Gilsoft | Code Like It's 198x

Gilsoft published games briefly and authoring tools for a decade, and it is the tools that matter: The Quill, The Illustrator and PAW between them account for a large share of every British text adventure written in the 1980s.

Their own advertising in CRASH called them “The Welsh Wizards of Adventure”, which is both accurate and the best summary available.

Fast facts

Run by: Tim Gilberts, from South Wales.
The Quill’s author: Graeme Yeandle.
Products: The Quill (1983), The Illustrator (1984), PAW (1987).
Early games: a short line of £5.95 16K Spectrum games credited to T Gilberts.
In this library: Gilsoft appears on 276 pages of the Spectrum press.

A family business

Sinclair User profiled the company in April 1985 and found it owned and run by Tim Gilberts, then twenty. His own account of the start is the best line anyone has written about the period:

Gilsoft started mainly as a pocket money venture. 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 rather than go to university, and told the magazine he had no regrets about it. He was seventeen when the company began.

It was run as a family concern: Tim as technical director, and his father Howard Gilberts as managing director — which is why Howard is the one demonstrating PAW to Sinclair User in December 1986. Graeme Yeandle joined in 1982 to write text adventures, and The Quill “came along almost accidentally” out of that, through a friend of Gilberts who was a systems analyst rather than a games professional.

The Quill sold at £14.95 — a figure the period adverts confirm, listed beside Valhalla and Games Designer at the same price in a 1984 dealer’s page — with no royalty claimed on anything written with it — which is the decision that made the amateur adventure economy possible.

Before the tools

Gilsoft published games first. CRASH reviewed several across its first issues in 1984, all 16K Spectrum releases at £5.95 and credited to T Gilberts, including the maze game Styx. They are competent and unremarkable, and they stopped once the authoring business took over.

“Quilled” became a word

The overview claims The Quill accounts for a large share of British text adventures. The strongest evidence is not a sales figure — it is that the product name stopped being a product name.

By January 1990 an Australian magazine could open a review column with “this month I’ve decided to review three quilled text adventure games”, with no explanation offered and none needed. A tool sold from South Wales had become a generic adjective, on the other side of the world, six years after release. Almost no software of any era manages that.

Twenty minutes with the instruction book

Amstrad Computer User, April 1985, on what to do if you wanted to write adventures and could not yet program:

You can either study the articles in this magazine on how to write adventures, or you can get the Quill from Gilsoft. This makes adventure programming very easy. All you need is a good plot and twenty minutes with the instruction book. The Quill won an award for the utility of the year, and deservedly so.

Two things there. The Utility of the Year award is a distinction the entry did not record. And “twenty minutes with the instruction book” is the whole proposition in seven words: the barrier The Quill removed was not the difficulty of writing an adventure, but the requirement to be a programmer first.

What people did with it

The abstract claim has a concrete case, and ACE names it in June 1988. Fergus McNeill, head of Delta 4 Software in Southampton:

Seizing on The Quill at the very start, he produced one or two serious games before finding his forte in brilliant parodies of adventuring conventions.

A teenager with a £14.95 utility and no publisher built a recognisable authorial voice out of it — which is what the no-royalty decision above was for. The same ACE feature sketches the economy that grew up around such writers: no advertising budget, distribution through fanzines such as Probe, and advice to make the packaging “the best that you can afford” because nothing else would sell it.

The piracy problem, and where it led

The 1985 profile records a complaint that reads differently now. Gilberts told Sinclair User there were pirated copies of The Quill circulating that were “just appalling”, that it was hard to do anything about, and that it was worst abroad — “I’m scared even to send samples to places like Spain or Portugal.”

Spain is where the Gilsoft line took root. Gilberts went on to write DAAD for the Spanish studio Aventuras AD, a single-source system targeting eight different machines, and Spanish adventure writing outlived the British scene by decades on the strength of it.

Gilsoft itself did not last. The limited company folded and the team went their separate ways.