“The authors are very important,” Andrew Hewson told Sinclair User in 1985. “We always promote them as themselves. The Hewson name is simply a guarantee of standard.” Most British publishers of the time sold games under the company’s name. Hewson sold them under the programmers’: Steve Turner’s Avalon and Quazatron, Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid and Uridium, Raffaele Cecco’s Exolon and Cybernoid. The policy brought in a run of highly rated games. It also meant that when its best-known authors signed with a rival in 1987, the publisher had to fight in court over whose games were whose.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1980, by Andrew Hewson, with £500 of capital.
- Base: Wallingford, then an industrial estate at Didcot, with its own cassette-duplicating plant (1985).
- Main authors: Steve Turner, Andrew Braybrook, Raffaele Cecco, Mike Male, with music by Dave Rogers.
- Budget label: Rack-It, at £2.99, from 1987.
- End: receivership in spring 1991, reported by Zzap!64 in May.
- Afterwards: Andrew Hewson’s 21st Century Entertainment published Pinball Dreams (1992).
£500 and a cup of tea
Sinclair User profiled the company for its fifth birthday in October 1985. Andrew Hewson was not a programmer by trade. He had read chemical physics at Sussex, joined the British Museum in 1972 to date objects by radiocarbon, and learned to program on the museum’s 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 the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in Oxfordshire.
The company began with him being wrong. Driving back from Manchester with his boss, he stopped at the Wimpy in Stratford-upon-Avon, and his boss started enthusing about the new ZX80. “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.” He told Sinclair Programs the same story that year: “It was the summer of 1980 and the ZX-80 had just been launched.”
What he did next was write a book, Hints and Tips for the ZX-80, which became Hints and Tips for the ZX-81 when that machine arrived, and which led to his long-running Helpline column in Sinclair User. “Hewson Consultants was thus formed on a mere £500 of capital. The consultant part was because Andrew also did some consultancy work.” It was a business from the start: “I had a wife and two kids and a mortgage.” He ran it at night alongside his NERC job, with help from his wife Janet, until his brother Gordon joined as sales director to take on the administration. The first games were sold by mail order and copied “the hard way. On a cassette deck, by hand”. By 1983 the company had “a scruffy little place in Wallingford”, and Hewson left NERC in the middle of that year. By 1985 it had moved to a Didcot industrial estate and installed its own duplicating plant, because, Hewson said, “we couldn’t get guaranteed supplies of our software”.
Authors who sent in tapes
The early authors arrived in the post. Mike Male, an air traffic controller at Heathrow, sent in an unsolicited flight simulation called Pilot. “It was dry. And very slow,” but Male stayed to write Nightflite and Heathrow Air Traffic Control, and later, with a railway-enthusiast friend, the train simulation Southern Belle. John Hardman sent in Puckman “in just the same way”. Kim Topley wrote the adventures Quest and Fantasia Diamond.
Hewson set out the policy that kept them. “It’s very easy to find people who’ll write software. It’s very difficult to find someone who can write good software,” he said, and the answer was “by keeping faith with our authors”. If an author’s first game sold, the next one was discussed at once, and the author chose it: if Mike Male wanted to write simulations, Hewson would not push him into arcade games.
Steve Turner joined in August 1983. He had gone to the same school as Hewson, and his first games for the company were 3D space shooters, Seiddab Attack, Space Wars and Lunattack. Hewson admitted to Sinclair User that “as games, they were not overly successful or particularly good”, but the programming underneath led to Turner’s arcade adventures Avalon and Dragontorc. By 1985 Hewson employed four in-house programmers for conversions and tools, while its main authors stayed freelance.
The catalogue, scored
CRASH’s index of its first four years, printed in January 1988, shows how consistently Hewson’s Spectrum games scored.
| Game | CRASH score | Issue | Programmer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technician Ted | 96% | 13 | Steve Marsden and Dave Cooke |
| Quazatron | 94% | 29 | Steve Turner |
| Dragontorc | 92% | 16 | Steve Turner |
| Firelord | 91% | 35 | Steve Crow |
| 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 | Dominic Robinson, from Andrew Braybrook’s Commodore 64 original |
| Impossaball | 89% | 37 | — |
| Astroclone | 88% | 22 | Steve Turner |
| Nebulus | 85% | 47 | John Phillips |
| Southern Belle | 84% | 20 | Mike Male and a collaborator |
| Di-Lithium Lift | 61% | 4 | — |
| Gunrunner | 55% | 41 | — |
| Evening Star | 53% | 45 | — |
Twelve of the seventeen scored 88% or more. CRASH’s own retrospective in the same issue singled out Quazatron: Paradroid had been Braybrook’s game on the Commodore 64, “but Steve Turner’s Spectrum Quazatron borrowed from it and reinvented it, making it a wholly new and interesting product”.
On the Commodore 64 the lead author was Braybrook, who with Turner made up the development team Graftgold. Hewson published his Gribbly’s Day Out, Paradroid, Uridium and Alleykat in 1985 and 1986. Hewson also co-published Jeff Minter’s Iridis Alpha with Llamasoft in 1986.
Budget, after all
In August 1985 Hewson told Sinclair User that the company was “not interested in the budget range because of the aura associated with it”. Two years later it launched one. CRASH reported in late 1987 on “Hewson’s £2.99 Rack-It label”, whose titles included Draughts Genius and Ocean Conqueror, and quoted Andrew Hewson on why everything on it would appear on the Spectrum: “it’s much easier to do budget conversions than full-price ones”.
