Telecomsoft

~ the obit ~

For five years in the middle of the 1980s, one of Britain's game publishers was the national telephone company. Telecomsoft was a division of British Telecom, founded in 1984 under Ederyn Williams, staffed at first by a BT employee seconded across named James Leavey and by Tony Rainbird, who already ran a budget software outfit called Micro-Gold.

Its first label was going to be called Firefly until somebody discovered the name was taken, so it became Firebird. In November 1984 the budget line put out its first cassettes at two pounds fifty each: The Wild Bunch on the Spectrum, Booty on the Commodore 64. The third was Bird Strike for the BBC Micro. By February 1985 Booty was the third best-selling game in the country, behind Ghostbusters and Daley Thompson's Decathlon.

Above the budget range sat Firebird Gold, which is where the label earned its reputation. Firebird took on the job of converting Ian Bell and David Braben's Elite from the BBC Micro to everything else, and published Revs and The Sentinel. There was a deal with Ultimate Play the Game to convert their Spectrum titles to the Commodore 64 and put them out under the Firebird name.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ gamestar ~

The reason BT was in this business at all is better than anything that happened afterward. Executives there had decided that a network business would eventually be a content business, so the original plan was to sell software down the phone line: downloadable games delivered by modem to Sinclair Spectrums, through a service to be called Gamestar, with modem-equipped terminals in shops for people who did not have one at home. That was the pitch in 1984.

It did not happen, in part because cable arrived in Britain far more slowly than the forecast assumed. So the entertainment division built to feed a delivery network that never arrived went and sold cassettes on shelves like everybody else. My own first modem came fourteen years later and ran at 14.4k on a Turkish phone line, and downloading a game over it was still an overnight proposition. BT had wanted to do it in 1984, on a network that could not carry it, for machines that counted their memory in kilobytes.

~ the birds ~

The label structure kept multiplying. Firebird Silver was the cheap end and Firebird Gold the expensive one, then Firebird Hot appeared for full-price releases, and Firebird Super Silver for a short-lived three-ninety-nine middle. Rainbird was spun off for the premium catalog, which is where the serious strategy and simulation work went. In early 1988 the budget line was rebranded again as Silverbird.

Underneath the renaming, the numbers were good: more than six million pounds of turnover across 1987 and 1988, from a division that had been a speculative bet on where phone networks were heading.

~ may 1989 ~

By the end of the decade BT's attention had moved elsewhere, and eight-bit publishing was shrinking even as Telecomsoft was doing well on sixteen-bit machines. The division was put up for sale in 1989. A management buyout was attempted and failed. MicroProse bought the three labels in May 1989 for a figure reported at around two million pounds.

The buyer kept the Firebird and Rainbird names going briefly and sold Silverbird on almost immediately. Within a couple of years all of them were gone, and the only part of the original idea that survived is the part nobody credits to a games label: selling content to people at home, down a telephone line.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »