Rainbow Arts

~ the goodbye ~

i missed the Amiga years entirely. My first machine and my first phone line both arrived in 1998, by which point the Commodore 64 was a story older people told and the Amiga was already a dead platform with a religious following. Rainbow Arts belongs to a window that closed before i got in the room, and everything below is read rather than remembered.

Marc Ullrich and Thomas Meiertoberens started it in Gütersloh in 1984 and moved it to Düsseldorf later. Germany in the mid eighties had a real home computer market and almost no domestic games industry, so the gap was obvious and the fastest way into it was to look hard at what was selling elsewhere and build it for the machines people here actually owned. That worked, and it kept working right up until it got the company sued.

By 1986 the company sat inside the Rushware group, which also owned Softgold, and the arrangement held for the rest of its life. The output over fifteen years covers a lot of ground, but the record it is judged on is three titles: two that landed it in court and one that did not need to.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the giana problem ~

The Great Giana Sisters came out in 1987, developed by Time Warp Productions and published by Rainbow Arts. It is Super Mario Bros. on a Commodore 64, and not in a general sense. The level design and the block hitting came across intact, with two sisters standing where two brothers had been. The advertising line was that the brothers were history.

Nintendo noticed, reportedly after an executive saw it at a trade show, and the writs went out. Rainbow Arts pulled the game and cancelled the finished ZX Spectrum version, and there was an out of court settlement with compensation that was never made public. The whole commercial life of the game was a few months. What that produced was one of the most heavily pirated cassettes in Europe and a genuine collector's item, and a name with enough residual value that the rights got revived decades later for a new Giana game. Being pulled is the reason anyone still talks about it.

~ the katakis deal ~

The second one went better. Katakis in 1988, written by the team that became Factor 5, was close enough to Irem's R-Type that Activision Europe, which held the home license, gave Rainbow Arts a choice between a lawsuit and a contract. The settlement was that Katakis came off the market and returned in 1989 as Denaris with the graphics changed, and Rainbow Arts took on the official C64 and Amiga conversions of R-Type.

Julian Eggebrecht's explanation of why was blunt: Activision could not find anyone who could actually do it. So the punishment for copying a game too well was a paid job doing the real one, and the R-Type ports that resulted were better than what the license holder would have shipped alone.

~ what remains ~

Turrican in 1990 is the answer to anyone who thinks the company only knew how to copy. Manfred Trenz built it on the Commodore 64 as a run and gun with enormous open levels and a rotating laser you steered by hand, and it took ideas from Metroid and from Contra without being either. Turrican II followed in 1991. Chris Huelsbeck's soundtracks for both are still performed live by orchestras, which is a strange sentence to write about a German budget publisher's mascot shooter.

The end was administrative. THQ bought Rushware and Softgold around the turn of 1999 and folded everything into THQ Deutschland, and after that the Rainbow Arts name simply stopped appearing on boxes. No collapse and no last game. In January 2022 Ziggurat Interactive bought more than eighty titles from the old catalog, which means most of it is buyable again, twenty three years after the label that made it was quietly retired.

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