The Hobbit and The Way of the Exploding Fist were sold in Britain under the Melbourne House label, but they were written in Melbourne, Australia, by a studio called Beam Software. Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen, who had started Melbourne House as a book publisher in 1977, set Beam up in 1980. By 1987 CRASH reckoned its 25 programmers made it “the biggest programming team outside Japan and the US”. When Melbourne House was sold that year, Beam carried on, first as a maker of Nintendo games for American and Japanese publishers and later under its old publishing name. As Milgrom put it to Edge in 1997, “You’d have to go to Japan to find a game developer who started before we did and are still going strong.”
Fast facts
- Founded: 1980, in Melbourne, by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen.
- Run by: Milgrom as chairman; Adam Lancman was managing director by 1997.
- Publishing partner: Melbourne House, the couple’s publishing company, until its sale to Mastertronic in February 1987.
- Known for: The Hobbit (1982), The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), Shadowrun (Super NES, 1993), Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy (1997).
- Later names: Infogrames Melbourne House (1999), Atari Melbourne House (2003) and Krome Studios Melbourne (2006), closed in 2010.
Two companies with the same owners
Beam and Melbourne House are often treated as one company under two names. They were two companies with the same owners. ACE set out the arrangement in 1990: the London company was a publishing base for “Australia-based Fred and Naomi Milgrom”, and its “product was sourced mainly from the Milgroms’ Beam Software”. Milgrom described it the same way to Edge: “Beam Software was running the development from Australia and Melbourne House was our UK-based publishing arm.”
So Beam wrote the games in Melbourne and Melbourne House sold them in Britain. The Melbourne House entry tells the publishing side of the story, from the ZX80 books of 1980 to the sale.
The 8-bit years
The Hobbit made the studio’s name. Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler wrote it, and Stuart Richie designed its parser, Inglish, which accepted whole sentences rather than two-word commands. Its characters wandered about and acted on their own. CRASH called it “the biggest selling adventure for the Spectrum of all time”, and Sherlock (1984), The Lord of the Rings (1986) and Shadows of Mordor (1987) followed, built on the adventure system Mitchell developed.
The other half of the catalogue was arcade games. The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), credited to Greg Barnett, Greg Holland, Stephan Taylor, Damian Watharow and William Teng, was a one-on-one karate game. CRASH later said it “founded the entire beat ’em up genre”, and Milgrom told Edge it sold 500,000 copies across Europe.
By April 1987, when CRASH interviewed the Beam programmer Steve Taylor, the studio had 25 programmers. They worked in groups of four or five, each group taking a game from start to finish. A second division, Arcade Machine, made shoot-’em-ups.
The sale of Melbourne House
In February 1987 Mastertronic bought Melbourne House. Beam was not part of the deal. Milgrom explained the reasoning to Edge ten years later. Many of the British staff had moved on, the industry was moving from 8-bit to 16-bit machines, and “we didn’t have the management depth at that time to run both the publishing and development sides of things, so we ended up selling off the Melbourne House publishing side”. What followed, in his account, was a wasted year: Mastertronic wanted Melbourne House to move straight to 16-bit, and “we spent a whole year developing products that went nowhere. They never got published.”
In Australia, The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review reported in April 1988 that Melbourne House no longer existed there and its games were distributed by SLM Publishing, “the old Melbourne House mob”. “Anyhow,” it added, “Beam Software is still a strong firm and is still churning out the classics.”
Inside the adventure team, 1988
That April 1988 issue carried an interview with the team that had just finished Shadows of Mordor: John Harwood (project leader), Paul Kidd (storyline developer) and Norton Truter (programmer). Harwood said he had inherited the game “when Phillip Mitchell left, who mainly developed the adventure system”, about halfway through. The games were not written on the machines they ran on: development was “done on a 16 bit mini-computer and then we cross-assemble as appropriate to the different machines”. The team had finished Shadows of Mordor and moved on before they had even seen a Commodore.
They were frank about their failures. The first Lord of the Rings game had drawn complaints that it strayed from Tolkien, so they cut its non-Tolkien material “ruthlessly”, and then heard that the result was “too slavish”. Harwood said: “I had the habit of collecting all the hate mail that we get and so collected together the complaints that we could do something about.”
Asked whether you needed to be good at adventure games to write one, Kidd said:
I loathe adventure games. I hate wrestling with parsers, they bore me to tears. I don’t see why anyone would voluntarily sit there and constantly try and tell the machine what they know it is going to accept but they can’t find the words for it.
