Daze
The route continental games took in
A small British distributor that carried French, German and Finnish Amiga games into UK shops in the mid-nineties — the last working version of the import route that ran through the whole era.
Daze published other people’s games in Britain, and the list of whose is the entry: Silmarils from France, Ascon from Germany, Bloodhouse from Finland, Impressions at home. It is a small company doing an unglamorous job at the point where doing it had become essential.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: Amiga Power, 1993–1994, from £9.99 to £35.
- Published in the UK: Ishar and Ishar 3 (Silmarils, France), The Patrician (Ascon, Germany), Stardust (Bloodhouse, Finland), Robinson’s Requiem (Silmarils), and Impressions strategy titles.
Where the good Amiga games were coming from
By 1993 something had changed about the Amiga, and Daze’s catalogue shows it plainly. The interesting new games were increasingly continental.
Stardust is Finnish, from Bloodhouse in Helsinki — a rotary shooter with rendered graphics that stood beside anything British. The Patrician is German, a Hanseatic trading simulation of a kind the British industry was not making at all. Ishar is French. Each came from a scene with its own preoccupations, and none of them needed a British developer to exist.
The reason is not mysterious. Britain’s games industry was following its market onto consoles and the PC. In Germany, Finland, France and Poland the Amiga stayed central for years longer, so that is where Amiga development continued — and Britain, which had led the platform, ended up importing its own machine’s software.
A job that keeps being reinvented
Daze is the fourth version of the same role in this Vault, and the sequence is worth reading together.
Ariolasoft carried American software into Britain at full price in 1986. Americana carried older American games in at budget. Alternative carried Spanish games in at £2.99. Daze carried French, German and Finnish games in at £25 to £35, alongside Kompart, which did the same for Blue Byte and Max Design.
The names change every few years; the function never does. Software crosses borders with no technical difficulty at all and no commercial ease whatsoever, and somebody local always has to do the boxes, the translation, the sales calls and the review copies.
Why it mattered
Daze is the import route in the 16-bit era, and the moment the traffic reversed. Between 1982 and 1988 Britain exported games and imported American back catalogue. By 1993 the flow of interesting Amiga software was running into Britain from the continent.
It also explains a gap in how the era is remembered here. Games that arrived through a small distributor got one review, no marketing and no follow-up — so a strong French or Finnish game could pass through the British market almost silently, and be remembered vividly in Helsinki or Lyon and not at all in London.