which is the sort of ending that gets no announcement because there is nothing left to announce.

~ what got buried with it ~

The bedroom-to-shelf pipeline died with this generation of labels rather than with this label specifically. By the end of the eighties a game needed a team and a budget, and the route where you posted a tape to a Southampton address and got a contract back had closed. The people who came up through it went on to run much larger things. Rod Cousens spent decades running Acclaim's international business and later Codemasters.

What is actually gone is the scale. A publisher whose entire output was one person's idea per title, sold by post, is not something the industry can produce again. It required computers that a single person could exhaust.

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