Topo Soft

~ the obituary ~

Topo Soft was dissolved in 1994 in Madrid, after seven or eight years depending on which article you believe. English Wikipedia dates the founding to 1986, the English article on the Spanish golden age says Topo started work in 1987 with a game called Spirits, and the Spanish release table has a title from 1986. The company made games for the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the MSX and eventually the PC. Erbe sold nearly all of them, because Erbe owned Topo.

It started with two people and a Sunday market. Javier Cano and Emilio Martínez Tejedor had written an educational geography game called MapGame and were selling it at El Rastro in Madrid when somebody from Erbe Software noticed and hired them. Erbe was the main distributor of entertainment software in Spain from 1984 to 1995, run by Paco Pastor, and it had been publishing games under its own name. Everything that happened to Topo afterward follows from the decision Erbe took next. It split the two jobs in half: distribution stayed with the Erbe label, and a new subsidiary was created to do nothing but produce the games. That subsidiary was Topo.

What followed was a run of titles that Spanish players of a certain age can still list. Desperado in 1987, which was sold in England under the name Gun.Smoke. Mad Mix Game and Emilio Butragueño Fútbol followed in 1988, then Viaje al centro de la Tierra and Metrópolis in 1989. Lorna and Ice Breaker came in 1990. Zona 0, Desperado 2, Tour 91 and Black Crown all appeared in 1991, which was the last full year of it. Most of the covers were painted by Alfonso Azpiri, whose airbrushed women are as much of the period's memory in Spain as the games behind them.

~ the case file ~

~ the floor above the distributor ~

Being the distributor's own studio is a different life from being a studio. Topo never had to find a publisher and never got to choose one. Erbe financed the games and Erbe sold them, which removed the problem that killed most houses of that era. It also meant that Topo's future was a decision somebody else would take. The Spanish article calls Topo a filial and says plainly that it depended entirely on Erbe's management, and the office was reportedly the top floor of Erbe's own building. Even the name has competing origin stories: a basement in those offices, or a shop in the Retiro area. The Spanish edition of Retro Gamer says instead that it came from a small computer shop in the corridors of Atocha station.

The detailed record of this company is in Spanish and the English one runs to a few paragraphs. Topo reads as a minor name outside Spain largely because of that gap, and it does not read that way inside it. The English-language sources cannot even agree on when it closed, while the Spanish article walks through the decline year by year with a release table to back it.

~ gremlins 2 ~

In 1990 Topo licensed Gremlins 2: The New Batch and got the rights for the whole of Europe. No Spanish video game company had held an exclusive continent-wide license from a Hollywood film before, and it is the hardest single fact in Topo's favor when the question is how good this studio actually was. A house founded four years earlier because somebody noticed two programmers selling their own game at a street market was now holding a Warner property across a continent.

~ ten million pesetas ~

Two years before that came the other kind of license. Emilio Butragueño was a Real Madrid forward at the height of his career, and his fee for Emilio Butragueño Fútbol ran to about ten million pesetas. The Spanish article puts sales above a hundred thousand copies in a sentence that also carries the fee, and never makes clear whether the figure belongs to the game or to the player's commercial record in general. It is worth repeating as what it is, a number from an article, loosely attached.

The founders did not stay to see any of it finish. Cano and Martínez left in 1989 to start their own studio, Animagic, whose main title was a Mortadelo y Filemón game and which did not last long. Topo carried on without them under new people, including Gabriel Nieto, who had edited the magazine Micromanía. In 1993 the studio was doing work for Televisión Española on a segment of the game show El precio justo. That is a fair picture of where a Spanish games company sat by then.

The attempt to get out was called Quickit. In 1991, aware that 16-bit machines were the future, the studio tried to build a graphical desktop environment for MS-DOS. It did not succeed. Spain had come to 16-bit late, and a studio whose expertise was squeezing games into 48K found that nothing about that skill transferred to selling an operating environment against the companies already doing it.

~ what erbe did next ~

Erbe's own future was in distribution, and by the early nineties that meant consoles and imported 16-bit software rather than games written in Madrid. Topo's production was pushed into second place, and the Spanish article ties the final closure to Rafa Gómez arriving at Erbe, describing a process that dragged on until 1994. Two last PC titles appeared that year, Luigi en circusland and Super Scrylis. One English source says instead that Topo went bankrupt in 1992, in a section Wikipedia itself flags as citing no sources, and the 1994 releases argue against it. Several Topo people surfaced in 1998 inside Pyro Studios, which made Commandos and became the Spanish studio the rest of the world did hear about. Erbe closed its own doors in 1999, five years after shutting the studio it had built to keep the catalog Spanish.

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