Cinemaware | Code Like It's 198x

Cinemaware’s first game opened like a film. Defender of the Crown (1986) began with credits over a harpsichord tune, then dropped the player into a medieval England of jousting tournaments, castle sieges and a rescued Saxon lady, every scene painted by hand on the Commodore Amiga. Underneath was a simple version of the board game Risk. Bob Jacob, who founded the company with his wife Phyllis, built a business on that combination: borrow a Hollywood genre, give it the best art money could buy, and keep the game easy enough for someone who had never read a manual. His company printed “interactive movie” on its boxes years before the phrase came to mean full-motion video.

Fast facts

Founded: January 1986, in California, by Bob and Phyllis Jacob, first as Master Designer Software with Cinemaware as its label; based at Westlake Village, near Thousand Oaks.
Distribution: Mindscape in the United States at first, Electronic Arts Distribution by 1991; Mirrorsoft in Britain.
Games: Defender of the Crown and S.D.I. (1986); The King of Chicago, Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon and The Three Stooges (1987); Rocket Ranger and TV Sports: Football (1988); Lords of the Rising Sun and It Came from the Desert (1989); Wings (1990).
People: John Cutter (first employee, producer, designer of Wings); Kellyn Beeck (designer, Defender of the Crown and Rocket Ranger); Jim Sachs (art director, Defender of the Crown); R.J. Mical (programmer); David Riordan (It Came from the Desert).
Closed: 1991.

An agent’s idea

Before Cinemaware, Jacob had been a software agent, placing other people’s games with publishers. Jimmy Maher’s history of the Amiga, The Future Was Here, tells how he was given one of the pre-release Amigas and decided “this is going to revolutionize everything”. He wanted games with a “mass market sensibility”: “no typing, get you right into the game, no manual”. Films gave him the theme. “People like movies, right?” he said later. “I was smart enough and cynical enough to realize that all we had to do was reach the level of copycat, and we’d be considered a breakthrough.”

Jacob formed the company in January 1986, signed a distribution deal with Mindscape and commissioned four games from outside developers. Computer Gaming World came away from the summer Consumer Electronics Show that year calling the Cinemaware line “the most exciting products we saw”, and its first advertisements announced “ADULT entertainment, a revolutionary new genre”. “Popcorn not included.”

John Cutter, who had lost his job when Activision bought the Santa Barbara company Gamestar, joined as the first employee. He remembered Jacob as “kind of a stereotype of a Hollywood agent”, and an office park near Thousand Oaks where Jacob turned out the lights and loaded Defender of the Crown: “When that amazing title screen appeared my mouth popped open.” The company, Cutter said, “was run by Bob and his wife Phyllis”. Ahoy! credited the pair in 1988 as “the executive producers of CinemaWare games”.

Defender of the Crown

The first game was nearly not finished. Cutter recalled that with about three months to go “we scrapped all our code and hired legendary programmer RJ Mical to rewrite the game”, and that he changed it from real time to turns to get it out on time. Jim Sachs ran the art, drawn in Deluxe Paint; Maher records that Sachs said he had worked “seven months at twenty hours a day average”. The rush showed in a bug that doubled the player’s army if the home castle was left undefended, and neither Sachs nor Mical worked for the company again.

It sold anyway. Maher puts its sales at 20,000 copies in the first six weeks, when about 150,000 Amigas were in use, and the game became one of the programs people bought to show what the machine could do. Jacob’s plan, the artist Jeff Hilbers explained, was to make a name on the Amiga, where sales “could never get much bigger than 30 or 40 thousand”, and then sell cut-down versions to the much larger Commodore 64 market. Defender of the Crown went on to the Atari ST, the PC, the C64 and the NES. In April 1989 ACE reported that Mirrorsoft and Cinemaware had made a version for PCs with a CD-ROM drive, with a narrator and a recorded soundtrack, calling it the first CD-ROM game for the PC.

A studio of genres

The games that followed each took a different film genre. S.D.I. was a space shooter about Ronald Reagan’s missile shield; The King of Chicago, written by Doug Sharp, was a 1930s gangster story; Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon took on the Arabian Nights. The Three Stooges, the company’s only licensed game, used sound lifted from the films on VHS. Rocket Ranger, designed by Kellyn Beeck and drawn from 1940s film serials such as King of the Rocket Men, sent a rocket-pack hero after Nazis with a base on the Moon, and made its code wheel part of fuelling the pack. It Came from the Desert, David Riordan’s tribute to 1950s giant-insect films such as Them!, ran in real time: if the player did nothing, the ants overran the town of Lizard Breath. Riordan told Retro Gamer that he had brought the idea of “big bugs” to his first meeting with Jacob, and it filled three floppy disks.

The reviews were not all kind. Ahoy! praised The King of Chicago’s score by Eric Rosser, fit for “any Cagney or Edward G. Robinson film”, but found that it suffered from “talking heads”: “Often, the only thing on the screen is a head-and-shoulders drawing of one or more characters… the overall effect is unexciting.” Maher thought the games after Defender were harder and more frustrating, with no way to save progress.

The company also knew who it was selling to. Jacob told ACE in December 1988 that “the average person who buys one of our products in the US is probably about 32 years old”, and the magazine described American players as older buyers who did not “mind spending a few hours wading through a manual”. In 1988 TV Sports: Football took the same approach to sport, with a pre-match studio show, half-time analysis and cut-away shots of the crowd; its sideline reporter, the programmer Larry Irvin recalled, was modelled on Jacob. Basketball, baseball, boxing and hockey versions followed.

