Alligata Software | Code Like It's 198x

Alligata Software Ltd, 1 Orange Street, Sheffield S1 4DW — the address is printed on every advertisement, and it is a fair summary of the company. A small northern publisher in the first wave of British Commodore 64 software, selling arcade-style games and sports titles from an ordinary office in an ordinary city.

The Vault includes it deliberately, because the eighties are usually told through the exceptions. Alligata is the layer underneath — and the evidence for what that layer was like is less flattering, and more interesting, than the shorthand suggests.

Fast facts

Based: 1 Orange Street, Sheffield S1 4DW.
Press evidence in this library: CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amtix, Amstrad Action, Computer Gamer, Commodore Computing International and 8000 Plus, 1984 to 1988, at £6.95–£14.95.
Its programmer: Tony Crowther — Blagger, Son of Blagger, Loco, Trap.
CRASH scores, from the issue 48 index: Jack Charlton’s Match Fishing 74% (issue 18), Who Dares Wins II 73% (issue 28), Show Jumping 70% (issue 27), Son of Blagger 61% (issue 13), Trap 59% (issue 39), Rockman 57% (issue 44), Knockout 52%, Loco 44% (issue 38).
Also published: Guardian, Cyrus II Chess, Here Comes The Sun.

The programmer was the company

Alligata’s catalogue is unremarkable. Its hiring was not.

Tony Crowther wrote Blagger, Son of Blagger, Loco and Trap for Alligata, and in May 1985 Commodore Computing International named him in a short list of British programmers the public could name:

we don’t have the cult of the programmer, though some names (Jeff Minter, Scott Adams, Tony Crowther, Matthew Smith) are quite well-known.

His name is also why the catalogue is hard to pin down. Ghettoblaster is routinely listed as an Alligata game and was published by Virgin (ZZAP!64, July 1985, £8.95) — an understandable slip, since Crowther wrote it and wrote four others here. A publisher whose identity rests on one programmer inherits everything that programmer touched.

Hollywood is attributed to Alligata too, and no game of that name can be traced to the company from this library at all; the likeliest source of the confusion is Infocom’s Hollywood Hijinx.

Four names. Two of them — Minter and Smith — carry whole chapters of the period on their own. The third was Alligata’s.

He left, and Amtix reported his return in May 1986 under the headline “TONY RETURNS TO ALLIGATA”: Crowther “has signed an exclusive contract with Alligata Software Limited” as a full-time games writer, with a company director quoted as confident he would start writing straight away.

A publisher of Alligata’s size signing an exclusive full-time contract with a named programmer, in 1986, is the whole strategy stated out loud. It did not have a licence business, a conversion factory or a marketing department. It had a person.

What the scores say

The CRASH index of January 1988 lists Alligata’s Spectrum releases with their ratings, and the spread is worth reading honestly: 44% to 74%, clustered in the fifties and sixties.

That is lower than the entry for “the respectable middle of the market” would suggest, and it is not the whole picture either — because the same games did better on the machine they were written for. Loco took 44% on the Spectrum, but Commodore Computing International reviewed Crowther’s C64 original in September 1984 and gave its graphics five stars out of five. Trap, per Computer Gamer, “was a success for Crowther on the C64” before the Amstrad and Spectrum versions arrived; CRASH gave the Spectrum one 59%.

The pattern is the same one visible in Elite’s Commando — a review score in this period is a verdict on a specific conversion, not on a game. For a company whose asset was a C64 programmer, that arithmetic was expensive.

Jack Charlton, and what an endorsement bought

Jack Charlton’s Match Fishing is Alligata’s best-scoring Spectrum title at 74%, and CRASH’s own retrospective in January 1988 explains why the number should not be taken at face value. Listing the era’s celebrity endorsements, the magazine notes the rating was given “from a fisherperson’s viewpoint” — and then does not hold back:

The great Charlton is apparently a mad-keen angler, but the game has nothing to do with him other than the endorsement and not a lot of fishing either.

That is the cheap end of the celebrity licence, described by the magazine that scored it. A name on a box, £6.95, no personal involvement — the same manoeuvre Martech built a company on, done without the appearances.

Twice too close

Alligata’s two appearances in the trade gossip columns are both about Elite’s lawyers.

The game that never shipped. Commodore User, June 1986, in passing: “Elite stopped Alligata putting out the original Who Dares Wins.” That is why the game British readers know is Who Dares Wins II — reviewed by Amstrad Action in March 1986 at £8.95, described as “Rambo crossed with” something, and by Amiga Computing later as “an Ikari Warriors style game”. CRASH gave it 73%, and by July 1986 it was number four in Amstrad Action’s games chart. Alligata’s biggest hit was the sequel to a game a competitor had blocked.

The one that nearly did not. The same column, same month: Alligata released Bombo, and “Elite are currently seeking legal advice”. Commodore Computing International picked up the resolution in September: “do we hear that Elite is now bosom pals with Alligata after they threatened legal action over Alligata’s alleged ‘Bombo’ rip-off of Elite’s ‘Bombjack’.”

Neither episode reached a court in this library’s record, and both were settled or dropped. What they establish is a working method. Copying an arcade game’s structure was normal in 1983 and legally untested; by 1986 the arcade games had licensed home publishers with budgets, and the same habit had become someone else’s cause of action. Alligata is on the wrong side of that line twice inside six months.

Selling arcade games to a word processor

One genuinely odd corner of the catalogue, and a good illustration of how small publishers found revenue.

In 1987 Alligata converted Guardian and Blagger for the Amstrad PCW — a green-screen machine sold to people who wanted to write letters, with no colour, no sprites and no joystick port as standard. 8000 Plus announced it in March 1987 and reviewed the two-game disc at £14.95 in May: “Blagger is a platform game in which you take on the role of Rodger the Dodger… Guardian is a fast action shoot ’em up.”

Fourteen ninety-five for two three-year-old C64 games, sold to an audience with nothing else to play. A back catalogue is an asset if you can find a machine that has not seen it.

Why it mattered

Alligata sat in the middle of the market: publishers who were neither the biggest names nor budget labels, whose games scored in the fifties and sixties, and who are remembered now mainly by the people who owned them.

Any honest picture of the era needs that layer, because a history assembled from the classics describes an industry that never existed — one where every game was excellent and every company famous. But the layer should be described accurately. Alligata did not fail because it was unlucky. It ran on one programmer’s output and other people’s ideas, in a market that was, year by year, professionalising around it: buying licences, hiring lawyers, and turning “that’s a bit like Bomb Jack” from a compliment into a letter.