Hewson Consultants

Hewson Consultants was a British software publisher founded by Andrew Hewson in 1980 — initially as a vehicle for self-publishing his own programming books, starting with Hints and Tips for the ZX-80 — and expanding through the early 1980s into a fully-fledged game publisher. Across an 11-year run, Hewson released some of the most-respected technical and creative work on the 8-bit British platforms: Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid (1985), Uridium (1986), and Morpheus (1987); Steve Turner’s Quazatron (1986) and Ranarama (1987); Raffaele Cecco’s Cybernoid (1988) and Stormlord (1989). The company’s hallmark was crediting its programmers visibly — names on the cassette covers and in the magazine ads — and paying them fairly enough that developers stayed loyal across multiple games.

This was unusual in the era. Many British publishers treated programmers as interchangeable contractors; Hewson treated them as authors. The model attracted talent and produced unusually consistent quality, particularly through the mid-1980s. Crash, Zzap!64, and the contemporary press routinely awarded Hewson titles Smashes and Sizzlers (Zzap!64’s equivalent honour); Hewson games sold well not because of marketing budgets but because they were genuinely good.

£500 and a cup of tea

Sinclair User profiled Hewson in October 1985, at the company’s fifth birthday, and the account it printed is the founding in his own contemporary words rather than in retrospect.

He was not a programmer by trade. Andrew Hewson read chemical physics at Sussex, joined the British Museum in 1972 to date objects by radiocarbon, and learned to program there on a 16-bit Hewlett-Packard whose 64K of memory was “a set of ferrite rings which lived in a drawer”. After seven years he moved to NERC in Oxfordshire.

The company began with him being wrong. Driving back from Manchester with his boss, they stopped at the Wimpy in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his boss started enthusing about the newly launched ZX80.

Andrew was not impressed. “I said, ‘you must be joking!’ and started listing all the reasons why the machine was awful. He said, ‘look at the price’. And the penny dropped.”

“So I bought a ZX-80 and played around with it. You only get one life.”

What he did next was write a book about it — Hints and Tips for the ZX-80, which became Hints and Tips for the ZX-81 when that machine arrived, and which is why he ended up writing Sinclair User’s Helpline column. Hewson Consultants was formed on £500 of capital. The odd second word in the name was literal: he was doing consultancy work at the same time.

It was never a hobby that turned into a business. “Right from the start it was business. Andrew was interested in making money, not acquiring a hobby. ‘I had a wife and two kids and a mortgage.’” He stayed at NERC for three more years, working the business at night with help from his wife Janet, and left in mid-1983. His brother Gordon came in as sales director. The office by then was “a scruffy little place in Wallingford”, and the games were duplicated by hand on a cassette deck and sold by post.

The author model, stated at the time

The practice this entry is built around is usually described from the outside, and usually after it stopped working. Hewson set it out himself in 1985, four years before Graftgold left:

“It’s very easy to find people who’ll write software. It’s very difficult to find someone who can write good software” — the answer being “by keeping faith with our authors.”

Sinclair User spells out what that meant in practice: if the first game sold, the next one was discussed immediately, and the author picked it. Mike Male wanted to write flight simulations, so Hewson did not push him towards arcade games.

Male is the model working. He was an air traffic controller at Heathrow who posted in an unsolicited flight simulation called Pilot — “It was dry. And very slow” — and stayed to write Nightflite and Heathrow Air Traffic Control. John Hardman arrived the same way with Puckman; Kim Topley wrote Quest and Fantasia Diamond. The names on the covers were, at the start, simply the names of the people who had sent the tapes in.

The catalogue, scored

CRASH’s issue 48 index gives Hewson one of the most consistent records of any publisher in this Vault’s working set — and its top entry is a game the received account of Hewson tends to leave out.

Game	Score	Issue	Author
Technician Ted	96%	13	—
Quazatron	94%	29	Steve Turner
Dragontorc	92%	16	Steve Turner
Firelord	91%	35	Steve Turner
Zynaps	91%	42	—
3D Lunattack	90%	4	Steve Turner
Exolon	90%	43	Raffaele Cecco
Pyracurse	90%	31	—
Ranarama	90%	38	Steve Turner
Uridium	90%	35	Andrew Braybrook
Impossaball	89%	37	—
Astroclone	88%	22	Steve Turner
Nebulus	85%	47	John M. Phillips
Southern Belle	84%	20	—
Di-Lithium Lift	61%	4	—
Gunrunner	55%	41	—
Evening Star	53%	45	—

Eleven titles at 88% or above is a hit rate almost nobody in this period matched, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for the author model described below: pay the same few people well, keep them, and their fourth game is better than their first.

⚠ Avalon’s CRASH score is contested in the sources and is not stated here. The issue 48 index carries two different figures for it at issue 7, and a later re-citation gives a third at issue 10. It is not safe to state.