Rehearsing for CD

Jacob saw the Amiga games as preparation. In June 1989 ACE wrote that Cinemaware “was set up in the first place as a rehearsal for new interactive technologies”, and quoted Jacob: the company was “using computers as a training ground” for whichever interactive video format won, the Philips and Sony CD-i or Intel’s DVI. A separate Cinemaware Interactive Group, headed by David Riordan, worked on the new formats, and the company was hiring scriptwriters and building tools to capture filmed movement for its artists. Hilbers later described a CD-ROM version of It Came from the Desert for which the team built a model town and planned to film actors in front of it: “it all proved too expensive and in the end Bob basically just ran out of money.” A smaller version came out on NEC’s TurboGrafx-CD.

Wings and the end

Wings (1990) was the last of the interactive movies. Cutter designed it after Jacob told him “you need to design the game”, although he knew nothing about First World War flying until he spent an afternoon in the Thousand Oaks library. The player flew some 250 missions as a young British pilot from 1916, between diary entries modelled, Maher notes, on the real diary of the ace Mick Mannock.

By then the company was in trouble. Computer Gaming World reported in April 1991 that Cinemaware had laid off 43 employees, leaving 14, and planned to license and develop its games instead of publishing them, while it finished TV Sports: Hockey and It Came from the Desert for NEC and TV Sports: Football for Commodore’s CDTV. Maher blamed “an ill-advised business relationship with a Japanese partner” and a failure to take advantage of the PC’s growing lead in America. Cutter gave Retro Gamer his reasons: no sequels to the hits, better games from rivals such as Wing Commander, and a late PC version of TV Sports: Football. In his account, Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts had agreed to buy Cinemaware, “but at the last minute the board voted the acquisition down”. The company closed in 1991. Its collapse cost others too: Level 9, which had converted It Came from the Desert, was owed about £100,000 and closed soon after.

Later history

The name came back in 2000, when a new Cinemaware company released remastered versions of Defender of the Crown and Wings for the Game Boy Advance and, in 2003, Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown for the PC, Xbox and PlayStation 2. It later put Defender of the Crown on iOS and raised money on Kickstarter for a high-definition Wings. Starbreeze bought the rights to the old games in 2016, and in February 2024 the publisher Nordcurrent bought the catalogue from Starbreeze, saying it was looking at remastering the games for PCs and consoles.

Sources

Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 8, pp. 210–221: Jacob’s background and aims, his quotes, the Defender of the Crown team, the rush and the army bug, Sachs’s hours, sales of 20,000 in six weeks against 150,000 Amigas, the later games, TV Sports, Wings and Mannock, the closure in 1991 and its causes.
Jimmy Maher, “Defender of the Crown”, The Digital Antiquarian, April 2015 (web, secondary): the founding in January 1986, the Mindscape contract and the first four games. https://www.filfre.net/2015/04/defender-of-the-crown/
Computer Gaming World issue 30, August 1986, p. 25: Summer CES report (Cinemaware, Master Designer Software and Mindscape).
Computer Gaming World issue 32, November 1986, p. 11: Cinemaware advertisement (“ADULT entertainment”; “Popcorn not included”).
Mike Bevan, “The History of Cinemaware”, in Retro Gamer’s The Amiga Book (Imagine Publishing), pp. 80–89: interviews with John Cutter, Jim Sachs, Jeff Hilbers, Larry Irvin, David Todd and David Riordan (Cutter’s arrival and Jacob as an agent; Bob and Phyllis Jacob; the rewrite by R.J. Mical; Amiga sales and the C64 strategy; the game designers and their sources; Wings; the CD-ROM It Came from the Desert; the reasons for the failure and the EA deal; the revival from 2000).
Retro Gamer issue 30, 2006: “The Making of It Came from the Desert”, with David Riordan (the “big bugs” pitch, Ken Melville and Randy Platt, the real-time design, three floppy disks, Antheads).
Ahoy!’s AmigaUser (Ahoy! issue 53), May 1988, p. 36: The King of Chicago review (Bob and Phyllis Jacob as executive producers; Eric Rosser’s score; “talking heads”).
ACE issue 15, December 1988, p. 33: the American market and Jacob’s “32 years old”.
ACE issue 19, April 1989, p. 9: the CD-ROM Defender of the Crown from Mirrorsoft and Cinemaware; p. 61: Cinemaware advertisement for the Atari ST, Rocket Ranger and The King of Chicago at £24.99, with Mirrorsoft’s London address.
ACE issue 21, June 1989, p. 27: Cinemaware as “a rehearsal for new interactive technologies”; Jacob’s “training ground”; scriptwriters, rotoscoping and David Riordan’s Cinemaware Interactive Group.
Computer Gaming World issue 81, April 1991, p. 43: industry news (layoffs, the move to licensing, the NEC and CDTV obligations, distribution through Electronic Arts).
AC’s Guide to the Commodore Amiga, Fall 1990 and Summer 1991: product listings giving Cinemaware Corporation’s address, 4165 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Westlake Village, California.
Retro Gamer issues 6 and 7, 2004, “The Next Level”: Level 9 and Cinemaware’s debt, as cited in the Level 9 entry.
Nordcurrent, “Nordcurrent expands its portfolio with acquisition of legendary Cinemaware catalog”, press release, 1 February 2024 (web): the purchase from Starbreeze, which had bought the rights in 2016. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/press-release/nordcurrent-expands-its-portfolio-with-acquisition-of-legendary-cinemaware-catalog