“At our peak we had 17 employees,” Andrew Braybrook told Edge in 1997, “but to be honest I would probably have earned more money if I’d stuck to programming mainframes for Marconi.” Graftgold wrote Avalon, Paradroid, Uridium and Quazatron, and some of the best-regarded home conversions of arcade games. It never published anything itself. It wrote games under contract, and most of the publishers it worked for went bust, were sold, or fought over its games.
ST Software
Steve Turner left a job as a commercial programmer in 1983 to write Spectrum games for Hewson Consultants, trading as ST Software. He worked in his dining room with a Spectrum and a black-and-white television, he recalled in Retro Gamer, and kept office hours, 9am to 5pm. Working alone was lonely, so he asked his friend Andrew Braybrook, a programmer at Marconi, to join him. It was a risk: Turner had saved about £10,000, and taking on an employee meant their games had to earn royalties within the first year.
CRASH introduced them in March 1984 as “the professional programmer Steve Turner and his assistant, Andrew Braybrook”, who “have recently entered the field of writing software for home computers on a full time basis”. Turner wrote for the Spectrum, and Braybrook converted his games to the Dragon. That was a lesson, Turner said: the Dragon went out of production and only a few hundred copies of each game sold. Braybrook moved to the Commodore 64. Andrew Whittaker, who left school in 1984, joined the team too.
Turner formed a limited company, Graftgold, when the Hewson royalties started to rise, to keep the money for future games and pay the programmers a steady wage. By March 1986 Braybrook was telling ZZAP!64: “ST Software, or Graft Gold as we’re known now”, and the team was about to move into offices in Witham, in Essex.
The Hewson games
Hewson credited its authors by name, so Graftgold’s games were known as Turner’s and Braybrook’s. Turner wrote Avalon, Dragontorc, Astroclone, Quazatron and Ranarama on the Spectrum. Braybrook wrote Gribbly’s Day Out, Paradroid, Uridium and Alleykat on the Commodore 64. Quazatron, Turner recalled, borrowed Paradroid’s gameplay and married it to a graphics engine he had built with no game to use it in.
CRASH’s readers put two of the team’s games in their top five for 1986. In the Best Game Overall poll, printed in March 1987, Starglider won with 12.5% of the vote, The Great Escape came second, and “the two Graftgold goodies published by Hewson”, Uridium and Quazatron, came third and fourth with 6% and 5.8%. Uridium also won Best Shoot ’Em Up with 26%. (The Spectrum Uridium was converted by Dominic Robinson, then at Hewson, from Braybrook’s original.)
Turner’s own account is less rosy. The Hewson deal gave Graftgold complete creative freedom and no advances, and every Spectrum game “seemed to sell less than the previous one”. Dragontorc sold far below Avalon, Astroclone “did not fit into a neat category”, and Ranarama did better in Spain than in Britain.
To Telecomsoft, and to court
At the PCW Show in September 1987 Graftgold signed with Telecomsoft, British Telecom’s software business and the owner of Firebird and Rainbird. CRASH reported that Turner and Braybrook would be joined by Dominic Robinson and John Cumming, “both from Hewson”. Turner later filled in the background: Robinson and Cumming had rung him, thinking Hewson was finished, and Hewson’s second-in-command had left for Telecomsoft and introduced Graftgold there. With Robinson and Cumming on board, Graftgold doubled in size and moved into its first offices, above a greengrocer’s in Witham. (CRASH later corrected its report: it had left out Andrew Whittaker, a member of the team since 1984.)
Hewson had been preparing to publish Braybrook’s Morpheus and Turner’s Magnetron, and challenged Graftgold’s right to take them elsewhere. ACE reported in February 1988 that “after months of wrangling” Telecomsoft had won:
The titles fell into their hands at the PCW show when Graftgold programmers Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, long time associates of Hewson, signed long term programming contracts.
A High Court injunction, ACE said, had “restrained Hewson from publishing the titles until the case can be tried”. Magnetron went to Firebird and Morpheus to Rainbird. CRASH called them “the first products of Graftgold’s long-term exclusive contract with Firebird”. Turner said that Hewson had never paid Graftgold advances or given it a contract, and that the two publishers eventually settled out of court.
The move left one more trace in ACE. In September 1988 the magazine apologised for printing a picture of Braybrook captioned as Turner. It had cropped the wrong man out of a photograph of both Graftgold programmers, taken “at last year’s PCW show when Graftgold signed up with Telecomsoft”.
Rainbow Islands
Telecomsoft paid Graftgold to convert Taito’s arcade game Flying Shark; Robinson wrote the Spectrum version in six weeks, and Turner had 14 days to convert it to the Amstrad. The bigger job was Taito’s Rainbow Islands. Braybrook’s diary dates the work from September 1988 to June 1989. Braybrook led it, using Robinson’s 16-bit engine; David O’Connor wrote the Spectrum version and Gary Foreman the Commodore 64 one, Turner recalled.
ACE reviewed the Atari ST version in September 1989. “Steve Turner, Andy Braybrook and company can congratulate themselves on this fine conversion,” it said: “nearly identical to the coin-op in almost every department”. Memory limits had forced them to leave out the three secret islands, but they had managed to include both of the possible animated endings.
