Daze | Code Like It's 198x

In March 1994 Amiga Format asked where the money went when someone bought a £25.99 Amiga game. The man who answered was Richard Hennerley, managing director of Daze Marketing, and he showed his working. The government took £3.87 in VAT. Of the £22.12 left, the shop kept £7.74 and the wholesaler £4.43, and the publisher received £9.95. After £4.70 of other expenses the publisher kept £5.25 a copy, out of which it still had to pay for development, perhaps £40,000 for an average game. Even a small company such as Daze, he said, spent around £60,000 a year on salaries, rent and taxes, and a game that flopped might sell only two or three thousand copies.

Daze was one of those small companies. It made no games itself. It represented publishers from abroad in Britain, taking on the sales, the marketing and the press for them, and in the early nineties several of the Amiga’s most talked-about games reached British shops that way.

Fast facts

Founded: January 1992, in London, by Richard Hennerley.
Address: 2 Canfield Place, London NW6, from 1993; earlier advertisements give Dagmar House, Old Street, London EC1.
Represented: Silmarils (France), Ascon (Germany), Bloodhouse (Finland) and, from late 1994, Impressions.
Games: Storm Master, Ishar, Ishar 2 and Ishar 3, Transarctica and Robinson’s Requiem (Silmarils); Stardust (Bloodhouse); The Patrician and On the Ball (Ascon); Breach 3, High Seas Trader and Lords of the Realm (Impressions).
Prices: from £14.99 for Stardust to £35 for High Seas Trader; £25.99 to £29.99 was usual.

A press officer goes it alone

Hennerley had worked in public relations: in 1988 he was Prism Leisure’s PR manager, and later he was at Palace Software, which marketed Silmarils’ games in Britain. ST Format reported in April 1992 that he had left Palace because he “wasn’t too happy”, and that Silmarils had then approached him with an offer he could not refuse. Daze’s first game was Silmarils’ Storm Master.

Hennerley explained the idea to CU Amiga in 1994. “Daze Marketing was launched in January 1992. I had two main reasons for setting up the company: firstly I had a personal desire to be my own boss and secondly I had, in my time in the business, identified a distinct opportunity in the market.” British publishers that handled foreign labels alongside their own, he argued, gave those labels a second-best service. Daze would deal only in representing overseas publishers, “in terms of sales, marketing and PR”. Asked about problems, he said there had been only three: “Cash, cash and cash.” He had been backed by people within the industry rather than a bank.

Ishar and the French connection

Daze’s advertisement for Silmarils’ Ishar in mid-1992 was confident: “At Daze Marketing we believe that ‘Ishar’ is the best RPG currently available on the market.” It quoted CU Amiga (89%), Zero (89%), ST Review and The One (87% each) and gave the price, £29.99, for the Amiga, ST and PC. The sequel Ishar 2 followed in 1993, along with an update of Ishar for the A1200’s larger AGA palette, and in 1994 came Ishar 3, at £32.99, and the survival game Robinson’s Requiem.

Silmarils was one reason Daze kept supporting the Atari ST while larger publishers left it. In 1993 ST Format found Hennerley “responsible for importing many French games into the UK” and enthusiastic about the machine, which still had over a million users in France. “Even if Atari stopped selling the ST and Falcon tomorrow, there’d still be millions of users out there,” he said, and he blamed Atari for treating the ST as a business machine: “This is absolute rot. It’s a game’s machine.”

In 1994, short of space, Hennerley sold off older Silmarils games. Amiga Format reported that he was “knocking out old Silmarils games for a fiver”: full-price copies of Ishar and Transarctica direct from Daze for £4.99, or £5.99 for the A1200 versions.

Finland and Germany

In 1993 Daze took on two very different games. Stardust was the first game from Bloodhouse, a new studio in Finland: an update of Asteroids in 32 colours, with a three-dimensional tunnel section. Amiga Power’s previewer complained that he could not get the joystick back from his colleagues, and Amiga Computing noted that it cost only £14.99, although Bloodhouse insisted it was not a budget game. Daze’s advertisements named it as distributor. Accounts of how it sold differ. In October 1994 Amiga Computing wrote of “the tremendous success of Stardust”, while Amiga Power, previewing the sequel Super Stardust that summer, said it had “delivered fabulous gameplay at a ludicrously low price and NOBODY BOUGHT IT”. The sequel went to Team17, not Daze. In 1995 Bloodhouse merged with Terramarque to form Housemarque, which went on making arcade shooters, among them Super Stardust games for Sony.

