Grandslam Entertainments
A magazine publisher's software arm, renamed
Formerly Argus Press Software — the games label of a magazine house, and the third of three outside industries that walked into British software and found the distribution already suited them.
A trade show guide of the late eighties lists the company plainly: “Grandslam — formerly Argus Press”. Argus Press was a magazine publisher, and Grandslam is what its software division became once it had a name of its own.
Fast facts
- Formerly: Argus Press Software.
- Press evidence in this library: ZZAP!64 and Amiga Power, 1988–1994.
- Published: Chubby Gristle, Power Pyramids, Nick Faldo’s Golf, Beavers, Bump ‘n’ Burn, Espionage, Terramex.
- Range: 8-bit budget-adjacent comedy platformers through to full-price Amiga sports and racing.
What Argus Press had been buying
Before the rename, Argus Press Software spent the mid-eighties acquiring. CRASH, April 1985, describes “Argus Press Software’s shopping list for other companies” as a running joke at the LET trade show — by which point it had already bought Quicksilva, one of the first British software labels, and was taking over production and marketing for the wargame house Lothlorien.
That is the same magazine-publisher logic seen from the buying side. A company with printing, distribution and a national sales operation does not need to build a catalogue; it can purchase one, and Argus did.
Three doors into software
Put Grandslam beside two entries already in this Vault and a pattern appears.
Ariolasoft was a record company’s software arm. Firebird was British Telecom’s. Grandslam was a magazine publisher’s. Three large businesses from three unrelated industries all decided, within about two years of each other, that software was a natural extension of what they already did.
They were not being fanciful. Each already had the thing the new industry lacked most: a way of getting small physical products, or information about them, to a national audience. Record companies had retail and warehousing. BT had a marketing budget and a household name. A magazine publisher had printing, distribution to every newsagent, and — most valuable of all — direct contact with exactly the people who owned home computers.
Why they mostly failed at it anyway
None of the three became a lasting force in games, and the reason is worth stating because it recurs.
Distribution was the visible problem, so it was the one an outsider could see and solve. The invisible problem was knowing which games were worth making, which required people who played games, argued about them and could tell a good prototype from a bad one at a glance. That is a much harder capability to buy than a lorry.
Grandslam’s catalogue reads accordingly: competent, varied, and with no through-line. A comedy platformer, a golf licence, a board-game tie-in, an Amiga racer. There is nothing wrong with any of it and nothing that suggests a house with a view.
Why it mattered
Grandslam is the outsider’s entrance into software — the years when it was not yet obvious that games were their own business and not a product line for whoever already owned distribution.
By about 1990 that question had been answered, and answered against the outsiders. The companies that lasted were the ones that were only ever games companies, and the record labels, telecoms operators and magazine publishers went back to what they knew.