U.S. Gold

~ the last words ~

The company was registered in Birmingham as Covsound Ltd on 30 January 1984 and renamed U.S. Gold on 12 March, which tells you the name was decided after the business was. Geoff and Anne Brown were running a distribution operation and worked out that the interesting inventory problem in Britain was not manufacturing. It was rights. There was a large catalog of American software that had never been released here, sitting behind publishers with no European presence and no plan to build one.

So U.S. Gold went and licensed it. Software from Cosmi and Epyx, and eventually from most of the American independents, ended up on British cassettes through Birmingham. The Olympic sports games in the Epyx catalog sold in numbers that made the company a fixture, and by 1988 it had moved up the chain far enough to pay Capcom two million pounds for ten arcade conversions.

Around that catalog it built labels: GO! in 1987, opening with Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper, and Kixx for the budget end. The parent holding company, first Woodward Brown and then CentreGold, also owned the distributor CentreSoft, and in October 1994 it bought a developer in Derby called Core Design.

i came along after the question this company answered had stopped being a question. By 1998, when i first got a modem working, nobody needed to be told a game was American, because effectively all of them were and the information carried nothing. In 1984 it was worth putting on the box in gold letters.

~ the record ~

~ the name was the product ~

There is no way to read U.S. Gold as anything other than a claim about origin. A British company chose an American name to sell American software to a British market that treated American software as better, and did it well enough that the claim was still working a decade later.

What makes it worth recording is how fast that stopped being a viable position. Once European publishers were shipping their own catalogs internationally and arcade licenses were negotiated globally, a company whose core competence was being the bridge had nothing distinctive left. U.S. Gold's answer was to buy studios, which is how CentreGold ended up owning Core Design and Silicon Dreams, and which is also what made the group worth acquiring.

~ the fall ~

The conversions are the other half of the reputation. U.S. Gold held the European home computer rights to Out Run and Strider among plenty of others, and what came out the other end frequently bore only a structural resemblance to the arcade machine. Some of that was contractual deadlines and some of it was hardware that could not do the job, and the distinction did not matter much to anyone who had saved up for the cassette.

They sold anyway, in enormous quantity, which is the uncomfortable part. The business model did not require the conversion to be good. It required the license to be exclusive.

~ what got buried with it ~

Eidos acquired the whole CentreGold group in April 1996 for 17.6 million pounds. It wanted Core Design, which was already deep into Tomb Raider, and it wanted the distribution arm. It did not want the publishing label. U.S. Gold ceased operations, CentreSoft was disposed of, and Geoff Brown bought Silicon Dreams back later that year through a new holding company.

The last game to carry the logo was Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996, out that June on PlayStation and Saturn, which is a neat ending for a company that had built its first serious sales on Epyx Olympics titles on the Commodore 64. Twelve years, opening and closing on the same event.

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