CentreSoft
The Halesowen distributor that grew a publisher
Geoff and Anne Brown started distributing games from a Halesowen office with milk crates for chairs in 1983. CentreSoft became Britain's largest games distributor, and its credit line is what made U.S. Gold possible a year later.
CentreSoft was the games distributor Geoff and Anne Brown built in Halesowen, in the West Midlands, from 1983. It matters here for something other than its own trade: the publisher it financed. U.S. Gold exists because CentreSoft could raise a Letter of Credit and a start-up publisher could not.
Fast facts
- Founded: early 1983, Halesowen, West Midlands, by Geoff and Anne Brown.
- Business: wholesale distribution of computer games and hardware to British retail.
- Financed: U.S. Gold’s first three licences in 1984.
- First employee: Jenny Richards, later head of sales.
- Became: CentreGold plc in 1993, merged with U.S. Gold ahead of a flotation.
- Named in the British press continuously from 1983 to the mid-1990s.
Milk crates in Halesowen
The accountant Martyn Savage — who would join the company two years later — remembers the first meeting in early 1983:
I went over to a very small office where all they had was a table to gather round and milk crates to sit on. We went through certain figures and put through a business plan to raise some money.
The plan projected a cash flow from 1 April to 31 December 1983 and an opening balance of £20,000 in share capital, “assuming they would be ready to incorporate a new company at that point, which as it turned out they were not”. CentreSoft traded as a name before it was a limited company, which is why its founding resists a single date.
Anne Brown was still working at a bank through the early months, so the operation ran on one pair of hands: “Delivery notes, invoices etc. — I just entered the details in a little blue book.”
Distribution first, publishing second
The idea was borrowed rather than invented. Geoff Brown had been selling Atari 800s, watched a rival move from selling machines to distributing them, and followed: “I sort of stole the idea of distributing from Mike really.”
Sourcing product is half of distribution; the other half is a retailer. Currys — Britain’s largest electrical chain until Dixons took it over in 1984 — was the account that made the volumes work.
By the time U.S. Gold was founded in March 1984, CentreSoft was established enough to underwrite it. The licensors wanted their guarantees locked in through Letters of Credit, a bank issues those only against funds on deposit, and the funds were CentreSoft’s.
And a third company, quietly
The group was wider than U.S. Gold. The Story of US Gold has Geoff Brown also part-owning Gremlin Graphics in Sheffield, after Ian Stewart needed money — so the same man owned the biggest British publisher of arcade conversions and a Yorkshire developer that competed with it.
The two subsidiaries did not behave like siblings. Tim Chaney, running U.S. Gold: “if I could have put Gremlin out of business I would have done.”
And CentreSoft’s own head of sales, Jenny Richards — its first employee — was involved with, and later married, Gremlin’s Ian Stewart. Chaney describes her as “the most powerful person under Anne”, which places Anne Brown at the top of the distribution business rather than beside it.
Why the two are one story
Most accounts treat U.S. Gold as a publisher that happened to have a sister distributor. The sequence says otherwise: the distributor came first, paid for the publisher, and the two ended as divisions of the same listed company when the group was renamed CentreGold plc in 1993 ahead of its flotation.
A British software house of the eighties usually died when its distribution failed. This one started at the other end.