Software Creations

~ the obituary ~

Richard Kay placed an advertisement in the Manchester Evening News and Steve Ruddy answered it. By Kay's own account that was 1986, a year later than the date the company files under, and the first four on the payroll were the two of them plus Mike Ager and Andrew Threlfall. The office was on Oxford Road, above a computer shop directly opposite the BBC. The early work was conversions of budget titles for Firebird at three or four hundred pounds a game, which is roughly what a weekend of a programmer's life was worth in mid-1980s Manchester.

The job that changed the company was the Commodore 64 version of Bubble Bobble. Good enough to win reviews, and reviews on a conversion meant more conversion work, so the catalog filled up with arcade ports, Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Bionic Commando among them. Then an early demo of Solstice went to Nintendo and came back as a contract, and from the end of the 1980s the studio was writing for the NES and then the Super NES with a Japanese platform holder behind it.

The studio's name was on nothing a buyer would see. Work for hire puts the publisher's logo where the money looks and the developer's name on a credit screen, and in 1990 a credit screen was something you reached by accident. The name reached me years late and from the wrong direction, through credits other people had typed up and posted, by which point Software Creations was already on its third owner and not far from losing the name altogether.

~ the case file ~

~ the nintendo contract ~

What followed the Solstice demo was a decade of other people's licenses. Silver Surfer and Wolverine for Marvel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Tom and Jerry, Beauty and the Beast for Disney, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, Terminator 2 on the 8-bit machines. Two of the originals, Solstice in 1990 and Equinox in 1993, are the ones that still get written about, along with Plok!, which the studio created rather than converted.

The quieter achievement came in 1995. Software Creations built the sound tools that went into Nintendo's development kit for the Nintendo 64, and those tools became the standard sound driver used on most N64 games. A Manchester company of a few dozen people wrote the layer that nearly every game on that console used to make noise, and the record of it sits in a 1995 magazine gossip column and in what the people involved said afterward.

~ the follin sound ~

The Follin brothers worked there, three of them, and Tim is the one people still name. The music written in that office pushed the NES and Super NES sound hardware past what the machines were supposed to manage, and it is the most durable thing the studio produced: decades later the Solstice and Silver Surfer soundtracks circulate on their own, detached from games most listeners have never played.

~ what acclaim bought ~

Ownership moved three times. In 1994 the company was sold to Bristol Coin Equipment, which was later renamed Rage Software, and in 1997 it was sold on again to Sweeplink Ltd. On 1 May 2002 Acclaim announced that it had bought Software Creations, with around 70 people on the books, and renamed it Acclaim Studios Manchester. The name that had been over the door since the Oxford Road office came off at that point.

Acclaim had about two years left in it. On 27 August 2004 the publisher closed Acclaim Studios and all of its development facilities at once, Manchester included. No separate decision was taken about Manchester, which is how a work-for-hire studio usually dies, as a line in somebody else's bad year.

~ the credits nobody read ~

There was a rescue. In September 2004 Rod Cousens and Barry Jafrato, Acclaim's chief executive and head of publishing, announced a new publisher called Exclaim, backed by Europlay Capital Advisers, which would take over both British studios and re-employ roughly 160 people across Manchester and Cheltenham. The opening was set for 11 October. Acclaim's liquidator, Allan Mendelsohn, challenged Cousens's claim to the studios, and the staff spent the autumn in limbo while lawyers argued about who owned a building full of people.

What actually came back was smaller. In April 2005 Jon Oldham founded SilverBack Studios with fifteen former Acclaim Manchester staff. The logo the old company used carried the line "catalyst for the imagination" under the wordmark, which was true enough for nineteen years of somebody else's catalog, and a company that spent all of them making other people's games ended as a paragraph in another company's liquidation.

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