In November 1984 a new publisher advertised twenty games at £2.50 each, with a promise printed on every box: “Seeing is believing”. The screenshots on the inlays were real. The publisher was British Telecom. CRASH, reviewing its first Spectrum game, explained the name: Firebird was “the evil alter ego” of Buzby, the cartoon bird in BT’s television adverts. Six months later the magazine visited its offices for a profile titled “The Boys from Buzby”, admitting that it was “not immediately obvious why BT should wish to be ‘The Power Behind the Joystick’”.
A phone company goes into games
CRASH’s answer was that BT was already in electronic publishing, through Prestel, Micronet and Gamestar. Dr Ederyn Williams, General Manager of BT’s New Information Services Division, set up Firebird in the spring of 1984, and in May it started advertising for programs. Nearly two thousand arrived in the first three months. Tony Rainbird left his own label, Micro-Gold, to join in June, and James Leavey transferred from elsewhere in Telecom in July to run publicity. A marketing analyst, Theresa Jackson, surveyed the market that summer and backed the plan for two price tiers, Silver and Gold.
Firebird’s head, James Scoular, formerly publisher of Personal Computer Games, died of a heart attack shortly before the profile appeared.
The Silver range
The Silver range went on sale in the autumn of 1984. The November advertisements listed twenty titles across the Spectrum, Commodore 64, VIC-20 and BBC Micro, “all available at the remarkably low price of £2.50”. The first CRASH Smash was Booty, John F. Cain’s pirate-ship platform game, which CRASH thought “would easily have sold for £5.95”. By May 1985 it had passed 100,000 sales.
Leavey explained the screenshots: customers were “getting disillusioned” by “hyped up artwork on the cassette inlay, and over the top claims in the blurb”, so Firebird printed what the game looked like. Tony Rainbird argued that “a smaller profit per game, when it was achieved on a high volume of sales, could result in a larger profit overall”; CRASH compared it to selling tins of beans. Firebird aimed to keep 24 Silver titles on sale at a time, replacing eight or twelve every three months with better games or dropping the slowest sellers, and said it might also take on full-price games from other publishers that had “exhausted the market at that level”.
It did not hire programmers. “We haven’t any in-house programmers,” Leavey said. Silver games came from freelancers, and Firebird would lend them money for equipment or pay royalties in advance. By mid-1986 Silver games cost £1.99, the same as Mastertronic’s, and by 1988 the budget label was called Silverbird.
Don’t Buy This
Firebird also published its rejects. Don’t Buy This collected five Spectrum games “which didn’t quite make the Silver Range”. CRASH called it “a masterpiece of anti-hype”: the inlay suggested using the tape as a blank and disclaimed responsibility for “the total unplayability of the games it contains”. Leavey told Computer & Video Games: “They are a good joke. You’ve got to have a sense of humour.” CRASH gave it 39%.
ACE remembered it fondly in December 1988 as “a deliberate laugh in the early days of Firebird, when all they published was budget software”. It described a dog that had to duck flying obstacles, “and to duck it had to stand up because it was tallest when it sat down”, and a go-kart game “written by Tony Rainbird (the man who went on to set up Rainbird software for Telecomsoft), where the controls reversed as you went round a bend on the track”.
Gold, Hot and Elite
Herbie Wright joined from VNU at the start of 1985 to run the Gold range. “A Gold game has to be special,” he said; “it’s got to have Ingredient X.” The first Gold releases were Demons of Topaz on the Commodore 64 and Buggy Blast on the Spectrum at £5.95. Gyron, at £9.95, came with the chance to win a Porsche.
As CRASH’s profile went to press in May 1985, Firebird was releasing Elite for the Commodore 64 on disk at £17.95, with a Spectrum version promised for late summer. Acornsoft had published the original BBC Micro game in 1984; Firebird published it for other machines. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 92%. A mid-price Hot Range at £7.95 followed at the end of 1985.
Firebird’s Spectrum games scored across the whole range. A selection from CRASH’s index of January 1988:
| Game | Range | CRASH score | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sentinel | Firebird | 97% | 40 |
| Booty | Firebird | 93% | 10 |
| Gyron | Firebird | 93% | 14 |
| Elite | Firebird | 92% | 22 |
| Buggy Blast | Firebird | 91% | 13 |
| Bubble Bobble | Firebird | 90% | 45 |
| Druid | Firebird | 90% | 35 |
| Thrust | Firebird | 76% | 34 |
| Don’t Buy This | Firebird | 39% | 17 |
| Oriental Hero | Firebird Silver | 30% | 44 |
| Pneumatic Hammers | Firebird Silver | 18% | 43 |
Firebird also released Pneumatic Hammers on the Commodore 64 at £1.99 on cassette. ZZAP!64’s March 1987 review gave that version 58% overall. The Spectrum and C64 figures describe separate versions reviewed by different magazines.
