Virgin Interactive

~ the goodbye ~

Nick Alexander left Thorn EMI in 1983 and set up Virgin Games on Portobello Road in London, inside a group that was then a record label with an airline still ahead of it. The British home computer market was two years old and nobody had worked out yet whether software was a record business or a book business. Virgin treated it like a record business, which is why the company existed at all.

An in-house team was assembled in 1984 under the name the Gang of Five, and Sorcery and Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future came out of it. The bigger move came in 1987, when Virgin bought the budget label Mastertronic. Branson took 45 percent first and the rest afterward, and the merged operation became Virgin Mastertronic in 1988 under Martin Alper. What Virgin had actually bought was the company distributing Sega hardware in Britain.

Sega noticed the same thing. In 1991 it bought Virgin Mastertronic outright and turned it into Sega Europe, leaving Virgin with a small publishing unit and a name. That unit bought Westwood Associates in 1992, renamed itself Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993, and spent the middle of the decade doing very well on Disney licenses and then on Command & Conquer in 1995. Revenue was around 67 million pounds by 1993 and there were roughly 500 staff by 1997.

i knew the word Virgin long before i knew it published games. In Turkey the name meant records and an airline, the way a conglomerate name usually reaches a country before its products do. Seeing it on the front of a game box read as brand extension rather than as a publisher with fifteen years of history behind it.

The part i could not have read off the box is that the logo was the only thing on it that stayed put. Everything behind that logo was sold, and sold again, and the games kept shipping through all of it without a break.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Hasbro bought 15 percent of the company in August 1993, mostly to secure game rights to Transformers and Monopoly. Blockbuster took 20 percent in January 1994 and 75 percent later the same year, then sold the whole stake on to Spelling Entertainment in 1995, which put Virgin Interactive inside Viacom next to Paramount and MTV. On paper this made it one of the five largest American video game companies, which is a strange thing to say about a firm founded on Portobello Road.

Underneath the ownership churn the catalog was genuinely good. Westwood was producing Lands of Lore and then Command & Conquer. The Disney games out of the American studio had David Perry on them. A 1995 distribution deal with Capcom gave Virgin the European rights that Acclaim had held.

~ four owners ~

In August 1998 Electronic Arts paid 122.5 million dollars for Westwood Studios and took Virgin Interactive's North American operations in the same deal. The European half went through a management buyout and carried on separately, which is the point where the company stopped being one thing.

Interplay signed a distribution agreement in February 1999 and took 43.9 percent. Titus Interactive bought a controlling stake later that year, then took Interplay's remaining share in April 2001. On 1 July 2003 the name was retired and the company became Avalon Interactive, at which point the last useful thing it owned was gone too.

~ what really happened ~

A French commercial court declared Titus bankrupt on 9 January 2005 with about 33 million euros of debt. Avalon France closed straight away. The UK operation kept trading through most of that year on nothing much, and was wound up on 22 November 2005.

The library went to Interplay, which had by then acquired what was left of Titus, so a catalog that started with Sorcery on a Commodore 64 ended up filed under a company that had once been its own distributor. Nobody announced the ending. There was nothing left by then that anyone would have written a press release about.

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