Graftgold goes to Telecomsoft
At the PCW Show in September 1987, Telecomsoft, British Telecom’s software arm and owner of Firebird and Rainbird, signed Graftgold. CRASH reported that Turner and Braybrook would be joined by Dominic Robinson and John Cumming, “both from Hewson”. Commodore User reported the fallout the next month. Graftgold, “who had hitherto exclusively produced software for the Hewson label”, had signed to write for Firebird alone, and Hewson had been advertising two Graftgold games, Braybrook’s Morpheus and Magnetron. Copies of Morpheus were already going out for review when Firebird was understood to have obtained an injunction stopping Hewson from publishing it. Andrew Hewson would say only that the dispute concerned “the extent to which an exclusive licence existed”. Morpheus came out under Telecomsoft’s Rainbird label.
Looking back in October 1991, The One said that Hewson “never really recovered from Turner and Braybrook’s defection (as Graftgold) to Telecomsoft”, though it dated the move to 1989. The break was not complete either way. Braybrook’s development diary in Amiga Action records Graftgold converting Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft from September 1988 to the end of June 1989, “when we were contracted to produce Paradroid on the ST and Amiga by Hewson”. That game became Paradroid 90.
Cecco, Rogers and the late 1980s
Hewson’s later Spectrum hits came mostly from Raffaele Cecco: Exolon (1987), Cybernoid (1988), Cybernoid II (1988) and Stormlord (1989). Dave Rogers wrote the music. CRASH credited him with the original Cybernoid tune and its successor, and Cecco’s development diary in CRASH recorded Rogers delivering Stormlord’s music on 11 November 1988 (published in January 1989). John Phillips wrote Nebulus (1987).
Receivership, and 21st Century
In spring 1991 the company went into receivership. Zzap!64 reported in May that “despite a turnover of approximately one million a year, financial problems led to receivers being sent in to recover debts owed”, and hoped the company would be sold whole to finish Rubicon and Nebulus 2. Amiga User International called it “administrative receivership” and recalled that Braybrook’s departure had led to “a legal dispute” with Telecomsoft. ACE was drier: Andrew Hewson “has managed to move from a company with lots and lots of debts to one with… hey presto!… no debts at all!”
The new company was 21st Century Entertainment, with Andrew Hewson as its contact. Amiga Format wrote in 1992 that it “came about following the demise of Andrew Hewson’s former company”. Its best-known releases were the Amiga pinball games from the Swedish developer Digital Illusions, Pinball Dreams (84% in Amiga Format issue 33) and Pinball Fantasies (90% in issue 41). Digital Illusions later became DICE.
The name comes back
In September 2013 a new company called Hewson Consultants Limited was registered, with Andrew Hewson as a director. Its first project was a book, Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, Andrew Hewson’s account of the period written with his son Rob Hewson and funded on Kickstarter. The company went on to publish games, and in December 2017 it was renamed Huey Games Ltd.
Sources
- Chris Bourne, profile of Hewson Consultants, Sinclair User issue 43, October 1985, pp. 106–108: Andrew Hewson’s background; the ZX80 and the Wimpy; Hints and Tips; £500 of capital; NERC, Janet and Gordon Hewson; mail order and hand duplication; Wallingford and the Didcot plant; Mike Male, John Hardman, Kim Topley; “keeping faith with our authors”; Steve Turner’s arrival in August 1983 and his early games; four in-house programmers; “we always promote them as themselves”.
- Sinclair Programs, May 1985: Hewson’s account of the summer of 1980.
- Sinclair User issue 41, August 1985: Hewson on the budget range.
- CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (the scores and issue numbers above); retrospective on Quazatron, Ranarama, Firelord (Steve Crow) and Dominic Robinson’s Uridium; Rack-It and Andrew Hewson on budget conversions.
- CRASH issue 13, February 1985: Technician Ted, by Steve Marsden and Dave Cooke.
- CRASH issue 43, August 1987: Exolon, by Raffaele Cecco. CRASH issue 47, December 1987: Nebulus, by John Phillips.
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, and issue 47, December 1987: the Rack-It label.
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987: “Telecomsoft signs Graftgold” at the PCW Show; the men behind Graftgold; Dominic Robinson and John Cumming.
- Commodore User, November 1987: the dispute over Morpheus and Magnetron, and the injunction.
- Zzap!64 issue 11, March 1986, and issue 22, February 1987: Gribbly’s Day Out, Paradroid and Alleykat as Hewson games. Issues 19 and 20, November and December 1986: Iridis Alpha (Llamasoft/Hewson). Issue 38, June 1988: Morpheus (Rainbird).
- Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: Rainbow Islands for Telecomsoft and the Hewson contract for Paradroid on ST and Amiga.
- CRASH issue 57, October 1988: Dave Rogers’s Cybernoid music. CRASH issue 60, January 1989: Cecco’s diary, Stormlord’s music from Dave Rogers.
- The One issue 37, October 1991: survey of the industry (“never really recovered from Turner and Braybrook’s defection”).
- Zzap!64 issue 73, May 1991, p. 6: the receivership.
- Amiga User International, June 1991: “administrative receivership”; the legal dispute with Telecomsoft.
- ACE issue 45, June 1991: Andrew Hewson and the debts.
- Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: 21st Century Entertainment, Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies. Amazing Computing vol. 7 no. 12, December 1992: Pinball Dreams “produced by Digital Illusions and distributed by 21st Century Entertainment in the U.K.”.
- Companies House, company 08708755 (web, secondary): incorporation of Hewson Consultants Limited on 27 September 2013 and its renaming as Huey Games Ltd on 12 December 2017.
- Kickstarter, “Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers by Andrew Hewson & Rob Hewson” (web, secondary): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robhwson/hints-and-tips-for-videogame-pioneers
- Wikipedia, “DICE (company)” (web, secondary): Digital Illusions as the forerunner of DICE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICE_(company)