Firebird
British Telecom’s budget-to-premium powerhouse
British Telecom's software label, set up in 1984 by its New Information Services Division — £2.50 tapes chosen from two thousand unsolicited submissions, plus the premium Rainbird imprint named after the man who ran it.
Firebird was British Telecom’s software label, set up in the spring of 1984 by Dr Ederyn Williams, General Manager of BT’s New Information Services Division. It is a stranger thing than it now sounds — a nationalised telecoms monopoly selling £2.50 games in newsagents — and CRASH, profiling them in May 1985 under the headline “The Boys from Buzby”, said as much: it was not immediately obvious why BT should want to be “The Power Behind the Joystick”.
The magazine’s own answer was that BT was already in electronic publishing through Prestel, Micronet and Gamestar, so selling software in shops was not as illogical a move as it first appeared.
Fast facts
- Founded: spring 1984, by BT’s New Information Services Division.
- Launch price: £2.50 — twenty titles available by November 1984.
- Catchphrase: “Seeing is believing”.
- Labels: Firebird Silver (later Silverbird) for budget, Rainbird for premium.
- Breakout release: Elite, published under the Firebird label.
The range, in one table. CRASH’s issue 48 index lists more Firebird titles than any other publisher in this Vault’s working set, and the spread is the point:
| Game | Score | Issue | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sentinel | 97% | 40 | Firebird |
| Starglider | 95% (128 version 97%) | 36 | Rainbird |
| Jewels of Darkness | 94% | 36 | Rainbird |
| Booty | 93% | 10 | Firebird |
| Gyron | 93% | 14 | Firebird |
| Elite | 92% | 22 | Firebird |
| Heartland | 92% | 31 | Firebird |
| Buggy Blast | 91% | 13 | Firebird |
| Bubble Bobble | 90% | 45 | Firebird |
| Druid | 90% | 35 | Firebird |
| The Pawn | 90% | 41 | Rainbird |
| Dark Sceptre | 88% | 47 | Firebird Gold |
| Thrust | 76% | 34 | Firebird |
| Don’t Buy This | 39% | 17 | Firebird |
| Mad Nurse | 31% | 39 | Firebird |
| Oriental Hero | 30% | 44 | Firebird Silver |
| Pneumatic Hammers | 18% | 43 | Firebird Silver |
| Heist | 12% | 45 | Firebird Silver |
97% to 12%, under one owner. No other publisher of the period had that range, because no other publisher was running a rotating budget shelf and a premium adventure imprint out of the same building.
Open submissions, at scale
Firebird advertised for programs in May 1984 and, by its own account to CRASH, received nearly two thousand in the first three months. That is the budget model working as designed: no development studio, no advances, a wide net cast across the bedroom-coder population, and an editorial filter applied afterwards.
Tony Rainbird was persuaded to leave his own label, Micro-Gold, and join in June 1984 to get the operation moving. The premium Rainbird imprint carries his name.
Managing a budget range
Firebird treated the Silver range as inventory rather than a catalogue. Every few months it planned to replace eight or twelve of the titles — dropping whatever sold least and introducing better games to lift the average. It also told CRASH it might take on games from other houses that had “exhausted the market” at full price, which is budget republishing described plainly a decade before the practice became routine.
By May 1985 the label had taken three CRASH Smashes in the few months it had been operating, which is what prompted the profile.
Three labels, one owner
Firebird was not BT’s only games label. By 1986 the software operation ran three imprints, and CRASH’s report from that April’s Consumer Electronics Show catches all of them in one paragraph: Rainbird used the show to announce tie-ins with Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls, and Beyond was “the only other wing of British Telecom present” — Firebird itself having “stayed at home on the nest”.
| Label | Role |
|---|---|
| Firebird | Budget, from £2.50; Silver, later Silverbird |
| Rainbird | Premium — simulations and adventures at full price |
| Beyond | An established publisher absorbed into the group |
The consequence is worth stating plainly: for a stretch of the mid-1980s, the two most respected British adventure houses and the publisher of Lords of Midnight were all, corporately, the phone company.
Don’t Buy This
The open-submission pipeline has a punchline, and Firebird published it.
Don’t Buy This was a compilation of the worst games Firebird had been sent — released deliberately, under that title, at budget price. CRASH gave it 39%, which is arguably generous. ACE, looking back in December 1988 in a feature on the industry’s great marketing disasters, described it with real affection:
Released as a deliberate laugh in the early days of Firebird, when all they published was budget software, this was a collection of ‘Sunday Sport’ games — games that were so bad, they were almost good. There was a dog, that had to duck flying obstacles, and to duck it had to stand up because it was tallest when it sat down. Then there was the go-kart simulation… where the controls reversed as you went round a bend on the track. A delicious set of awful games, sold under an honest title for a fair price.
The go-kart game with the inverted steering was written by Tony Rainbird — the same Tony Rainbird recruited to get the operation moving, and after whom the premium imprint that published The Pawn and Starglider was named.
That is the two-thousand-submissions model laid bare. A label with an editorial filter has, by definition, a pile of rejects. Firebird is the only publisher of the era that looked at the pile, priced it, labelled it honestly, and put it on the shelf.
Legacy
Firebird’s output ran from £2.50 tapes to Elite, and the Rainbird imprint carried simulations and adventures at full price. Telecomsoft, BT’s software arm, was sold in 1989 and the catalogue passed to MicroProse.
One acquisition is worth recording, because it took the top of a rival apart and ended in court. Graftgold — Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, the authors on whom Hewson Consultants had built its reputation — signed to Telecomsoft at the PCW Show in September 1987. ACE reported the aftermath in February 1988 under the headline “BT GET GRAFTGOLD GAMES”: rights to Morpheus and Magnetron were “disputed fiercely” until BT successfully restrained Hewson in the High Court from publishing games it had already geared up to produce. The spoils were split between the labels — “Firebird will get Magnetron while Morpheus goes to sister label Rainbird”.
⚠ The One’s October 1991 retrospective dates this to 1989. It is about two years out: ACE and CRASH both report the signing and the resulting dispute contemporaneously, in 1987–88, and the contemporary reporting is the better record.
“Defection” is The One’s word, and it reads cleaner than the record. Braybrook’s own development diary, printed in Amiga Action, shows Graftgold contracted to Telecomsoft for Rainbow Islands from September 1988 to June 1989 and contracted by Hewson to produce Paradroid on ST and Amiga immediately afterwards. The studio was working for both.
The One’s verdict on the consequences still stands, whatever its dating: Hewson “never really recovered”, and “Telecomsoft never really recovered either — its labels were sold to MicroProse not long afterwards.
The label matters here because it is the clearest case of a large institution running the bedroom-coder pipeline deliberately: an advert, two thousand submissions, a filter, and a rotating shelf.