Elite Systems

Elite Systems Ltd, Anchor House, Anchor Road, Aldridge, Walsall, West Midlands WS9 8PW — the address is on every advertisement it ever placed, and it was still on the copyright line of a 3DO release in 1995.

The company was run by Steve Wilcox, and its business was buying recognition and converting it. By early 1987 it was describing itself in recruitment advertising as “Britain’s Number 1 independent Entertainment Software Publisher”.

Fast facts

Based: Aldridge, Walsall. Run by: Steve Wilcox, managing director.
Press evidence in this library: CRASH, Amtix, ZZAP!64, Amstrad Action, ACE and Amiga Power from 1984 to 1995, at £1.99 budget to £25.99.
Confirmed CRASH scores: Ghosts ’n Goblins 95% (issue 30), Commando 94% (issue 24, p130), Bomb Jack 92% (issue 27), Scooby Doo 91% (issue 33), Paperboy 88% (issue 33), Frank Bruno’s Boxing 86% (issue 19), Kokotoni Wilf 84% (issue 9), Space Harrier 77% (issue 36).
Licensing chains: Space Harrier from Sega; Buggy Boy developed by Tatsumi, licensed via Data East USA.
Awards: Amtix Readers’ Awards 1986 — Best Software House, and Best Sound FX for Ikari Warriors.

Before the arcade

The shorthand “Elite made arcade conversions” is roughly right and gets the order wrong.

Elite’s first hit was an original. Kokotoni Wilf — a time-travelling arcade adventure with a dragon amulet — was in Commodore Computing International’s top twenty in October 1984 at £6.95, and took 84% in CRASH. Its most fondly remembered title is also not a licence: Frank Bruno’s Boxing (86%) was, as ACE put it plainly in 1988, “effectively a version of the arcade scrapping game, Punch Out” — an unlicensed arcade-alike sold on a personality licence instead. Elite bought a boxer’s name because it was cheaper than buying Nintendo’s game.

That is the company in miniature. What Elite dealt in was recognisability, from whichever source was selling it: coin-ops (Commando, Bomb Jack, Ghosts ’n Goblins, Paperboy, Space Harrier, Ikari Warriors, Buggy Boy), television and film (Scooby Doo, Thundercats, The Dukes of Hazzard, Airwolf), and people (Frank Bruno’s Boxing).

The conversion factory, advertised in public

Most publishers of the period were coy about how games got made. Elite ran the process as a classified advertisement in Atari ST User, in early 1987:

A small number of top-flight programmers are sought by Britain’s Number 1 independent Entertainment Software Publisher for exciting projects on the “Atari ST” and “Commodore Amiga”. Initially conversions of high-profile coin-op titles are offered, with exceptional sales potential. An exceptional financial package is available to the right individual. For further details contact Steve Wilcox.

There is no myth in that. It is a specification, a contract and a rate, addressed to freelancers — the shape the whole industry would take, printed in the back pages while the cottage-industry version of British software was still the story everyone told about it.

Wilcox was equally undramatic about new hardware. Asked by 8000 Plus in October 1986 whether the Amstrad PCW was worth publishing for, he gave the answer of a man who counts: “obviously it’s an extension to the market, but we’ve really got to suck it and see.”

Best Software House and Least Pleasing Game, same poll

Amtix‘s Readers’ Awards for 1986, printed in April 1987, gave Elite Best Software House, ahead of Gremlin Graphics and Gargoyle Games. Ikari Warriors took Best Sound FX, which pleased Wilcox for a specific reason — that readers were noticing production detail rather than the licence on the box.

Two pages later, in the same readers’ poll, Commando placed joint third in Least Pleasing Game.

⚠ The two columns are printed interleaved and the percentage figures cannot be safely assigned to either result, so no vote share is quoted here. The placings themselves are legible and unambiguous.

That contradiction is not an embarrassment; it is the conversion business working as designed. CRASH gave the Spectrum Commando 94% and a Smash. Amtix’s Amstrad readers, playing a different conversion of the same licence on a different machine, ranked it among the year’s biggest letdowns. One licence, several machines, several teams, and a review score that says as much about which version you bought as about the game.

The compilation

Elite’s least-remembered contribution is the one that changed how games were sold.

ACE, reviewing the Christmas 1988 market: “Chief compilation station in the late eighties has to be Elite. It seems to us that it was the first firm to bring out a blockbusting compilation.”

Frank Bruno’s Big Box, Fists and Throttles, the Thrilltime collections — several full-price hits on one tape at a fraction of the combined price, “lavishly packaged in unique collector boxes and mastered onto premium quality Gold and Platinum cassettes”, as Elite’s own advertising had it, with each title on its own cassette side “for maximum reliability”.

A publisher with a deep back catalogue and no further development cost on any of it had found a way to sell the same games twice. Every publisher copied it, and the multi-game box became a permanent feature of the market.

Budget, and the move to 16-bit

In May 1988 ACE reported Elite pushing its catalogue down to £1.99 — Commando, Airwolf, Frank Bruno’s Boxing. Company spokesman Pete Kury was open about the plan: “We’re still examining all the options available to us, but if we do it all in-house we’ll definitely be launching a new label.”

The money had a destination. ACE noted that budget revenue was intended to fund development of more expensive 16-bit releases, and that Elite was “particularly proud of ST Buggy Boy and Space Harrier”. The three-stage lifecycle — full-price release, compilation, budget re-release, each funding the next — is fully formed here in 1988.

The holographic sticker

Small, and worth recording. From January 1986 Elite’s advertisements carried a line no other publisher in this library ran:

Every single ELITE product carries the unique ELITE Holographic sticker. Make sure your copy does — it’s your guarantee of quality.

Holograms were expensive and hard to reproduce in 1986. A publisher putting one on a £7.95 cassette is doing what banknote printers do, and telling the customer to check — which is a publisher who believes counterfeit copies of its games are on sale in shops, not just taped in bedrooms.

Afterwards

Elite survived every transition that killed its contemporaries. It was still trading in 1995, publishing Virtuoso on the 3DO under licence from Motivetime, from the same Anchor House address it had used a decade earlier.

By then the press was less kind. ACE in December 1989, reviewing yet another Elite release: the company’s “most successful titles have always been those that are the least complex and rely most on addictive gameplay — Kokotoni Wilf, Bombjack, Bombjack II, Ghosts and Goblins — remember those?” — before dismissing the new one as “another Ikari Warriors clone”.

The complaint has a point and misses one. Elite was never in the business of originality; it was in the business of putting a recognisable thing on a shelf at a price. That worked brilliantly when the recognisable things were coin-ops nobody could own at home, and worked progressively less well as home machines caught up with the arcades.

Why it mattered

Elite is the corrective to the story of British software as teenage auteurs in bedrooms. That story is true and it is not the whole industry. Alongside it ran a business of licences, deadlines, contract programmers and a back catalogue worked three times over — recognisably the modern games industry, operating from an office in Aldridge in 1986.

Its two lasting inventions were commercial rather than creative: the compilation, and the full-price-to-budget lifecycle that funded new development from old stock. Both outlived every game Elite published.

Anchor House, Aldridge