Alternative Software
Still going
A Yorkshire budget label that sold Spanish games at £2.99 in 1988 and is still publishing today — the longest unbroken run of any British publisher in this Vault.
Alternative sold budget games from Yorkshire at £1.99 and £2.99 in the late eighties, went on selling them through the Amiga years, and never stopped. It is trading now, publishing licensed and family titles on current consoles, which makes it the longest continuous run of any company in this Vault’s British section.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amiga Power, 1988–1994, at £1.99–£7.99.
- Published: Meganova: The Weapon, ’Allo ’Allo, and a long list of budget and licensed titles.
- Distinctive habit: licensing continental European games for the British budget market.
Spanish games at £2.99
ZZAP!64 reviewed Meganova: The Weapon at £2.99 and opened with a joke about the inlay: “it’s dodgy Spanish translation time again”. The game is Dinamic’s, from Madrid, and it scored 67% — an ordinary game, ordinarily reviewed, at a budget price.
The joke is more interesting than the review. A Spanish game reaching a British magazine in 1988 was normal enough to be teased, not remarked upon, and the only visible trace of its origin was a translated inlay that had not been checked by a native speaker.
This is the same route Ariolasoft used for Dinamic’s Camelot Warriors two years earlier, at full price. By 1988 it had moved down-market: continental catalogues were now cheap enough to be budget stock, which is what happens to any back catalogue once it has finished earning at home.
Why it survived
Nearly every publisher in this Vault died in one of two ways — bought during a boom, or bankrupted when the market they served disappeared. Alternative did neither, and the reason looks like deliberate modesty.
It never chased a generation change. It did not bet a company on the 16-bit transition, on CD, or on a mascot. It sold inexpensive games to buyers who wanted inexpensive games, a demand that has never once gone away, and it kept the operation small enough that a bad year was survivable.
That is an unglamorous strategy and it beat almost every glamorous one. Ocean, US Gold, Imagine, Psygnosis — all bigger, all better remembered, none of them still trading under their own name.
The floor
Three Alternative titles appear in CRASH’s issue 48 index, and one of them is a useful data point about how low the budget shelf could go.
| Game | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| Star Wreck | 73% | 44 |
| Henry’s Hoard | 65% | 27 |
| Howzat | 11% | 37 |
Eleven per cent. That is among the lowest ratings CRASH issued to anything, and it is worth recording next to the headline fact — that this is the longest unbroken run of any British publisher here.
The two facts are not in tension. A label that survives four decades does so by never betting the company on any one release, which means shipping a great deal that nobody defends. Longevity in this business has never correlated with quality, and Alternative is the clearest available proof.
Why it mattered
Alternative is continuity, and it complicates the standard story of the British industry as a boom that ended. Something did end: the bedroom-coder economics, the £1.99 impulse cassette, the magazines. But a small Yorkshire publisher that started in 1985 has been shipping games without a break ever since, and that fact sits oddly against every account of the era as a lost golden age.
It is also a useful corrective to survivorship bias, running the other way. The companies history remembers are mostly the ones that failed spectacularly.