The talent roster

Andrew Braybrook — Paradroid (1985, C64), Uridium (1986), Alleykat (1986), Morpheus (1987), Intensity (1988). Braybrook was Hewson’s flagship author, particularly on the C64. Paradroid was widely cited as one of the platform’s finest games — a single-screen droid combat game with a peculiar transfer mini-game that captured imaginations for years.
Steve Turner — 3D Space Wars (1983), Avalon (1984), Quazatron (1986, Spectrum Paradroid reimagining), Ranarama (1987), Stormbringer (1988). Turner’s name was on the Spectrum side of Hewson’s catalogue; Quazatron in particular is the Spectrum’s most-loved Braybrook adaptation.
Raffaele Cecco — Equinox (1986), Exolon (1987), Cybernoid (1988), Cybernoid II (1988), Stormlord (1989). Cecco’s late-80s Spectrum releases pushed the platform’s audio and visual ceiling — Stormlord’s music, by Dave Rogers, is one of the platform’s audio peaks.
Dave Rogers — the house composer on the Spectrum. CRASH credits him with the original Cybernoid tune and its Cybernoid II successor; Cecco’s Log records him delivering Stormlord’s music and effects in January 1989.

What Hewson published

The catalogue spans 1980-1991 and roughly 50 titles. Highlights:

Paradroid (1985, C64) — Andrew Braybrook’s transfer-game droid shooter. One of the most-acclaimed C64 games.
Quazatron (1986, Spectrum) — Steve Turner’s Spectrum reimagining of Paradroid. Source of the “QAOP movement convention” — the keys Quazatron used became the era’s de facto Spectrum control scheme.
Uridium (1986) — Braybrook’s parallax-scrolling shooter. C64 / Spectrum / others. Sequel Uridium+ in 1990.
Cybernoid (1988) — Raffaele Cecco’s tight-screen shooter; visually striking, mechanically demanding.
Stormlord (1989) — Cecco’s fantasy platformer, with Dave Rogers music.
Exolon (1987) — Cecco. Side-scrolling action.
Nebulus (1987) — Spectrum / C64. John M. Phillips. The rotating-tower platformer.

What the author model cost

The entry above describes Hewson’s distinguishing practice: put the programmer’s name on the box. It is worth following that practice to its conclusion, because the period press did.

By 1989 Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook — trading as Graftgold — had gone to Telecomsoft, the British Telecom software arm behind Firebird and Rainbird. The One, surveying the British industry in October 1991, treats this as the whole explanation:

At one point one of the country’s top software houses, Hewson never really recovered from Turner and Braybrook’s defection (as Graftgold) to Telecomsoft in 1989.

⚠ “Defection” is The One’s framing and is tidier than the record. Braybrook’s own development diary in Amiga Action shows Graftgold working on Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft from September 1988 to June 1989 and contracted by Hewson to produce Paradroid on ST and Amiga straight afterwards. The studio was serving both.

The irony is exact and it is not cheap. Hewson’s competitive advantage was treating programmers as authors — names on covers, names in the advertising, royalties rather than flat fees. That is what attracted the talent, and it is what made the talent portable. A publisher whose brand is Braybrook and Turner has no brand once Braybrook and Turner incorporate. The house that would not keep its programmers anonymous had, by design, no claim on them.

The One records that Telecomsoft did not benefit for long either: “Telecomsoft never really recovered either — its labels were sold to MicroProse not long afterwards.”

The 21st Century Entertainment continuation

By 1989, the 8-bit market was contracting and Hewson Consultants was pivoting toward 16-bit (Amiga, Atari ST). The transition didn’t work cleanly. The company went into receivership in March 1991, per The One’s survey published that October.

Andrew Hewson and the management team then founded 21st Century Entertainment, which published a run of well-regarded 16-bit pinball games — Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies, both with the Swedish developer Digital Illusions, later DICE — before fading in the late 1990s.

The 2013 revival

The name came back. In 2013 Andrew Hewson reformed Hewson Consultants Ltd, initially to write and publish Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, his account of the era, co-written with his son Rob Hewson and funded on Kickstarter. The book carries commentary from more than twenty people who were there, including Steve Turner of Graftgold, Raffaele Cecco and Jon Hare — Hewson authors writing about their own publisher, thirty years on.

The campaign’s success led to the games division being relaunched, with Rob Hewson as chief executive and creative director. He had previously been a game director at TT Fusion, the LEGO studio. Huey Games is that same company: the reformed Hewson Consultants Limited was renamed Huey Games Ltd in December 2017. It has taken UK Games Fund backing and makes games openly modelled on the Hewson catalogue of the 1980s.

⚠ This section is drawn from present-day sources rather than the period archive held here.

Why Hewson matters for Code Like It’s 198x

The Shadowkeep curriculum brief explicitly references mid-tier full-price 1987 Hewson as its quality target — the £7.95 commercial bar that defines what Phase 1 builds toward. Stormlord, Cybernoid, and Exolon are the reference points for what a 1987 Spectrum game looks and sounds like at the top of its commercial form. The beeper compositions on these games are the audio bar Unit 7 is measuring itself against — and on the Spectrum they are Dave Rogers’s work, not Tim Follin’s. See that entry for the evidence; the attribution matters if the bar is going to be described accurately.

The publisher that put the developer's name on the box