Gilsoft | Code Like It's 198x

Gilsoft sold software from a house in Barry, South Glamorgan, and for most of the 1980s it sold the means to make it. Its adventure writing system, The Quill, turned the text adventure into something anyone with a plot and a Spectrum could write, and Gilsoft asked for no royalty on the result. By 1990 an Australian magazine could introduce “three quilled text adventure games” without explaining the word. The company called itself “The Welsh Wizards of Adventure”, and for a firm its founder described as “a pocket money venture”, it reached a long way.

Fast facts

Founded: 1982, by Tim Gilberts, then 17.
Address: 30 Hawthorn Road, Barry, South Glamorgan; 2 Park Crescent, Barry, by December 1985.
Products: The Quill (1983), The Illustrator (1985), The Patch (1985), The Press (1986) and the Professional Adventure Writer (1987).
The Quill’s author: Graeme Yeandle.
Own games: Spectrum games from 1982, then text adventures in the Gold Collection.

A family business

Tim Gilberts had been writing programs for the ZX81 before the Spectrum came out. When it did, he told Retro Gamer in 2005, “I knew that the machine was going to hit the mass market and there’d be a demand for games.” His father, who ran an electronics business, put up the money. The company was a family affair: Tim was technical director, his father Howard managing director, his mother company secretary and a cousin the accountant.

Gilsoft was advertising by December 1982. A small classified in Sinclair User offered 3D Maze of Gold for the Spectrum at £5.95: a hunt for gold through a labyrinth drawn in full-colour 3D perspective. CRASH reviewed it in its first issue in February 1984, credited to T Gilberts: a maze “seen from eye level in 3D blocks”, with ten levels from 0 (“impossible”) to 9 (“village idiots”). Gilberts later admitted that he “wrote rip-offs of most arcade games”, which Gilsoft soon stopped selling “due to copyright issues”.

When Sinclair User profiled the company in April 1985, it found “a soft spoken twenty-year old Welshman” in charge. “Gilsoft started mainly as a pocket money venture,” he said. “I bought myself a Spectrum when it came on the market and pretty soon had a full-scale business on my hands.” He had left school early to get into computing and could have gone to university, he added, but the business helped to pay “for my beer and a car”. Not, he added, a Porsche.

The Quill

The Quill “came along almost accidentally”, Sinclair User reported. Graeme Yeandle, a friend of Gilberts and a systems analyst, had been swapping adventures he had written in machine code. Gilberts borrowed the program, debugged it, and the two decided to build an adventure writing system on it. Gilsoft announced The Quill for the 48K Spectrum in autumn 1983 at £14.95. The entry on The Quill tells how it worked and what reviewers made of it.

Gilsoft’s key decision was to claim nothing from the games people wrote with it. Gilberts explained it with a drill: when you buy a Black and Decker, “you can then drill as many holes as you like… you wouldn’t expect to have to send off money every time you put in a rawlplug.” Twenty years later he had not changed his mind. Charging royalties “would have made it less popular”, he told Retro Gamer. “We also felt that tools should be unfettered. I think today it would be Open Source.” When Melbourne House started selling Quill-written games, he was pleased: “It shows that The Quill can produce top-quality adventures and isn’t just some kind of toy.”

The amateurs came in numbers. Fergus McNeill of Delta 4 was one of the first. ACE wrote in 1988 that, “seizing on The Quill at the very start”, he had produced a couple of weak games “before finding his forte in brilliant parodies of adventuring conventions”. Writers like him had no advertising budget and sold through fanzines such as Probe. A modern count on the ZX-Database, reported in 2022, found 531 Spectrum games made with The Quill and 510 with its successor, PAW.

Selling adventures like paperbacks

Gilsoft published adventures itself. CRASH reviewed four of its £5.95 Gold Collection games in May 1984, including Yeandle’s Magic Castle, and early in 1985 Micro Adventurer announced two more text-only titles, The Hollow and Madcap Manor. The same column reported that CodeWriter in America was selling the Commodore 64 Quill as Adventure Writer, with its own booklet. Howard Gilberts compared it to cornflakes: “what’s in the package is the same”.

