Denton Designs was what became of the people who were meant to make Imagine’s megagames. When Imagine collapsed in July 1984, five of the team working on Bandersnatch stayed together, bought the development computers they had been using and set up a studio in Liverpool’s medical quarter. They never became a publisher. Their games came out under other people’s labels, and some of the best-remembered Spectrum games of the mid-1980s are among them: the icon-driven Shadowfire, the pop-licence oddity Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Great Escape.
Fast facts
- Formed: September 1984, as a limited company run as a co-operative.
- Founders: John Gibson, Karen Davies, Steve Cain, Graham “Kenny” Everitt and Ally Noble, all from Imagine.
- Base: Rodney Street, Liverpool.
- Model: a development house, working for publishers such as Beyond and Ocean.
- Best-known games: Gift from the Gods (1984), Shadowfire and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1985), The Great Escape (1986), Where Time Stood Still (1988).
Out of Imagine
CRASH told the story in June 1985. On 9 July 1984 “the Imagine micro bubble burst”, and the team who became Denton were made redundant into the arguments over the rights to Bandersnatch. The Receiver, the magazine said, “couldn’t believe there was so little to show for the mega hyped games — little more than one disk existed, with most of the storyline and concept still inside the heads of programmers and designers”. Bandersnatch and the programmer Eugene Evans went to Fireiron, and after a few weeks’ planning the five set up Denton Designs. Their first, and largest, purchase was the Sage computer systems Imagine had used to develop games, which sent code down a cable to the target home computer.
Noble gave Retro Gamer a fuller account in 2008. Ocean’s David Ward, she said, bought the Bandersnatch development system from the receivers and rented the Rodney Street offices for them, in return for a game in time for Christmas 1984. That game was Gift from the Gods, which came out through Ocean. Ward’s part was on record at the time: CRASH’s 1986 profile of Ocean mentioned the company “helping Denton Designs get going”. “We used that system at Denton for years.”
Karen Davies told CRASH how they found work: “We just sat down and rang round the major software companies offering our services.” The response was “invariably favourable. Business-wise people were naturally a bit wary at first, because of the Imagine reputation, but as programmers and artists we had a good grounding and reputation, and people had heard of us through the Imagine name.”
A co-operative in Rodney Street
The magazine found the studio “tucked away in the heart of Liverpool’s Harley Street, down among the doctors”, sometimes addressed by medical supply firms as “Denture Designs” because they could not believe a software house had set up in Rodney Street. The company had a chairman and a secretary on paper but ran “very much as a co-operative”: everyone was listed as a director on the business cards. “We’re not frightened to criticise each other’s work, and no-one’s a prima donna,” Davies said.
They came from unlikely places. Gibson had been fitting suspended ceilings in Cornwall before a programming course in Liverpool; asked over a pint by someone from Imagine whether he could write machine code, he said yes and was hired on the spot. Everitt had been a carpenter and had written Imagine’s systems software for the Sages. Noble had worked in a travelling video workshop, and met Cain again in the Imagine interview room, where they started chatting about their days at Liverpool Art College. Davies had trained in textile design and worked in France and Italy before Imagine headhunted her.
Denton offered everything from straight conversions, which paid the wages, to complete games with their own design and packaging. Early conversions included Spy Hunter for the Spectrum. Shadowfire came about because Cain admired Mike Singleton’s Lords of Midnight, which Beyond had published: “It prompted us to approach Beyond. We did everything on Shadowfire including the packaging design, story and system.” Players steered a six-strong team through General Zoff’s starship by pointing at icons, with no typed commands. CRASH gave it 96%, and its readers put it third in their State of the Art award for 1985. Its sequel, Enigma Force, followed on the Beyond label in 1986.
Frankie and the Great Escape
Ocean’s commission for Frankie Goes to Hollywood came with a one-line brief. “David walked in and said he wanted a game with no Frankies walking about in it,” Cain told CRASH. The result was a game of games: the player starts as a nobody in a dull suburb, investigates a murder, and earns personality points in mini-games, among them defending Liverpool from bombers, on the way to the Pleasuredome. It sold at £9.95 in the summer of 1985 and scored 94% from CRASH. Noble told Retro Gamer that it knocked Shadowfire off the top of the Gallup chart, “the best moment of my career so far”.
The Great Escape (1986) put the player in a German prisoner-of-war camp. The camp keeps to a daily routine; the prisoner has to learn it, slip away from it and collect what an escape needs. Noble recalled that she and Heap had both liked a board game on the subject as children, and that the routine of the camp was Heap’s idea. CRASH gave it 96% in December 1986. Its readers voted it the second-best game of the year, behind only Starglider, and made it the year’s best arcade adventure; its advertisement, a pair of hands gripping barbed wire, won their award for the year’s best advertisement with 22% of the vote.
| # | Best game of 1986, CRASH readers | 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% |
Noble explained her method to CRASH: “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.” Years later she told Retro Gamer that she had also studied the uniforms, down to where the greatcoats ended, and that the team had cut the map by about a third to fit it into memory.
The split
By the end of 1986 the founders had gone. CRASH sent Julian Rignall to Liverpool for its Christmas issue to find out why. “The directors, Steve Cain, Karen Davies and John Gibson all wanted to go freelance,” Noble told him. “At the time it looked as though everyone was going to pack in and give up, but we decided not to.” She stayed, the only founder left, with a team of six: herself, John Heap, Andy Heap, Stewart Fotheringham, Dave Colclough and Colin Parrott.
