Vektor Grafix

~ the obit ~

Domark held the European licence for the Star Wars arcade game and needed somebody who could make wireframe vectors move on a ZX Spectrum. The company it handed the job to was about a month old. Three people did the conversions in eight weeks, one of them Ciaran Gultnieks, the first person Vektor Grafix ever employed. Mark Strachan of Domark, looking back, described dealing with Andy Craven and called him a genius.

Craven had been a college lecturer in computer studies, and before that had toured Europe as a rock musician playing British and American military bases, and he taught himself to program somewhere along the way. The founding itself comes down to two magazines that do not quite agree. The One says he formed the company alone in June 1987 and that John Lewis, who ran Cascade Games, came in as an unofficial partner after seeing the 3D routines Craven had written at home. CRASH says Craven and Danny Gallagher founded it together, neither having written a game before, and that Lewis arrived later to take over Gallagher's half.

What they sold was speed. By 1989 the studio had 25 programmers, artists and musicians, its own 3D tooling, and a reputation that Games-X summarised in 1991 as a technology and game design leader. Fighter Bomber that year put over a hundred polygons on some aircraft and claimed the first functional 3D discs and circles in a game; The One called it technically breathtaking and scored it 95 percent. Craven spun off two sister companies, Sprytes for the core 3D system and Muzik for the audio, which is what a contractor does when it realises the engine is worth more than any one game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what microprose bought ~

On 13 July 1992 the Washington Post ran a business item headed "MICROPROSE BUYS VEKTOR GRAFIX FOR MORE THAN FUN AND GAMES", spelling the name with a c throughout. Bill Stealey gave two reasons and no price. One was that owning the developer removed the royalties MicroProse was paying on B-17 Flying Fortress. The other was access to a second game the Leeds team had in progress, which the Post said was tentatively titled Air Glory.

B-17 shipped with a 230-page manual and a keyboard overlay, and its technical advisor was a retired USAAF bombardier who had trained on both the Norden and the Sperry bombsights. Air Glory arrived in March 1993 under the name Dogfight, eighty years of aerial warfare in one box, and nothing else ever came out of Leeds under any name. The sign over the door by then read MicroProse Leeds.

~ the undated closing ~

Wikipedia says the company was dissolved in 1993 and hangs that on GamePro issue 56, which reports the Spectrum HoloByte merger and never mentions Leeds at all. What can actually be dated runs like this. In June 1993 PC Review toured MicroProse UK, listed Leeds among its four sites and described a game in production there. By September the three senior people had left and registered a company of their own. In November ST Applications reported MicroProse cutting roughly 30 percent of its workforce and closing two of its three UK offices, without naming which. Somewhere in that summer the Leeds studio stopped, and no source anywhere gives the month.

~ the old brewery ~

The addresses tell it more precisely than the trade press managed. Vektor Grafix spent its first two years at Prospect House on Sovereign Street, then moved to the Old Brewery on The Calls and stayed until the end. In September 1993 Gultnieks, Ian Martin and Mark Griffiths started The Software Refinery in Gultnieks's flat at 32 The Calls, a few doors along the same street. They made two games for Gremlin, Slipstream 5000 in 1995 and Hardwar in 1998, the second built on the first one's 3D engine. Dominic Robinson, who had come to Leeds from Graftgold specifically to work in 3D, left to form Wayward Design and later sold it to Rage Software.

Hardwar went on sale in Britain in September 1998, which is roughly when I came online, and it is the only object anywhere in this story I could plausibly have met while it was still current. Vektor Grafix had been shut for half a decade by then, and across six years of trading it had never once got its own name onto a shop shelf.

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