The Patrician, from the German company Ascon, was a trading game set in the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, in which up to four players built shipping fleets and bribed, married and schemed their way towards the league’s top job. Amiga Format reported that it had been top of the German charts “for some time” before Daze brought it to Britain in June 1993 at £25.99. Ascon’s football management game On the Ball followed in 1994.

Impressions

In November 1994 The One reported that Impressions, the British strategy publisher, was handing its new games to Daze to make itself “more visible”: Breach 3, High Seas Trader, Lords of the Realm and the wargame Front Lines. Amiga Power reviewed High Seas Trader the next summer, with Daze as publisher and Impressions as authors, at £35 for the A1200.

Daze sold PC versions too: PC Zone‘s buyers’ guide was still listing its PC Patrician at £34.99 in January 1996. In March 1996 Amiga Format reported that Daze had been unsure whether to publish the Amiga game Watchtower and had not done so. Daze was still listed, with a London telephone number, among the publishers’ helplines in Germany’s PC Player in July 1996. Public sources do not record when it stopped trading.

Sources

Amiga Format issue 57, March 1994, pp. 24–26: Richard Hennerley, “MD of Daze Marketing”, on how a £25.99 game’s price is divided, development costs, Daze’s overheads and sales of 2,000–3,000 for a flop; distributor of Ishar 2 and Stardust; “Amiga games are priced about right”.
CU Amiga, April 1994, p. 41: profile of Daze Marketing (launched in January 1992; Hennerley’s reasons; representing overseas publishers in sales, marketing and PR; “Cash, cash and cash”; industry backing; Prism Leisure and Palace Software; Ishar 3, Robinson’s Requiem and On the Ball).
The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988, p. 7: Richard Hennerley, Prism’s PR manager.
ST Format issue 33, April 1992, p. 23: Daze Marketing, “a new company fronted by ex-Palace man Richard Hennerley”; Silmarils; Storm Master.
The One issue 47, August 1992, p. 19: Daze Marketing advertisement, Dagmar House, Old Street, London.
CU Amiga, July 1992, p. 25: Ishar advertisement (the review quotes; £29.99; Amiga, ST and PC).
CU Amiga, July 1993, p. 47: Daze Marketing Ltd, 2 Canfield Place, London NW6.
ST Format issue 46, May 1993, p. 13: The Patrician (June, £25.99) and Ishar 2 for the ST and Falcon.
Amiga Format issue 46, May 1993, p. 26: The Patrician from Ascon, top of the German charts.
Amiga Format issue 48, July 1993, p. 65: the AGA update of Ishar, Daze Marketing, £29.99.
ST Format issue 49, August 1993, p. 28: Hennerley on the ST, Atari and French publishers.
Amiga Power issue 27, July 1993, p. 18: Stardust preview.
Amiga Computing issue 63, August 1993, p. 126: Stardust, Bloodhouse’s first game, from Finland, £14.99.
Amiga Power issue 32, December 1993, p. 55: Stardust advertisement, “Distributor: Daze Marketing Ltd”.
Amiga Format issue 58, April 1994, p. 30, and Amiga Computing issue 73, May 1994, p. 117: old Silmarils games at £4.99 direct from Daze; Ishar 3 and Robinson’s Requiem.
Amiga Computing issue 78, October 1994, p. 93: Daze, “after the tremendous success of Stardust”; Ascon’s On the Ball; Ishar 3 at £32.99.
Amiga Power issue 40, August 1994, p. 10: Super Stardust preview (publisher Team17; “NOBODY BOUGHT IT”).
The One issue 74, November 1994, p. 8: Impressions hands its new games to Daze.
Amiga Power issue 51, July 1995, p. 42: High Seas Trader review (publisher Daze, authors Impressions, £35).
Amiga Format issue 82, March 1996, p. 37: Watchtower.
PC Zone issue 34, January 1996, p. 156: buyers’ guide, The Patrician, Daze Marketing, £34.99.
PC Player (Germany), July 1996, p. 16: publishers’ hotlines, Daze Marketing.
Edge issue 263, February 2014, p. 115: Housemarque, formed when Terramarque and Bloodhouse merged in 1995; Bloodhouse’s Stardust in 1993.