Red Rat Software

~ the goodbye ~

Red Rat Software was founded in Manchester in 1985 by Charles Partington, Harry Nadler and Don Rigby, and its first two releases were A Day at the Races and a platform game called Sprong: The Quest for the Golden Pogostick. Both were for Atari 8-bit computers, and so was almost everything that followed for the next four years.

1986 was the year it went wide. The releases from that single year run past a dozen titles, among them Crumble's Crisis and Laser Hawk, which for a company one year old and working on one platform is a startling rate. Some of them appeared on the Commodore 64 as well, and Screaming Wings appeared on the Amiga and the Atari ST as well as on the Atari 8-bit.

The platform choice is the interesting decision. In Britain the Atari 400 and 800 and their successors were a minority machine, well behind Sinclair's Spectrum and the Commodore 64 in the places games were actually bought, and a publisher that specialized in them was choosing a small market on purpose. I have never used an Atari 8-bit computer. Red Rat spent eight years serving a platform that was out of production before I ever sat down at a keyboard of my own.

~ the chronicle ~

~ atari world ~

Where the company physically was is recorded mostly in the memories of people who went there. An AtariMania commenter remembers Atari World, a shop in Manchester, as Red Rat's base, and describes overhearing Harry Nadler talking shop in it. That is anecdote rather than record.

The 8-bit line kept going long past the point where it made commercial sense. Hawkquest and Speed Run arrived in 1989, by which time the British industry had largely relocated to the Amiga and the ST, and Red Rat was still shipping cartridges and tapes for a machine Atari itself had stopped promoting.

~ the top cat tavern ~

The company's best-known game came out of a lunch break. Partington and Nadler were watching Lombard RAC Rally coverage on television at the Top Cat Tavern, near the Manchester offices, and decided to make a game of it. Lombard RAC Rally shipped in 1988 on the 16-bit machines and on MS-DOS.

The other one is Push-Over, from 1992, a puzzle game about dominoes that went out through Ocean Software and reached the SNES alongside the home computer versions. That is how a Manchester house built on Atari 8-bit games ended up with a credit on a Nintendo cartridge.

~ after the 8-bit ~

One Step Beyond, in 1993, is the final entry in the catalog, released for MS-DOS and for both 16-bit home machines. No closure announcement survives and no trade source explains what happened: the year 1993 is on the record and the reason is not. What is left of the company is a games list maintained by the Centre for Computing History and a page on MobyGames, which between them preserve about thirty titles and one slogan.

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