Tiertex Design Studios

» see tiertex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Tiertex was founded in Macclesfield in 1986 by Donald Campbell and John Prince, and its first credits appeared the following year: 720 degrees, Rolling Thunder, 1943, all squeezed onto the Amstrad CPC and the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum. That was the whole of what the company did, and it held for thirty-five years. Somebody else made a hit. Tiertex made it run on your machine.

Between 1988 and 1992 the list reads like a shelf in a British newsagent: Street Fighter, Thunder Blade, Last Duel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Strider, Strider II, Mercs, Alien Storm, Bonanza Bros. Much of it came through U.S. Gold, and the studio got a reputation along the way. The Strider conversions and the 1988 Human Killing Machine are still cited by people who grew up on 8-bit hardware as the ones that taught them a license on the box guarantees nothing.

Then the work moved. Sega's Master System and Game Gear through the early nineties, then Game Boy and Game Boy Color for almost the whole of the late nineties: Toy Story, Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan, A Bug's Life, Madden, FIFA, NBA Live, Noddy, Bob the Builder, Tweenies. This is the invisible half of the industry. Any handheld tie-in you were given for a birthday had a studio like Tiertex behind it, and nobody reading the box knew the name.

The last game on the list is Carrera Power Slide for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. Seventh-generation consoles were where the company stopped being able to compete, so it stopped competing: Tiertex spent its final years building USB development boards and displays for industrial customers, still at the same address, still under the same name.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the paper trail ~

The legal history is messier than the brand history, which is normal for a British company that lived this long. The entity that carried the name to the end, company number 02691194, was incorporated on 27 February 1992 as Neejam 128 Limited, traded as Team-X Limited from December 1992, and only became Tiertex Design Studios Limited in December 2002. The 1986 founding belongs to the brand rather than to that registration.

The final set of accounts it filed covered the year to 30 October 2019. An application to strike the company off the register was filed on 6 August 2021, the day after Tiertex closed its doors. The first Gazette notice went out on 17 August and the final Gazette on 2 November 2021, which is the date the company legally stopped existing.

~ the unreleased one ~

Buried in the catalog is Sonic's Edusoft, a Master System educational Sonic game Tiertex built and Sega never shipped. It leaked years later and circulated among collectors, which gives the studio the odd distinction of being remembered as much for a cancelled thing as for most of the two hundred it finished.

~ the day it died ~

tiertex.com no longer belongs to anyone connected to it. Over HTTPS the connection fails outright; over plain HTTP the domain now forwards to an offshore gambling site, the usual end for a lapsed British company domain. The last Tiertex game had been on a shelf eighteen years before that.

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