The magazine noted a year later that the interview “gained them criticism in UK magazines”, because quotes like that “didn’t sound too good from producers of top selling adventure games”. The same interview shows where the studio was heading. The company had aimed mainly at the British market, Harwood said, but had “recently changed over to the American market”, where “they have different grammar and they will say things very differently”.
The Nintendo years
By 1990, ACE reported, Beam was “a Nintendo-approved developer” working “virtually exclusively on Nintendo games for the Japanese and American market”. It wrote games for other publishers, many of them licences: Mean Machines credited it in 1992 with The Hunt for Red October, and by 1997 Edge counted 28 NES games, 14 for the Super NES (including a “superlative” conversion of Smash TV) and 25 for the Game Boy, along with Mega Drive, PlayStation and Saturn work such as Gex for Crystal Dynamics and The Lost Vikings 2 for Interplay. Adam Lancman, the managing director, said: “We tended to get the jobs that no one else wanted to touch because we were known to have the technological smarts to achieve results in areas that no-one else wanted to attempt.”
Gregg Barnett, the designer of Exploding Fist, remembered it less fondly. “At Beam we were doing licensed games for the NES and SNES, and we got into a rut,” he told Edge in 2001. “Every Nintendo publisher was buying any licensable property that moved.”
Shadowrun
The best-remembered game of those years began as Barnett’s. When Data East took the licence for a Super NES game based on FASA’s Shadowrun role-playing game, Barnett sketched its plot and a complex team combat system, then left Beam. Paul Kidd, by then head of design, picked it up about seven months before the deadline, pieced Barnett’s notes together, and got an engine running by borrowing code from other games Beam was working on. The game came out in 1993. Edge called it “critically acclaimed but commercially underachieving”, and Kidd’s own summary was: “This is the game that did so well in reviews that it got me fired.”
Melbourne House again
In 1997 Beam took back its old publishing name. “Virgin simply let the Melbourne House name lapse,” Lancman told Edge. “So we took it back. It’s ours again.” The real-time strategy game Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy, released that March, was the first Beam game under the Melbourne House label for almost ten years. Milgrom thought the old games had little left to offer beyond their names: “It’s more nostalgia than anything.”
Infogrames, Atari and Krome
Infogrames bought Beam in 1999 and renamed it Infogrames Melbourne House. Under that name it developed Le Mans 24 Hours for the Dreamcast, reviewed by Edge in December 2000, and Lancman led the Australian developers’ association. The studio became Atari Melbourne House in 2003, when Infogrames took the Atari name. In November 2006 Krome Studios bought it from Atari and renamed it Krome Studios Melbourne, and Krome closed it on 15 October 2010. Milgrom had told Edge in 1997 that “nearly all of the game-making talent in Australia has, at some point, worked at Beam”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984, pp. 56–58: Melbourne House feature (founded in 1977 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen; The Hobbit as “the biggest selling adventure for the Spectrum of all time”; the Sherlock team, with Stuart Richie as “the designer of Inglish”).
- CRASH issue 21, October 1985, p. 12: The Way of the Exploding Fist review and credits.
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 100: Fist II review (“founded the entire beat ’em up genre”).
- CRASH issue 39, April 1987, p. 88: Steve Taylor interview (25 programmers; “the biggest programming team outside Japan and the US”; Arcade Machine). The same issue: news of the Mastertronic purchase.
- ACE issue 5, February 1988: review of 1987 (Mastertronic buys Melbourne House in February).
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review vol. 5 no. 4, April 1988: interview with John Harwood, Paul Kidd and Norton Truter; SLM Publishing. Vol. 6 no. 9, September 1989: the interview’s reception in Britain.
- ACE issue 29, February 1990: “where are they now” survey (the Milgroms’ Beam Software; Beam as a Nintendo developer).
- Mean Machines issue 23, August 1992: Beam Software and The Hunt for Red October.
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Beam Software profile (Milgrom on the company, the sale and the wasted year; Fist sales; the console work; Adam Lancman on the jobs no one else wanted and on reclaiming the Melbourne House name; Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy).
- Edge issue 91, December 2000: review of Le Mans 24 Hours (Infogrames Melbourne House).
- New Zealand Station issue 10, March 2000: Adam Lancman of Infogrames Melbourne House heading the Australian developers’ association.
- Edge issue 102, October 2001: “The making of… Shadowrun” (Gregg Barnett and Paul Kidd).
- Wikipedia, “Beam Software” (web, secondary): founding by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen in 1980; Infogrames purchase in 1999, Atari Melbourne House in 2003, Krome Studios in November 2006, closure on 15 October 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_Software