Telecomsoft: Beyond and Rainbird
BT’s software business grew beyond Firebird. ZZAP!64 reported in April 1986 that Beyond “was the first to be captured”, and that Tony Rainbird, by then an ex-Firebird executive, “has his own label, Rainbird, another BT investment”. Rainbird published full-price games such as Starglider, and at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1986 it announced deals with the adventure writers Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls. CRASH noted that Beyond “was the only other wing of British Telecom present — Firebird stayed at home on the nest”. Tony Rainbird, “the founder who loaned his name to the company”, resigned in November 1986, and Paula Byrne, who had joined as marketing manager that April, was by early 1987 managing Rainbird jointly with a colleague. By 1989 ACE described her as “at the helm” of Telecomsoft.
In September 1987 Telecomsoft signed Graftgold, the team of Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, away from Hewson Consultants. Hewson had been preparing to publish Braybrook’s Morpheus and Turner’s Magnetron. ACE reported that a High Court injunction had settled the dispute for the time being, restraining Hewson from publishing the games “until the case can be tried”, and that “Firebird will get Magnetron while Morpheus goes to sister label Rainbird”.
Sold to MicroProse
In 1989 the American publisher MicroProse bought Telecomsoft. Its UK managing director, Stuart Bell, told ACE he was confident that Firebird and Rainbird would keep releasing games, but was less sure what to do with Silverbird: “It’s a big jump from there down to the £1.99 category.” ACE repeated a rumour that MicroProse had paid only £400,000 for the whole business, and that rumours of heavy losses had been denied. Games continued to appear with “Firebird/MicroProse” on the label, among them Rick Dangerous and Rainbow Islands, which ACE reviewed as a Firebird game in September 1989.
Sources
- CRASH issue 10, November 1984: Silver range advertisement (twenty games, £2.50, the launch titles; “Firebird and the Firebird logo are trademarks of British Telecommunications plc”); Booty review (John F. Cain; the Buzby explanation; “would easily have sold for £5.95”). The same advertisement ran in Sinclair User issue 32, November 1984.
- CRASH issue 16, May 1985, pp. 105–108: “The Boys from Buzby” (Ederyn Williams; the May 1984 advertisement and two thousand programs; Tony Rainbird, James Leavey, Theresa Jackson, Herbie Wright; “Seeing is believing”; the Silver range policy; Booty’s sales; the Gold range; Elite at £17.95; no in-house programmers; Don’t Buy This; the death of James Scoular).
- Computer & Video Games issue 45, July 1985: budget round-up (Silver catalogue launched in October 1984). Issue 46, August 1985, p. 62: Don’t Buy This competition and James Leavey’s quotes.
- CRASH issue 23, December 1985: “New from Firebird. The Hot Range” advertisement. Issue 26, March 1986: the £7.95 Hot Range.
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986: Firebird review box at £1.99; the Consumer Electronics Show (Rainbird, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, Beyond).
- ZZAP!64 issue 12, April 1986: British Telecom, Beyond and Tony Rainbird’s label.
- ZZAP!64 issue 23, March 1987, p. 99: Pneumatic Hammers on the Commodore 64 (£1.99 cassette; 58% overall); the review identifies Firebird as the budget publisher.
- Amtix! issue 17, March 1987: Paula Byrne at Rainbird; Tony Rainbird’s resignation in November 1986.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (the scores and issue numbers above).
- CRASH issue 55, August 1988: Silverbird games at £1.99.
- ACE issue 5, February 1988: “BT get Graftgold games” (the injunction; Magnetron and Morpheus).
- ACE issue 15, December 1988: “Great marketing disasters” (Don’t Buy This; Tony Rainbird’s go-kart game).
- ACE issue 19, April 1989: Paula Byrne “at the helm” of Telecomsoft.
- ACE issue 22, July 1989: MicroProse’s purchase of Telecomsoft; Stuart Bell; the £400,000 rumour.
- ACE issue 24, September 1989, pp. 62–63: Rainbow Islands review (Atari ST), credited to Firebird.
- ACE issue 26, November 1989: games credited to Firebird/MicroProse in its ratings table.