Electric Dreams Software
Activision's British label
A UK imprint run out of Activision's Wellingborough operation, holding Sega licences and publishing Spindizzy — a game that took a year to build and swept every format award going.
Electric Dreams Software was a British label operating inside Activision’s UK organisation. Its advertising makes the arrangement plain: orders went to Activision (UK) Ltd, Units 3 & 4 Lloyds Close, Finedon Road Industrial Estate, Wellingborough, and the small print identifies Electric Dreams as an “Authorised User” of Sega properties.
So this is the third distinct thing Activision’s British operation was doing at once — its own catalogue, distribution for Infocom, System 3, Sierra and Lucasfilm, and a separate imprint of its own with licences attached.
Fast facts
- Run from: Activision (UK) Ltd, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.
- Licences held: Sega properties, credited as an authorised user.
- Best known for: Spindizzy (1986).
- Typical prices: £9.99 cassette across Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad; £12.99–£14.99 on disc.
- Also published: Dandy, which turned up on Beau Jolly compilations.
Spindizzy
Spindizzy is the game Electric Dreams is remembered for. You steer a spinning top across a suspended landscape of ramps, towers, catwalks and trampolines, with lethal drops on every side and a time limit forcing the pace — an isometric exploration game with the handling model of a physics toy.
ACE placed it in its recommended list and gave the development cost: it took a year to build, which for a 1986 8-bit game is an unusual investment. The magazine’s verdict was that a whole world had been crammed into an 8-bit micro, and called the result a milestone.
It won everything
The clearest measure of Spindizzy’s standing is that it did not win one award; it won the set. Retro Gamer’s month-by-month reconstruction records ZZAP!64 awarding it the Gold Medal at 98%, and notes that it took top honours again elsewhere, giving it “a complete set of awards spanning all formats”.
⚠ Worth putting beside the other sweeps in this Vault. Martech’s Zoids took a CRASH Smash, a ZZAP!64 Sizzler and an Amtix! Accolade. Spindizzy did the same and took the Gold Medal — the tier above a Sizzler, and one ZZAP! declined to award at all in some months.
What the label was for
Electric Dreams shows a pattern this Vault sees repeatedly in the second half of the eighties: a large publisher operating several names at once, so that different kinds of product can sit at different price points without confusing the parent’s identity. Mastertronic ran M.A.D., Bulldog and Ricochet; Telecomsoft ran Firebird, Rainbird and Silverbird; US Gold ran Kixx.
Activision’s version put a British imprint with Japanese arcade licences alongside an American catalogue and a distribution arm — and the imprint’s best game was neither a licence nor an American import, but an original that took a year to make.
See also
- Activision — the parent operation.
- Beau Jolly — who compiled Dandy.
- Martech — the other multi-format award sweep.
- Mastertronic, Rainbird — the same multi-label pattern.