Then the game disappeared. Telecomsoft had been sold to MicroProse, whose deal with Taito fell through, and it could not release the conversions. In March 1990 ACE reported that Ocean had signed a new agreement with Taito and bought Graftgold’s code from MicroProse, for a sum rumoured to be around £50,000. Ocean published it in 1990. Six years later Graftgold converted Rainbow Islands again, for a PlayStation and PC compilation from Acclaim; Turner told Edge that the arcade code was not available, so, as for the Amiga version, the team worked from video of the entire game. Amiga Format had given a different account of the original conversion in 1992: that Braybrook disassembled the arcade ROMs.
Where the money went
Braybrook knew what a developer earned. In April 1991 ACE asked him whether programmers got a fair share of their games’ income. “Of course not,” he said. The magazine’s own estimate was that about 7% of the £25 price of a top game ended up “in the programmer’s pocket”.
The 16-bit years
Graftgold’s later publishers came and went quickly. Braybrook’s Paradroid 90 was written for Hewson, which collapsed; the rights went to Activision. Realms, a strategy game, was also begun for Activision, which then closed its operation. Graftgold bought Realms back and licensed it to Virgin, which advertised it for the autumn of 1991. Fire & Ice, Braybrook’s platform game, was part-financed by Mirrorsoft, which then collapsed; Renegade published it in 1992 and went on to publish Braybrook’s Uridium 2 (1993) and Iain Wallington’s Virocop, which Amiga Power reviewed in 1995.
Other work was lost altogether. Graftgold wrote Empire Soccer for the Super Nintendo in time for the 1994 World Cup, and it was never released; a Mega Drive Fire & Ice and a CD32 version were finished or nearly so, and also never released. Edge’s 1997 profile of Braybrook listed Telecomsoft, Mirrorsoft and Renegade as publishers that “all changed hands within months of signing Graftgold”.
The end
Renegade was bought by Warner, which published Graftgold’s motorbike racer International Moto X on the PC and PlayStation. Turner said it had no marketing budget, but it became Graftgold’s biggest profit-maker. Warner also signed, then cancelled, a large game based on Avalon. Graftgold then signed a PlayStation tank game with the Japanese publisher Coconuts. When Coconuts tried to cut the monthly advances to a third, Turner sold a majority of the company to Perfect Entertainment, the developer of the Discworld games.
The tank game became Hard Corp. PC Zone listed it among Perfect’s forthcoming releases in February 1998, from “developers Graftgold”, due in the spring. It was never finished. Perfect found extra money from a publisher, but the funding stopped before the game was complete, and, Turner wrote, “so 15 years of developing games came to an end”. Looking back, he said that most of the publishers Graftgold had worked with “either went bust, sold out or simply did not publish the game to our expectations, despite tight contracts”.
Sources
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 85–86: Andrew Hewson’s profile of Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook.
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986: Gary Liddon’s interview with Braybrook (“ST Software, or Graft Gold as we’re known now”; the move to Witham).
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 34: readers’ awards for 1986 (Best Game Overall; Best Shoot ’Em Up).
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987: “Telecomsoft signs Graftgold” at the PCW Show; Dominic Robinson and John Cumming.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987: correction adding Andrew Whittaker to Graftgold’s members.
- ACE issue 5, February 1988: “BT get Graftgold games”.
- CRASH issue 50, March 1988: “Double trouble for Telecomsoft” (Morpheus and Magnetron; the exclusive contract with Firebird).
- ACE issue 12, September 1988: “Oops! rides again” (the photograph from the PCW Show).
- ACE issue 24, September 1989: Rainbow Islands review.
- Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: Rainbow Islands from September 1988 to June 1989; Paradroid 90 for Hewson.
- ACE issue 30, March 1990: Ocean buys Graftgold’s Rainbow Islands code from MicroProse.
- Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: Braybrook and the Rainbow Islands ROMs.
- ACE issue 43, April 1991: feature on programmers’ earnings (Braybrook; the 7% estimate).
- The One issue 36, September 1991: Virgin advertisement for Realms.
- Amiga Format issue 35, June 1992: Fire & Ice advertisement (“Published by Renegade”).
- Amiga Power issue 31, November 1993: Uridium 2 review (Renegade).
- Amiga Power issue 55, November 1995: Virocop in the review index.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996, and issue 37, October 1996: Graftgold’s new Rainbow Islands conversion; Steve Turner, managing director.
- Edge issue 43, March 1997: profile of Andrew Whittaker (joined Graftgold in 1984).
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: profile of Andrew Braybrook (17 employees; Marconi; publishers changing hands; still in Witham).
- PC Zone issue 60, February 1998: Perfect Entertainment’s Hard Corp, by Graftgold.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004: “Developer Lookback: Graftgold Games”.
- Steve Turner, “Graftgold” profile, Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004: the company’s history in his own words (ST Software; Hewson; Telecomsoft; Flying Shark; Rainbow Islands; Activision, Virgin, Mirrorsoft and Renegade; Warner and Moto X; Coconuts and Perfect).