By April 1985 the Gold range cost £1.99, and Tim Gilberts was planning “Double Play” cassettes at about £2.50, with two separate games on each. He hoped they would be sold in newsagents like paperbacks: “A bit like Mills and Boon, good value and good entertainment for the same sort of price as a book.” He had little time for the distributors, who did not “seem to be interested in anything but fairly mindless reflex games”.

New tools, and the piracy problem

Gilsoft extended The Quill rather than replacing it. The Illustrator added pictures in January 1985, The Patch split screens and sound later that year, and The Press squeezed text to make room for more in 1986. At a show in late 1986 Sinclair User photographed Howard Gilberts demonstrating the Professional Adventure Writer, which “drew the biggest crowds”. CRASH reviewed PAW in May 1987 at £22.95, credited it to a team of six led by Tim Gilberts, and gave it 97%.

Pirates were a constant worry. There were copies of The Quill around that were “just appalling”, Gilberts told Sinclair User in 1985, and it was worst abroad: “I’m scared even to send samples to places like Spain or Portugal.”

Spain, and the end

Spain was where the Gilsoft line went next. In 1988 Gilberts built a new system, S.W.A.N. (System Without A Name), with Graeme Yeandle and Hugh Hamer-Powell, for Delta 4 and Abstract Concepts, whose Mindfighter was written with it. It let a game be written once and run on several machines. In February 1990 Howard Gilberts told ST Format that an Atari ST version of PAW would come as soon as he could “drag programmer Tim Gilberts back from Spain”, where he was helping with a Spanish conversion. There Tim Gilberts wrote DAAD for the Spanish publisher Aventuras AD; the entry on Tim Gilberts follows it to the present.

Gilsoft did not outlast the 8-bit market it was built for. “In the end, Gilsoft folded as it was a limited company,” Gilberts told Retro Gamer in 2005. “We all went our own ways and my father started selling homebrew wine and beer-making supplies.”

Sources

Sinclair User issue 9, December 1982, p. 81: Gilsoft classified advertisement (3D Maze of Gold, £5.95, 30 Hawthorn Road, Barry).
CRASH issue 1, February 1984: review of 3D Maze of Gold (Gilsoft, 16K, £5.95, author T Gilberts).
CRASH issue 4, May 1984: the Gold Collection reviews, including Magic Castle.
Micro Adventurer, January 1985: Steve Keaton’s adventure column (The Hollow, Madcap Manor, £5.95; CodeWriter’s Adventure Writer; Howard Gilberts on cornflakes).
Richard Price, “Fantastic landscapes”, Sinclair User issue 37, April 1985, pp. 68–69: the profile of Tim Gilberts and Gilsoft (the pocket-money venture, the origin of The Quill, the drill, piracy, the Gold range at £1.99 and the Double Play plans).
Sinclair User issue 45, December 1985: Gilsoft advertisement from 2 Park Crescent, Barry.
Sinclair User issue 57, December 1986: Howard Gilberts demonstrating PAW.
CRASH issue 40, May 1987, pp. 54–55: review of the Professional Adventure Writer (£22.95; authors; 97%).
Amstrad Action issue 31, April 1988: the new system developed by Tim Gilberts for Delta 4 and Abstract Concepts.
ACE issue 9, June 1988: Fergus McNeill, Delta 4 and the fanzine market.
Sinclair User issue 77, August 1988: Mindfighter and S.W.A.N. (Tim Gilberts, Graeme Yeandle, Hugh Hamer-Powell).
The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, vol. 7 no. 1, January 1990, p. 69: “three quilled text adventure games”.
ST Format issue 7, February 1990: Howard Gilberts on an ST version of PAW and Tim Gilberts in Spain.
Chris Wild, “Gilsoft: The Welsh Wizards”, Retro Gamer issue 16, 2005, pp. 54–57: the founding, the family roles, the no-royalty policy, and the company’s end.
Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (English edition), p. 242: founding in 1982; the ZX-Database counts of games made with The Quill and PAW as of October 2022.