In August 1983, the story goes, two teenagers walked into Superior Systems, a computer shop at 178 West Street in Sheffield run by the brothers Mike and Tim Mahoney. One was Tony Crowther and the other Steve Evans, and both were writing games. The Mahoneys, as Your Computer put it, were quick “to recognise a meal ticket when it looked at them”, and set up a software label to sell what the boys wrote. They called it Alligata. For five years it published Crowther’s Blagger and Loco, Evans’s Who Dares Wins II, sports games, chess and Spanish imports, and it twice found itself on the wrong side of Elite’s lawyers.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1983, in Sheffield, by Mike and Tim Mahoney of the shop Superior Systems; John Mahoney joined later.
- Address: 1 Orange Street, Sheffield S1 4DW, on adverts from 1984.
- Programmers: Tony Crowther (Blagger, Son of Blagger, Loco, Trap), Steve Evans (Who Dares Wins II), Ross Goodley; music by Ben Daglish.
- Labels: Alligata; Rhino (spelt Rino on its games) for titles not planned for conversion; Budgie, for budget games, from 1986.
- Best CRASH score: Livingstone, I Presume (1987), 77%, in the magazine’s 1988 index.
- Ended: taken over by Superior Software in 1988.
Two schoolboys and a shop
Superior Systems was an established Sheffield shop, listed as a dealer in the national computer press from 1981 and advertising itself from 1982, and it hosted a local BBC Micro user group. Crowther remembered it differently from the magazine’s tidy version. He had a Saturday job there selling computers, he wrote later, and the owner offered him a Commodore 64 if he wrote some games the shop could sell. “I wrote the games and he released them under the Alligata Software label.”
The first Alligata games were for Acorn’s machines. In November 1983 Computer & Video Games carried an Alligata advertisement for Balloon Rescue, Damsel in Distress, Bat Attack and Aztec Tomb Adventure at £7.95 each, and a BBC Micro dealer was selling its Lunar Rescue, praised for its “great graphics”. In February 1984 Personal Computer Games reported new Alligata titles for the Electron and three for the BBC Model B: Dambusters, Eagle Empire and Contract Bridge.
Blagger and Loco
Crowther’s Commodore 64 games made the company’s name. Blagger was a platform game about a burglar, Roger the Dodger, collecting keys to open a safe on each screen. Loco put the player in charge of a steam engine, with a side view of the train and a radar map of a six-track railway; Commodore Computing International gave it five stars out of five for graphics in September 1984. Son of Blagger followed. By May 1985 the same magazine named Crowther among the few British programmers whose names the public knew: “True, we don’t have the cult of the programmer, though some names (Geoff Minter, Scott Adams, Tony Crowther, Matthew Smith) are quite well-known.”
By then he had left, for the new Gremlin Graphics and then his own company, Wizard. Alligata carried on with Blagger Goes to Hollywood (1985), in which the burglar tries to steal a film from a run of film sets. It cost £9.95 with a voucher for a free T-shirt and badge, and in Computer & Video Games Alligata offered a £1,000 holiday voucher to Hollywood as a competition prize.
Elite’s lawyers
Alligata’s best-received game was one whose first version was withdrawn. Steve Evans’s Who Dares Wins was a commando game, and late in 1985 Elite Systems had just bought the official rights to Capcom’s Commando. ZZAP!64 reported in January 1986 that after “Alligata’s legal run in with Elite”, “Alligata’s original game was withdrawn and sufficiently redesigned so as not to infringe Elite’s copyright and we therefore got a sequel without a prequel”. Elite’s Steve Wilcox gave Retro Gamer his side in 2005. The game was already on sale, he said, and when Elite told Alligata it held the Commando rights, “the people there basically told us to get lost”. Elite went to the High Court for an Anton Piller order, and over one weekend the local sheriff and his men sealed off Alligata’s Sheffield offices, impounding its stock of the game. Alligata then changed the game so that the order no longer applied. Who Dares Wins II, as Wilcox recalled it, “didn’t differ a whole lot from Who Dares Wins except that the commando in the game had a blue beret as opposed to a green one”; it bought Elite a few weeks.
Who Dares Wins II did well. ZZAP!64 gave it 90% in December 1985 and readers put it seventh in their chart. Amstrad Action reviewed the Amstrad version at £8.95 in March 1986, as a game of eight enemy outposts, and CRASH gave the Spectrum version 73%.
Elite and Alligata met again in 1986. Commodore User reported in June that Alligata had released Bombo, an arcade game it set beside Elite’s Bomb Jack, and that “Elite are currently seeking legal advice”. The column reminded readers that “Elite stopped Alligata putting out the original Who Dares Wins”. Bombo came out on Rino, the Alligata label for games that would not be converted to other machines; ZZAP!64 had pictured it as “Rino’s latest game”. By September Commodore Computing International was asking whether “Elite is now bosom pals with Alligata after they threatened legal action over Alligata’s alleged ‘Bombo’ rip-off of Elite’s ‘Bombjack’”.
The return of Tony Crowther
In April 1986 Your Computer visited Alligata in “partly-derelict offices behind a shopping arcade”, where the heating had “never worked properly since the firm downstairs moved out”. Crowther had come back: in May Amtix reported that he had signed an exclusive contract as a full-time games writer. “I became bored with running a business,” he told Your Computer. “I want to get on with programming.” Ross Goodley was writing Meltdown for the Amstrad, another programmer was finishing the 96-screen adventure Ark Pandora, Ben Daglish was the “musician in residence”, and Dave Palmer handled publicity. Alligata had just started its budget label, Budgie.
