ReadySoft

~ the obituary ~

Almost everything ReadySoft sold was a copy of something that ran somewhere else. A laserdisc arcade cabinet. A Macintosh. The business was conversion, and for about four years it was very good at a job most of the industry had written off as undoable.

David Foster started the company in 1987 outside Toronto. In late 1988 it bought the home conversion rights to Dragon's Lair from Don Bluth's Sullivan Bluth Studios, which on paper was an absurd thing to own. Dragon's Lair was a laserdisc game. The arcade cabinet played back full frame hand-drawn cartoon animation off an optical disc the size of a record, and the home computers it was now supposed to run on had a megabyte of memory if you were lucky and a floppy drive that took seconds to find anything.

The Amiga version shipped in 1989 and it worked. The team redrew every frame at a size and color depth the machine could actually carry, cut a large amount of the original footage to make it fit, and spread what was left across a box of floppy disks that you swapped in and out as Dirk moved through the castle. It sold well enough to define the company. Space Ace followed in 1990. Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp and a run of expansions carried the same trick through 1992.

The Amiga is the wall here. It was the machine this entire company existed to serve, and it was not the machine that reached me. Turkey had an Amiga scene, mostly demo and cracking people who knew each other, but the computer that showed up in my house came later, ran DOS, and had a modem hanging off the back of it. By 1998 the Amiga was something older people argued about on forums.

~ the case file ~

~ the other half of the business ~

ReadySoft's second product line was emulators, which in 1990 meant something far more physical than it does now. A-Max let an Amiga run Macintosh software, and it did it by making you supply real Apple ROM chips, either socketed into ReadySoft's own cartridge or lifted off a machine you already had. Apple was not consulted. A-Max II arrived in 1992 with hard disk support and color.

The 64 Emulator did the same thing in the other direction, putting a Commodore 64 inside an Amiga. Both products sold to the same customer, an Amiga owner who did not want to buy a second computer, and both sat in a legal position nobody involved wanted to test in a courtroom.

~ the original games ~

Guy Spy and the Crystals of Armageddon in 1992 was ReadySoft trying to build a Dragon's Lair of its own with animation it actually owned. Brain Dead 13 in 1995 went further and hired real animators for a full CD-ROM cartoon game, arriving in the same year the market for full motion video games fell apart underneath it.

Neither became what the ports had been. Through the mid-nineties the company also distributed other people's games in North America, including the French studio Silmarils, and put NHL team discs and car catalogs onto CD-ROM. That is what a conversion house does when the conversions stop paying for themselves.

~ how it ended ~

Malofilm, a Montreal film distributor that later folded into Behaviour Communications, bought ReadySoft in 1996 and the name stopped meaning anything shortly after. There is no dramatic close here, no lawsuit worth reading and no bankruptcy filing. The Amiga market the company had been built on was gone and the CD-ROM market it moved into had already turned. It was worth more as an asset than as a going concern.

In August 1997 a group of former ReadySoft staff started Digital Leisure, which picked up the Don Bluth catalog and has been reissuing Dragon's Lair on every format that has existed since. The port outlived the porter by thirty years and counting.

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