Beau Jolly
Ten games, one cassette, £9.95
A London company that made no games at all. It bought the marketing rights to other publishers' catalogues, packaged them ten at a time, and spent a quarter of a million pounds on television advertising.
Beau Jolly published nothing of its own. Its business was the compilation: acquire the rights to a dozen games from a dozen different publishers, put them on one or two cassettes, and sell the lot for the price of a single new release.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: ZZAP!64 and CRASH, later eighties, at £9.95 for ten games — Megabits ran to ten games on two cassettes for around £19.
- Managing director: Colin Ashby, who told CRASH about the company’s rights deals directly.
- Notable acquisition: the bulk of Imagine’s back catalogue — struck weeks before that company’s liquidation, not after it — the sequence is set out below.
- Advertising: a quarter of a million pounds on television for the Megabits launch.
What was in one
10 Computer Hits 4 (£9.95 cassette) is the model. Its ten games came from eight separate publishers: Bride of Frankenstein from Ariolasoft, Alleykat from Hewson, Classic Snooker and Magic Madness from Anco, Starquake and Skaterock from Bubble Bus, Uchi Mata from Martech, Sacred Armour of Antiriad from Palace, Iridis Alpha from Llamasoft, and Dandy from Electric Dreams.
Look at what that required. Eight negotiations, for one product. Beau Jolly’s skill was not development or design; it was assembling rights, and the reason nobody else did it was that nobody else wanted to spend their time that way.
For the original publishers the deal was close to free money. A two-year-old game had finished earning; licensing it into a compilation cost nothing and returned something. For the buyer, ten games for £9.95 against £8.95 for one new one was an argument that barely needed making.
Compilations charted against new releases
The detail that makes the business make sense: these things sold like new games, because as far as the chart was concerned they were.
Acorn User’s software charts through 1986 carry Beau Jolly’s Computer Hits (10) at #2 in the Electron Top 10, and at #7 and later #15 in the BBC Top 20 across successive months — sitting among Elite, Repton 2, Way of the Exploding Fist and Strike Force Harrier at full price. Ten old games at £9.95 outsold most new ones at £9.95.
The company also outlasted nearly everyone whose games it packaged. Beau Jolly compilations were still shipping on the Amiga in 1993 — The Greatest, rated 91% by Amiga Format — and appearing in mail-order listings in 1995, a decade after it started and years after most of the publishers it had bought from were gone.
That is the clearest evidence for the argument below. A company that made nothing outlived the companies that made everything, because the asset was not the games — it was the right to sell them again.
The Imagine deal, dated properly
The deal is usually placed after Imagine’s collapse. It came before it, and the difference matters. Retro Gamer’s month-by-month history of 1984:
Imagine Software was still going strong in the public eye, although beneath the veneer of the Megagames, it was just weeks away from liquidation. It struck a deal to sell the bulk of its back catalogue to new label, Beau Jolly, with a view to releasing compilations of its games. Imagine would retain a small percentage from each individual game sold.
So this was not a receiver disposing of assets. It was a company weeks from going under selling its own history to raise cash, while still publicly promoting the Megagames — and keeping a royalty on the way out. Beau Jolly bought from a live company that knew what was coming.
It also sharpens the closing observation below. Imagine’s games kept selling under someone else’s name because Imagine arranged it, not because a liquidator found a buyer.
Two of the top three
The argument that compilations charted like new releases has a sharper piece of evidence than the Acorn User placings above. Retro Gamer’s reconstruction of the Amstrad chart for January 1987:
| # | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Five Star Games | Beau Jolly |
| 2 | Gauntlet | US Gold |
| 3 | Computer Hits 10 Volume 3 | Beau Jolly |
| 4 | Bombscare | Firebird |
| 5 | Booty | Firebird |
Two of the top three Amstrad titles in the country were Beau Jolly compilations, either side of Gauntlet — the biggest arcade licence of the period, from US Gold. A company that made nothing held the number one slot.
The longevity holds too: Retro Gamer’s 1991 Atari ST chart still lists Beau Jolly’s The Power Pack, seven years after the Imagine deal.
Why it mattered
Compilations are how an enormous number of people in Britain acquired their game libraries, and they are almost invisible in how the era gets remembered. A collection assembled from compilations looks nothing like the one implied by the review pages: it is broader, older, cheaper, and largely made of games that were already out of date.
Beau Jolly also shows a market growing up. A back catalogue only becomes an asset once there is a back catalogue — it took until about 1986 for the British industry to have enough history to resell, and by 1988 reselling it was a business with a television budget. The same recognition produced Kixx and the other budget re-release labels.
There is a last, quieter point. Beau Jolly ended up holding the marketing rights to Imagine’s games after Imagine failed. When a software house collapsed, its catalogue did not vanish; it was sold, and it kept selling. Some of the era’s most familiar games spent their later lives on cassettes carrying a name their creators never worked for.