Cascade Games
Fifty games and a free watch
The Leeds company behind Cassette 50 — fifty games on one tape for £9.95, on a dozen incompatible machines, with a calculator watch thrown in. The most famous bad deal in British home computing.
Cascade published ordinary games for a decade — Sky Runner, Barbary Coast, Boot Camp, reviewed in ZZAP!64 between 1987 and 1988. But it is remembered for one product, advertised in the back of nearly every British computer magazine of the early eighties: Cassette 50.
Fast facts
- The offer: “50 COMPUTER GAMES ON ONE CASSETTE”, £9.95, including a free 20-key multifunction calculator watch and postage.
- Available on: BBC, Atari, Dragon, Electron, VIC-20, Oric-1, ZX81, Apple, Atmos, Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad — twelve incompatible platforms.
- Sold by: mail order, “EXPRESS DELIVERY — ORDER NOW!”
- Also published: Sky Runner, Barbary Coast, Boot Camp.
What fifty games meant
The games on Cassette 50 are tiny — a few kilobytes each, some little more than a type-in listing with a title screen. Titles from the advert include Overtake, Motorway, Smash the Window, Space Ship, Jet Fight and Invader. Divide £9.95 by fifty and each cost twenty pence, which is roughly what they were worth.
Its reputation is deservedly poor, and the interesting question is why the offer worked anyway. Three answers, all of them about 1983, not about Cascade:
There was no way to find out first. No demos, no screenshots you could trust, and reviews only for games the magazines chose to cover. A buyer looking at a full-page advert had the advert.
Fifty of anything is a persuasive number to a fourteen-year-old with birthday money. Set against one £7.95 game that might also be bad, the arithmetic is hard to argue with until the tape arrives.
And the watch is not a joke — it is the tell. When a product competes on quantity and a free gift, the seller has concluded that nobody can judge the goods.
Twelve machines at once
The platform list deserves its own attention. In 1983, supporting the ZX81, the Dragon 32, the Oric-1, the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64 from one advert meant twelve genuinely separate pieces of work — different processors, different displays, different BASICs, no shared code at all.
That is only economic if the games are slight, which they were, and it is a decent illustration of why the market consolidated so hard onto the Spectrum and C64 over the following two years. Nobody could afford to write good games twelve times.
Why it mattered
Cascade belongs to the mail-order years, before shops stocked software and before the press was large enough to check what was being sold. It is the counterweight to the classics: the same magazines that carried Knight Lore reviews carried this advert, page after page, for years.
It also has a strange afterlife. Cassette 50 is one of the best-preserved artefacts of the era precisely because it sold in enormous numbers and disappointed everyone, which turns out to be an excellent way to be remembered.
Disk 15, and what the model was worth
Cassette 50 is the release Cascade is remembered for — fifty games on one tape — and the best evidence for what that was like is the moment the company tried it again on newer hardware.
ACE, April 1989, reviewing Disk 15 for the Atari ST at £19.95:
In a spirit of generosity, Cascade have decided to follow in the tracks of their popular eight-bit release, Cassette 50, by producing Disk 15 for the ST (effectively, 15 £1.33 games). But although boasting “15 amazing games on one disk”, the package actually contains 15 badly-programmed and generally awful compiled BASIC routines. The delights on offer include Hangman, Mastermind, Othello, Draughts, Solitaire and 3D Noughts and Crosses… A more despondent and dismal bunch of games you could not wish to meet. To be avoided at all costs, except for reasons of nostalgia or to have a good laugh.
ACE scored it 163 — on a scale where 1000 is the maximum and most competent budget releases sat in the 500s and 600s. It is among the lowest ratings the magazine issued.
The detail that matters is compiled BASIC. These were not small assembly programs; they were type-in-magazine listings run through a compiler and sold in a box. The per-game arithmetic in the review — fifteen games at £1.33 each — is the pitch made explicit, and the review’s answer is that the unit price is irrelevant when the unit is worthless.
⚠ Worth stating for balance: this is Disk 15 in 1989, not Cassette 50 in 1983. The earlier release sold in large numbers into a market with almost nothing else at the price, and it introduced many people to owning software at all. Disk 15 is what the same formula looked like once buyers had standards to compare it against.
The other Cascade
Cascade files neatly as a shovelware label, and it published at least one title that matters. Amiga User International, March 1989, describes the Artronics venture as “built on the foundations of the Cascade Games label — publishers of Cassette 50 and ACE”.
ACE — the flight simulator, no relation to the magazine of the same name — was a substantial and well-regarded release. A company can run both ends of the quality range at once, and Cascade did.