Crowther’s Trap followed, “a success for Crowther on the C64”, Computer Gamer said in January 1987, as it announced the Amstrad and Spectrum versions at £8.95. A game called Moebius, set on a looped strip whose two sides both showed on screen, was planned too, but Crowther took it to Ariolasoft.
Sports, chess and Spain
Alligata’s Spectrum list leaned towards sport and pub games. Jack Charlton’s Match Fishing (1985) let up to eight players fish a lake drawn by the artist David Thorpe, and CRASH gave it 74% “from a fisherperson’s viewpoint”. Looking back in January 1988, the magazine called it the oddest of the era’s celebrity games: “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 with fishing either.” Alligata also published Show Jumping (70% in CRASH), Knockout (52%), Pub Games and Cyrus II Chess, which Computer Gamer priced at £11.95 with nine levels.
From 1987 the Mahoneys looked abroad. “Mike Mahoney’s Alligata is snapping up games” from European developers, Computer Gamer reported in June 1987. The first was Livingstone, I Presume, by the Spanish studio Opera Soft, in which Stanley searches 63 screens of jungle for the missing doctor. CRASH gave it 77%, the best score of any Alligata game in the magazine’s January 1988 index of its reviews. Addictaball, a scrolling bat-and-ball game, reached the Atari ST at the end of 1987.
Alligata also found buyers on an unexpected machine. In 1987 it converted Guardian, its Defender-style shoot-’em-up, and Blagger for the Amstrad PCW, a word processor with a green screen. 8000 Plus reviewed the pair at £14.95 on one disc, describing Blagger as “a platform game in which you take on the role of Rodger the Dodger” and Guardian as “a fast action shoot ’em up”.
Superior
In November 1988 Amstrad Action reported that Alligata, “software with bite”, had been taken over. The new owner was Superior Software of Leeds, the leading publisher for the BBC Micro. Its first release was the boxing game By Fair Means or Foul, which appeared on “the new Superior Software/Alligata label”, and in 1989 the same label brought Superior’s Repton games to the Spectrum as Repton Mania. By January 1990 The One described Alligata as “sadly no longer in existence”, remembering it for “two talents – Tony Crowther and Steve Evans” and for “its attempt at a budget label… Budgie”.
Sources
- Your Computer, April 1986, pp. 24–25, Lee Paddon, “Alligata puts the bite on”: Superior Systems and the Mahoneys, Crowther and Evans in August 1983, John Mahoney, the offices, Blagger Goes to Hollywood, Evans and Who Dares Wins, Crowther’s return and his quotes, Goodley and Meltdown, Ark Pandora, Daglish, Dave Palmer, the Rhino and Budgie labels.
- Antony Crowther, recollection in The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2016), p. 172: the Saturday job at Superior Systems and the Alligata label.
- Computer & Video Games issue 2, December 1981, p. 98, and issue 7, May 1982, p. 38: Superior Systems, 178 West Street, Sheffield. Acorn User issue 4, November 1982, p. 50: the BBC user group at Superior Systems.
- Computer & Video Games issue 25, November 1983, p. 84: Alligata advertisement. The Micro User, November 1983, p. 50: Lunar Rescue (Alligata). Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984, p. 5: new Electron and BBC titles.
- Commodore Computing International, September 1984, p. 74: Loco review (Tony Crowther, Alligata, 1 Orange Street; graphics five stars). May 1985, p. 38: “the cult of the programmer”. September 1986, p. 30: Elite, Alligata and Bombo.
- ZZAP!64 issue 1, May 1985, p. 27: Blagger Goes to Hollywood, £9.95, T-shirt and badge. Issue 8, December 1985, p. 128: Who Dares Wins II review. Issue 9, January 1986, p. 103: the original withdrawn and redesigned. Issue 10, February 1986, p. 108: readers’ chart, Who Dares Wins II at 90%. Issue 14, June 1986, p. 70: Bombo, “Rino’s latest game”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 44, June 1985, p. 10: the Blagger Goes to Hollywood competition.
- Retro Gamer issue 13, 2005, p. 79, “He who dares…”: Steve Wilcox on Who Dares Wins, the Anton Piller order, the sealed offices and the changed game.
- Amstrad Action issue 6, March 1986, p. 56: Who Dares Wins II review. Issue 38, November 1988, p. 10: the takeover.
- Commodore User, June 1986, p. 98, “Hotshots”: Bombo and Elite’s legal advice; Elite stopping the original Who Dares Wins.
- Amtix issue 7, May 1986, p. 98: “Tony returns to Alligata”.
- Computer Gamer issue 22, January 1987, p. 4: Trap conversions, Moebius, Cyrus II Chess. Issue 27, June 1987, p. 5: Mike Mahoney’s Alligata and European games.
- CRASH issue 18, July 1985, p. 50: Jack Charlton’s Match Fishing review (74%). Issue 41, June 1987, p. 110: Livingstone, I Presume review. Issue 48, January 1988, pp. 40 and 98–102: celebrity endorsements and the review index (Alligata scores).
- 8000 Plus issue 6, March 1987, p. 6, and issue 8, May 1987, p. 47: Guardian and Blagger for the PCW.
- Atari ST User, December 1987, p. 54: Addictaball.
- Commodore Disk User, January 1989, p. 4: the Superior Software/Alligata label. ACE issue 16, January 1989, p. 162: Superior Software and Alligata competition. Sinclair User issue 85, April 1989, p. 99: Repton Mania advertisement.
- The One issue 16, January 1990, p. 128: Alligata “sadly no longer in existence”, Crowther, Evans and Budgie.