Ariolasoft

If you bought Marble Madness, Archon, Racing Destruction Set, Arcticfox or Lode Runner in Britain in 1986, the name on the box was Ariolasoft. None of those games is Ariolasoft’s. They are Electronic Arts’ and Broderbund’s, and Ariolasoft was the company that held the British rights to sell them.

Fast facts

• Press evidence in this library: reviewed in CRASH and ZZAP!64 through 1985–1987, at £9.95 cassette / £14.95 disk — a consistent, distinctly American two-tier price.
• Published in the UK: Marble Madness, Archon (83% in CRASH, £10.95), Racing Destruction Set, Arcticfox, Touchdown Football, Lode Runner, Camelot Warriors, Deathscape, Triaxos.
• Parent: Ariola, the record company — Ariolasoft was its software arm, and mail orders went to Ariolasoft UK Ltd, PO Box 461, London NW1.

Two industries meeting

Two things about that list are worth separating out.

⚠ That two-tier reading is too simple. Ariolasoft’s own advertisement in CRASH 18, July 1985, prices Realm of Impossibility as a matrix by platform, not a pair:

“Commodore or Atari Cassette £9.95, Disk £12.95 · Spectrum or Amstrad Cassette £8.95. All prices include VAT & p&p.”

So the disk tier was £12.95 on that title rather than £14.95, and there was a separate, lower cassette price for the Spectrum and Amstrad — the machines whose owners would not pay Commodore money. The same advertisement gives the trading address as Ariolasoft U.K. Ltd., Suite 105/106, Asphalte House, Palace Street, London SW1E 5HS.

The first thing to draw out is the cassette-and-disk pricing. £9.95 for tape and £14.95 for disk is an American publisher’s price structure landing in a market where the Commodore 64 was overwhelmingly a cassette machine and £9.95 was already at the top end. American software cost more here, and part of the reason is that another company had to make a living in between.

The second is who owned it. A record label deciding that software was adjacent to its business is a judgement of its moment, and not a stupid one: both are content stamped onto cheap physical media, sold through the same shops, to overlapping customers, with distribution as the hard part. Record companies already had the warehouses, the sales force and the relationships with retail. Software did not.

The other direction

Camelot Warriors is the quiet surprise in the catalogue. It is Spanish — a Dinamic game, from Madrid — reviewed in CRASH in December 1986 under the Ariolasoft name.

The same machinery that carried American software into Britain carried European software too, and it worked because the barrier was never technical. A C64 in Madrid ran the same code as a C64 in Manchester. What stopped a Spanish game reaching British shops was paperwork, boxes, lorries and a sales rep, and a licensee solved all four.

The scores, and what they show

Game	Score	Issue	Origin
The Deactivators	85%	34	UK
Sky Fox	84%	27	US (Electronic Arts)
Archon	83%	18	US (Electronic Arts)
Parvadrome	77%	24	UK
Tujad	69%	32	UK
Deathscape	57%	42	UK
The Terrors of Trantoss	8/10	29	UK (Adventure Trail)

⚠ The last is scored out of ten on CRASH’s separate adventure scale and is not 80%.

The American imports cluster in the eighties and the British originals spread wider — the same pattern visible at US Gold, and for the same reason. A distributor handling finished, tested product from Electronic Arts is buying a known quantity; a distributor commissioning its own is taking the risk itself.

Ariolasoft was still operating at scale into the sixteen-bit years: Amiga Computing records Mandarin Software completing a distribution deal with “giant German distribution house Ariolasoft” in 1989, covering Lombard RAC Rally, Time and Magik and Pioneer Plague. The record-company parentage produced a distribution business that outlived most of the publishers it carried.

Why it mattered

Ariolasoft ran on the territory licence — the arrangement that made the eighties software market international while leaving no trace on the games themselves. It explains a puzzle anyone browsing old British magazines runs into: why celebrated American games carry a publisher’s name that means nothing to American readers, and vice versa.

It also marks a moment when it was not obvious that software would become its own industry instead of a branch of the record business. That question stayed open for several years, and one of the possible answers had a record company’s name on it.

Ariolasoft was not alone in asking it. Virgin, Thorn EMI and K-Tel all opened software labels between 1983 and 1985, and by 1989 only Virgin remained — see When the Record Companies Sold Software.

See also

• When the Record Companies Sold Software — the wider move Ariolasoft was part of
• Electronic Arts
• Mindscape
• US Gold
• Commodore 64
• ZZAP!64