Krisalis Software
Rotherham, and the business of conversion
A South Yorkshire house whose product was often the port and not the game — moving other people's software between machines, and taking German games to Britain and British games to the PC.
Krisalis worked out of Rotherham and did two things at once: it published games, and it converted them. Its own titles — Manchester United, Soccer Kid, Arabian Nights — sit alongside a steady trade in moving software between machines, which is where a great deal of the era’s actual engineering effort went.
Fast facts
- Based: Rotherham, South Yorkshire.
- Press evidence in this library: Amiga Power, 1991–1994, at up to £25.99.
- Published: Manchester United and Manchester United Europe, Soccer Kid, Arabian Nights, Hill Street Blues, Lost Treasures.
- Credited developers in Amiga Power headers: Starbyte Software (German), Rich Teather, Nigel and the Krisalis team.
Conversion as the product
A game written for the Amiga did not run on a PC, an ST, a Spectrum or a console. Somebody had to write it again — often most of it — against different graphics hardware, a different processor, different memory and different input.
This was not a minor sideline. Most British commercial programming in these years was conversion work, and it was hard: the original team had tuned everything to the machine they knew, and the port had to reproduce the feel of that on hardware with different strengths. Do it badly and the reviews say so.
Krisalis is a good example because the trade ran in both directions through it. It published German developer Starbyte’s work in Britain, and it moved its own British games out to other platforms.
Manchester United Europe, in Greek
The Greek press caught the interesting part. Reviewing the PC version of Manchester United Europe, a Greek magazine notes that the game had taken a substantial share of Kick Off’s following thanks to its ease of control and good graphics — and then that Krisalis, building on that success, had converted the program to PC, where several of the characteristics that made it famous on the 8-bits had been left out.
That is a precise statement of the conversion problem, from outside Britain, about a British game. What makes a game good is frequently bound up with the machine it was written for; move it and some of that does not survive. The Greek reviewer could see it because they had played both.
It is also a second piece of evidence, alongside Anco, that British football games had a continental audience that argued about them in detail — in this case measuring a Rotherham game against Kick Off as the standard.
Teque House
The address on Krisalis advertising is worth recording because it names the other half of the operation: Krisalis Software Ltd, Teque House, Masons Yard, Downs Row, Moorgate, Rotherham S60 2HD.
A conversion house operating out of a building named for its associated development studio is a small thing, and it tells you what the company was: the product was the porting capability, and Krisalis was organised around it.
The Archimedes conversions
The clearest evidence for the thesis above, and the least likely.
Acorn User, October 1992, advertising Krisalis’s line for the Acorn Archimedes:
Lotus Turbo Challenge II is regarded as the best driving game to date. In an amazing piece of programming Krisalis have converted this best seller for the Acorn Archimedes and compatible computers.
Lotus Turbo Challenge II is Gremlin’s — the middle of the Amiga racing trilogy — and Krisalis moved it onto a machine that almost nobody published games for at all. The advertisement is a direct-order coupon: cheque, postal order, Access or Visa, dispatch on 16 October 1992, carriage paid in the UK, overseas add £3.
That is the conversion business at its furthest extension. A South Yorkshire studio taking a Sheffield publisher’s Amiga hit to Acorn’s workstation- derived home computer, and selling it by post because there was no retail channel worth the shelf space.
Hill Street Blues, and what Krisalis built when it was not porting
Worth noting because it contradicts the shorthand. Krisalis’s own 1991 advertising for Hill Street Blues describes something considerably more ambitious than a licence:
Krisalis have created a computer controlled city which generates an environment displaying 300 vehicles and 400 people who live and work within the Hill Street Precinct for you to interact with… you can interact with up to nine incidents simultaneously, ranging from Muggers to Bank Robbery, Drug Pushers to Murderers.
A persistent simulated city with a population going about its business and crimes generated against it, on 1991 hardware, sold on a television licence. The company whose product was usually somebody else’s game was capable of more than the conversion work it is remembered for.
Why it mattered
Krisalis is porting — the least celebrated and most widely practised craft of the period. Almost nothing that sold well existed on only one machine, and every one of those extra versions was somebody’s year of work.
It also stands for the regional British studio: Rotherham, not London, doing steady contract and licence work instead of chasing a hit — the pattern that kept a Yorkshire games industry alive between the eighties boom and whatever came next.