Richard Shepherd Software

~ the last words ~

Here is a company that opened in February 1982, two months before the ZX Spectrum went on sale, and was gone before I was two. British home computing in those three years ran on cassette tapes sold in newsagents and reviewed in magazines that never reached a Turkish shelf.

Richard Shepherd was an accountant. He taught himself to program on a ZX81 in his own time, and the company exists because his wife Elaine, who liked text adventures, bought one that disappointed her and he said they could do better. The first product was Bargain Bytes, a mixed bag of games and utilities for the ZX81, sold out of the family's dining room in Maidenhead. Then Sinclair released the Spectrum in April 1982 and the company had to start again on a different machine barely two months after it had started at all.

The turn came in February 1983, when WHSmith ordered Transylvanian Tower for its shops. That is the moment a hobby becomes a business in Britain: a chain with a shelf in every high street takes your cassette. Shepherd left his job and rented an office in Slough, where the company took on its first employees. For about two more years the company put out a steady line of adventures, most of them written either by Shepherd or by Pete Cooke, who would go on to a long career of his own.

~ the record ~

~ the dining room ~

The catalogue is small enough to list and the dates tell the story on their own. Eight titles in 1982, among them Transylvanian Tower and Super Spy. Then Invincible Island, Urban Upstart, Everest Ascent and Devils of the Deep across 1983. The Inferno and Upper Gumtree in 1984. Ski Star 2000 in 1985, reviewed in Crash that March, and after that nothing.

One of the oddest items in it is not a game at all. Cash Controller, a home finance utility from 1983, was the first Spectrum program written to work with the ZX Microdrive, Sinclair's endless tape loop cartridge that was supposed to replace the cassette deck and mostly replaced nothing. The accountant's company got there first with an accounts program, which fits.

~ what the tapes were ~

The adventures were text with drawn graphics on top, running in 48K, and they were sold on tapes with hand-painted inlay art of the sort British software had for about four years and then lost. Transylvanian Tower promised a spine chilling adventure with spectacular 3D on its packaging. Invincible Island and Urban Upstart are the ones people still load into emulators, and Upper Gumtree put a mad professor wrecking a small town on the Commodore 64 in 1984.

How it ended was never written down in any source I could reach. Wikipedia says 1985 and that the company folded, some mirrors say 1984, and nothing contemporary has turned up to settle it: no trade paper obituary and no liquidation notice. That year was brutal on the British software houses that had grown out of bedrooms and dining rooms between 1982 and 1984, and this was one of them, with an address at Elm House on Elmshott Lane in Cippenham and an output of sixteen cassettes.

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