The people who left told the same story. Gibson had accepted an offer from Ocean’s David Ward and was writing licensed games alone: “There was too much turmoil in the office with too many meetings. All I wanted to do was write programs.” Cain had set up a new company, Canvas, and Everitt and Davies were freelancing for it. “We couldn’t, as individuals, earn enough money for ourselves,” Cain said. “Dentons cost too much — it was a bit of a luxury and self-indulgent.” The plan had been to take on programmers and make money from their work, Everitt explained, but “in practice we were subsidising the extra programmers”. In 2008 Noble gave her own account: the employees had wanted shares, and “my feeling is that the other directors didn’t want to give them that”.
The new Denton told CRASH it wanted to make original games, not conversions, but could not afford to publish them. “We don’t know anything about marketing,” John Heap said. “There’s also a problem with cash flow — we wouldn’t get any money for six months, and we’d have to pay people in the meantime.” Its Commodore programmers talked about the machine they worked on. “With the C64 it’s a case of finding new tricks you can do with the machine,” said Ian, “but it is annoying to have to throw out ideas because you can’t get the machine to do them.” Fotheringham agreed: “The big problem with the 64 is the actual speed of the processor.” Asked which Denton game they were least pleased with, Noble answered at once: “Definitely Transformers.”
Later games
Noble and John Heap followed The Great Escape with Where Time Stood Still (1988), in which four survivors of a plane crash try to cross a plateau of cannibals, pterodactyls and swamp monsters. It was written for the 128K Spectrum and the Atari ST. CRASH gave it 94%, and The Games Machine gave it 95% and called Denton “one of the most imaginative and successful programming teams” of the Spectrum’s history.
In the 1990s the studio moved on to 16-bit machines. Wreckers, an isometric game published by Audiogenic, was a CRASH cover Smash in May 1991, although Noble later said she was sure the Spectrum code was never finished. World Class Rugby, also for Audiogenic, took 88% from CRASH in December 1991, whose reviewer thought “Audiogenic and Denton Design have done an excellent job”. In 1993 Denton took over the Amiga conversion of Konami’s Batman Returns from Rage Software, with John Heap as lead programmer, and in 1994 it was working on the Amiga rally game Powerdrive for U.S. Gold.
According to Noble, she and Heap decided around 1995 that they were stretching themselves too thinly, and the studio became part of Rage. She became a producer there, and after Rage collapsed in 2003 she moved into mobile games. “At Dentons we’d always had critical acclaim,” she said, “but never really made any money.” She dedicated the interview to two fellow directors, Steve Cain and Dave Colclough, who had both died of cancer.
Sources
- CRASH issue 17, June 1985, pp. 30–35: Denton Designs profile and Frankie Goes to Hollywood preview (Rodney Street and “Denture Designs”; September 1984; the five founders; 9 July 1984; the Receiver; Fireiron; the Sage systems; Karen Davies’s quotes; the co-operative; the founders’ backgrounds; Spy Hunter, Gift from the Gods for Ocean, Shadowfire for Beyond; Cain’s brief from David Ward).
- CRASH issue 17, June 1985, pp. 16–18: Shadowfire review (see Shadowfire; 96% in the issue 24 index).
- CRASH issue 19, August 1985, p. 34: Frankie Goes to Hollywood review (Ocean, £9.95, author Denton Designs); 94% (see Ocean Software).
- CRASH issue 27, April 1986, p. 67: readers’ awards for 1985 (Shadowfire third for State of the Art).
- CRASH issue 27, April 1986: Ocean profile (“helping Denton Designs get going”).
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986, pp. 128–129: Enigma Force review.
- CRASH issue 35, December 1986: The Great Escape review, 96% (see Ocean Software).
- Julian Rignall, “A Liverpudlian Interlude”, CRASH issue 36, Christmas Special 1986, pp. 125–127: the split; the new team; John Heap, Ian and Stewart Fotheringham; Noble on research and Transformers; Gibson at Ocean; Cain, Everitt and Davies at Canvas.
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, pp. 34–36: readers’ awards for 1986 (The Great Escape second-best game, best arcade adventure and best advertisement).
- CRASH issue 54, July 1988, p. 15: Where Time Stood Still review (94%).
- The Games Machine issue 9, August 1988, pp. 29 and 45: Where Time Stood Still review (95%; Spectrum 128K and Atari ST).
- CRASH issue 88, May 1991, cover and p. 42: Wreckers (Audiogenic).
- CRASH issue 94, December 1991, p. 56: World Class Rugby review (Audiogenic, 88%).
- CU Amiga, January 1993, p. 42, and The One issue 55, April 1993, p. 30: Batman Returns (Denton taking over from Rage; John Heap as lead programmer).
- CU Amiga, December 1994, p. 36: Powerdrive (U.S. Gold), coded by Denton Designs.
- Paul Drury, “Ally Noble”, Retro Gamer issue 53, 2008, pp. 76–80 (interview, secondary): Ocean’s backing and Gift from the Gods; the Sage system; the Gallup chart; the split and the shares; the camp routine; The Great Escape’s research and cuts; Wreckers; joining Rage; Noble’s later career; Steve Cain and Dave Colclough.