Graftgold
A development house, not a publisher — and it outlasted most publishers
Steve Turner quit his job in 1983 to write Spectrum games as ST Software, hired his friend Andrew Braybrook to handle Dragon conversions, and incorporated as Graftgold in 1984. It supplied Hewson's flagship output on both machines, signed exclusively to Telecomsoft in 1987, and lasted until 1998.
Graftgold is the development studio behind a striking share of the best-regarded British games of the 1980s — Paradroid, Uridium, Quazatron, Avalon, Ranarama — and it is worth an entry separate from its two famous programmers because it is a different kind of company from most in this Vault.
It did not publish. It made games under contract, put its own name on the team rather than on the label, and survived the collapse of more than one publisher it worked for.
How it started
Steve Turner quit his job as a commercial programmer in 1983 to write Spectrum games full time, trading as ST Software. He hired a close friend, Andrew Braybrook, initially to convert those games to the Dragon. ST Software incorporated as Graftgold in 1984.
CRASH caught them at exactly that moment. Its March 1984 issue introduces “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” — Braybrook as Turner’s hire, which is how it began, rather than as the co-founder later accounts describe.
That relationship did not stay one-directional for long. Braybrook went on to write Paradroid and Uridium, and Turner then reimagined Paradroid on the Spectrum as Quazatron.
The Hewson years
Graftgold’s early success came through Hewson Consultants, and the pairing defined both companies. Turner held the Spectrum side from Hewson’s first serious year; Braybrook held the Commodore 64 side through its peak.
Hewson’s practice of crediting authors on the inlay is part of why Graftgold’s name is known at all. Most contract development houses of the period are invisible.
The Telecomsoft move
In late 1987 Graftgold signed to Telecomsoft — British Telecom’s software operation, the parent of Firebird, Rainbird and Beyond.
CRASH reported it in December 1987 as a team “signed to Telecomsoft amid contractual controversy”, and by March 1988 was describing Morpheus and Magnetron as “the first products of Graftgold’s long-term exclusive contract with Firebird”. Leaving the publisher that had made its reputation, for the phone company, was not a quiet transaction.
The same issue notes a separate dispute involving Level 9, also a Telecomsoft signing — the aggressive acquisition of British talent by BT’s labels was becoming a story in its own right.
It went to the High Court
“Contractual controversy” is CRASH’s phrase and it understates what happened. ACE, February 1988, headline “BT GET GRAFTGOLD GAMES”:
After months of wrangling, Telecomsoft have announced that they will be bringing out the disputed games Morpheus and Magnetron. 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.
…BT successfully restrained Hewson from publishing the titles until the case can be tried… Hewson had already geared up to publish the games themselves, so Telecomsoft would have to make good whatever financial loss their injunction caused.
So Hewson had manufactured for two games it was then injuncted out of selling, and the two titles were split between the phone company’s labels: Magnetron to Firebird, Morpheus to Rainbird.
⚠ Note what this says about Graftgold’s position, which “signing exclusively” does not convey. The dispute was between two publishers over who owned games Graftgold had written. A contract development house is the asset being fought over, not usually a party to the fight.
Who was in it
CRASH had to print a correction in December 1987 after leaving Andrew Whittaker out of its list of Graftgold members. The team was always more than its two famous names, which is the usual condition of development houses and the usual omission.
Two of the five best games of 1986
CRASH’s readers voted on the year, and the results printed in issue 38 (March 1987) place Graftgold’s work twice in the top five of Best Game Overall:
| # | Game | Publisher | Share of vote |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Starglider | Rainbird | 12.5% |
| 2 | The Great Escape | Ocean (Denton Designs) | 9% |
| 3 | Uridium | Hewson (Graftgold) | 6% |
| 4 | Quazatron | Hewson (Graftgold) | 5.8% |
| 5 | Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins | Elite | 5% |
Uridium also took Best Shoot ’Em Up outright, with 26% of the vote.
Two things follow. The first is the obvious one: a five-person contract studio put two games in a national readership’s top five, and neither carried its name on the spine. The second is that the top four places went to three development houses and no in-house publisher team — Realtime, Denton and Graftgold. That is the case for contract development made by the readers rather than by a critic.
The signing, dated by an apology
ACE dated the Telecomsoft move by accident, in a correction. Having run the wrong photograph, the magazine explained itself in September 1988:
The photo in question dates from last year’s PCW Show, when Graftgold signed up with Telecomsoft, and has something of a jinx attached to it.
The PCW Show ran in September, which places the signing at September 1987 — consistent with CRASH reporting it that December “amid contractual controversy”.
The blunder itself is worth keeping, because it says something about how the two men were seen. ACE had a photograph with both Graftgold programmers in it, cropped the wrong one out, and ran Andrew Braybrook’s picture captioned as Steve Turner:
Poor old Steve Turner must be a bit miffed… a mistake was at least halfway understandable given that we were using a photo with both of the Graftgold programmers in it, and cropped the wrong one out.
What 7% looks like
Graftgold is this Vault’s clearest case of a studio that made famous games without owning them, and ACE got its senior coder to put a number on what that meant. April 1991, asking Andrew Braybrook whether developers were paid a fair share of what their games earned:
“Of course not. On the whole there are two sorts of deal that we get involved in, conversions and original titles.”
The magazine’s own breakdown of a £25 game:
Of the £25 that you fork out for the latest top game, on average only about 7% of that revenue will end up in the programmer’s pocket.
Roughly £1.75 a copy, split across a team, for the people who wrote it. That is the economic reality behind Graftgold outlasting the publishers it worked for: it never carried a publisher’s costs, and it never took a publisher’s margin either.
Rainbow Islands
Missing from the catalogue above, and one of the studio’s best-regarded jobs. ACE, September 1989, reviewing the home conversion:
Steve Turner, Andy Braybrook and company can congratulate themselves on this fine conversion — nearly identical to the coin-op in almost every department.
The review also records what had to go, which is the usual honest detail of an 8-bit conversion: memory limitations forced the omission of the three secret islands and the Prince of Darkness, though Graftgold “managed to include both of the possible animated end-game sequences”.
Afterwards
Graftgold continued into the 16-bit era with Fire & Ice, Uridium 2, Virocop and Realms, working across the Amiga and Atari ST. It closed in 1998 — fifteen years, which is a long life for a British studio of that generation, and longer than Hewson Consultants, Beyond or Telecomsoft itself managed.
⚠ The founding sequence is corroborated by CRASH in March 1984; the incorporation dates and the 1998 closure come from present-day sources.