Denton Designs

Denton Designs were five people who came out of the largest failure in British games publishing and carried on. CRASH profiled them in June 1985 and found them in Rodney Street, Liverpool — the city’s medical district — where the magazine noted they were sometimes addressed as “Denture Designs” by medical supply firms who could not believe a software house had set up there.

Fast facts

Incorporated: September 1984.
The founding five: John Gibson, Karen Davies, Steve Cain, Graham Everitt and Ally Noble.
Previously: all at Imagine, where they worked on the Megagames.
Structure: a co-operative — everyone listed as “Director” on the business cards.
Model: a facilities house, not a publisher.

Out of the Imagine collapse

Imagine went under on 9 July 1984, and the crew who became Denton were made redundant into the middle of the receivership argument over Bandersnatch — one of the two Megagames that had been sold to the press for a year. CRASH records the Receiver’s difficulty believing how little existed to show for it: barely one disk, with most of the storyline and design still in the heads of the people who had just been let go. Bandersnatch and Eugene Evans went to Fireiron; the rest planned for a few weeks and incorporated.

Their first significant capital purchase was the Sage development systems Imagine had used — the machines that cross-compiled code down into the target micro. The tooling outlived the company that bought it.

Karen Davies described the start plainly to CRASH: they sat down and rang round the major software houses offering their services, and found the response “invariably favourable” — businesspeople wary of the Imagine name, but programmers and artists who had heard of them through it.

A facilities house, run flat

Denton deliberately did not publish. They sold the whole range — straight conversions, game design, programming, package design, or all of it together — to whoever commissioned the work. That is why their catalogue appears under other people’s labels: Shadowfire and Enigma Force for Beyond, Gift from the Gods and Frankie Goes to Hollywood for Ocean, later The Great Escape and Where Time Stood Still.

The internal structure was as deliberate. Davies told CRASH that nobody was anybody’s boss, that they were not frightened to criticise each other’s work, and that there were no prima donnas — which the equal “Director” ranking on every business card made structurally true rather than aspirational.

What they were known for

Shadowfire (1985) is the one that made the case: a real-time squad game driven entirely by icons, with no text parser at all, which took 96% from CRASH and 10/10 from Personal Computer News. Frankie Goes to Hollywood followed for Ocean at £9.95 in 1985, again credited to Denton Designs as a whole rather than to individuals.

CRASH readers placed Denton third in the State of the Art category of its 1985 awards — an unusual result for a studio whose name never appeared on a box spine as publisher.

The research habit

CRASH went back to Rodney Street in January 1987 and found a studio with a working method worth recording. Ally Noble on how The Great Escape was built:

We tend to do a lot of research into our games. You get more into it if you do. …for The Great Escape I watched the Colditz series and went out and bought a load of military models.

A television drama and a box of Airfix kits, as primary sources for a Spectrum game. It is a small thing and it explains a great deal about why Denton’s games feel researched in a way most licensed product of the period does not.

Bigger than the founding five

The fast facts list five founders. By 1987 the studio was visibly larger, and CRASH names staff who are otherwise unrecorded — Ian, “a Commodore programmer”, and Stewart Fotheringham, “another Commodore specialist”. Both are quoted on the same frustration, which is a useful period record of what it felt like to write for the machine:

Ian: With the C64 it’s a case of finding new tricks you can do with the machine, but it is annoying to have to throw out ideas because you can’t get the machine to do them.

Stewart Fotheringham: the big problem with the 64 is the actual speed of the processor.

The cost of not publishing

The facilities-house model was a deliberate choice, and it had a price. John Gibson named it:

“We don’t know anything about marketing.” … It boils down to money: “there’s also a problem with cash flow — we wouldn’t get any money for six months.”

Six months between doing the work and being paid for it, with no catalogue of your own earning in the meantime. That is the structural weakness of contract development, and it is why so few studios of the period lasted — a point that applies equally to Graftgold, which solved it by surviving on a long exclusive contract instead.

Second-best game of 1986

CRASH’s readers voted The Great Escape the second best game of the year, behind only Starglider:

#	Game	Publisher	Share of vote
1	Starglider	Rainbird	12.5%
2	The Great Escape	Ocean (Denton Designs)	9%
3	Uridium	Hewson (Graftgold)	6%
4	Quazatron	Hewson (Graftgold)	5.8%
5	Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins	Elite	5%

CRASH described it as “DENTON DESIGNS’ wartime arcade adventure for OCEAN” — crediting the developer first and the publisher second, which was not the usual practice and is part of why Denton is remembered at all.

Note what this does to Ocean’s record. Ocean’s two best-reviewed Spectrum games are Head Over Heels and The Great Escape, and neither was made in-house. The second of them is Denton’s.

Five people who walked out of Imagine's collapse and kept working