Kixx

Kixx was US Gold’s budget label, and its business was mostly re-release — taking titles whose full-price life was over and putting them back on shelves at a few pounds, in new packaging, often years later.

That sounds like a footnote. It was a substantial part of how the British software market worked.

Fast facts

Parent: US Gold.
Business: budget re-releases of catalogue titles, plus compilations.
Press evidence in this library: reviewed in ZZAP!64 and Amiga Power from 1991 to 1995, at £3.99–£12.99 — the price range that defines the category.
Sibling labels: part of the same budget wave as Kixx XL, Hit Squad, GBH, Silverbird and Players.
Typical re-releases: Flimbo’s Quest, Super Monaco GP — full-price hits of two or three years earlier.

Launch, as reported at the time

CRASH announced it in September 1988, and the announcement fixes both the date and the price:

…a selective budget venture. Known as Kixx (not sure why) the new label is [U.S. Gold’s]. Games retail at £2.99 and should be ready to burn a hole in your pocket some time in the middle of August.

So: August 1988, at £2.99, and even the magazine could not work out the name. Prices drifted upward later, which is where the £3.99 commonly quoted for Kixx comes from — but the label did not start there.

The word doing the work in that announcement is selective. Kixx was not dumping a back catalogue indiscriminately; it was choosing which of U.S. Gold’s titles were worth a second release, which is what separates a re-release imprint from a clearance sale.

Who founded it

The fast facts give the parent company and stop there. ACE named the people in November 1988, and they did not come from US Gold:

Kixx are a new budget label determined to grab a slice of the ever-increasing budget 8-bit market. Kixx has been formed by ex-Mastertronic employees John Meatyman and Lesley Bossen, who reckon the Kixx philosophy of quality not quantity is just the thing the market needs.

Two people out of Mastertronic — the company that had invented the British budget tier — hired to run a budget label for a full-price publisher. “Quality not quantity” is a direct shot at the house they came from, whose model was a rack of several hundred titles.

The same report corrects the catalogue’s scope. Initial releases were “culled from the U.S. Gold and Gremlin back catalogue — such as Gauntlet and Metrocross”, so Kixx was re-releasing more than its parent’s own titles.

The third that was meant to be new

The same ACE piece states the plan:

They [plan] 24 titles over the next year with approximately a third of those being original titles. All games will retail for £2.99 on cassette.

A third. Not a footnote — a stated third of the release schedule, budgeted as new work.

And it happened. By February 1989 ACE reported that the Spanish house Topo Soft — “the authors of US Gold’s Pepsi Challenge game, Mad Mix” — had “been signed up to produce Kixx’s first original games”. The following month it reviewed the result:

Blackbeard — Kixx’s first original product, and it’s been programmed by Spanish software house Topo Soft. Spectrum: £2.99.

So the label that this Vault holds up as the representative re-release imprint was, within six months of launch, commissioning original games from a Spanish developer and selling them at budget price. That is worth keeping, because it complicates the tidy division between budget-as-recycling and full-price-as-new.

What the press thought of the model

The re-release business had critics at the time, and ACE was one of them. Reviewing a month of budget releases in February 1989, on the practice of dressing up old designs:

Tarting up 16-year-old (at least) game concepts and passing them off under the guise of ‘classics’ is hardly cricket.

Worth setting beside the case below that budget labels kept the platform alive. Both are true. The same mechanism that kept software affordable and machines commercially viable also filled the racks with material whose main qualification was that it already existed.

The market context in the same issue: Codemasters had just made £2.99 its starting price for budget, so the tier Kixx launched into was hardening around that figure across the whole industry.

The economics of the second release

A budget label solves a problem specific to this industry: a game costs a great deal to make and almost nothing to copy, so a title that has stopped selling at £9.95 still has value if you can reach people who would never have paid £9.95.

The re-release model exploited that directly. Development was already paid for. Packaging got cheaper — a smaller box, a thinner manual, sometimes just a cassette in a case. And the audience was enormous: children with pocket money, for whom a £3.99 game was an achievable weekly purchase and a £9.95 one was a birthday.

The cultural effect was larger than the margins suggest. A generation’s game collection was substantially budget re-releases, which means the games people remember playing are frequently not the games that were reviewed that month — they are the hits of two or three years earlier, arriving late and cheap.

Why it mattered

Budget labels are the reason British 8-bit software stayed a mass-market product for as long as it did. They kept machines alive commercially past the point where full-price publishers had moved to the next platform, and they made a back catalogue continuously available at a time when nothing resembling digital distribution existed.

Kixx is a representative example, not an exceptional one — which is exactly why it is worth an entry. It shows the machinery.

US Gold's second life for old hits