Melbourne House

The Australian publisher that reached Britain as a book house first, and documented three Sinclair ROMs before it sold a hit game

Melbourne House, founded as a book publisher in 1977 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen in Melbourne, became one of the most respected software publishers of the 8-bit era through its in-house development studio Beam Software. Britain met it as a publisher of Sinclair books: by 1981 it was advertising Ian Logan's Understanding Your ZX81 ROM, the start of a four-book run that ended with the Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly. The Hobbit (1982) then brought literary text-adventure design to mass audiences and Way of the Exploding Fist (1985) founded the 8-bit fighting game.

sinclair-zx-spectrumcommodore-64amstrad-cpcMSXpublishingaustralian-gamingbeam-softwarecomputer-books1977–2010

Melbourne House was an Australian publisher founded in 1977 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen in Melbourne. The company began as a book publisher — initially focused on cookbooks and reference titles — and pivoted into software in the early 1980s as the home-computer market emerged. By 1985 Melbourne House was one of the most-respected publishers of the 8-bit era, and its in-house development studio Beam Software (renamed Krome Studios Melbourne later) produced games that competed at the top of the British and American charts from twelve thousand miles away.

Three distinct strands of Melbourne House’s output matter for the Spectrum-era story:

The Hobbit (1982) — A licensed Tolkien text adventure that became one of the platform’s largest-selling games and a milestone in parser design.
Way of the Exploding Fist (1985) — The fighting game that established the 8-bit beat-’em-up genre.
The book division — Most importantly for the assembly-track tradition, Melbourne House published Logan & O’Hara’s Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly (1983) — the canonical reference book that every British Spectrum machine-coder owned a copy of.

The combination — serious games, serious books — gave Melbourne House a cultural footprint disproportionate to its size.

The order matters, and the usual summary gets it backwards. Britain met Melbourne House as a book publisher before it met the company as a games label. Full-page advertisements ran in Your Computer from August 1981 — a year before The Hobbit — for Not Only 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX81 1K (£6.95), Understanding Your ZX81 ROM by Dr Ian Logan (£8.95), and The Complete Sinclair ZX81 BASIC Course, a 240-page ring binder at £17.50 with a companion cassette set. By December 1981 the advertisements were calling Melbourne House “the world’s leading publisher of books and software for the Sinclair ZX 81”.

Nor was the company as remote as “Australian publisher” implies. Orders went to Melbourne House Publishers at 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London SE10 through 1982; CRASH photographed “the new London headquarters of Melbourne House in Richmond” in April 1984. ACE, looking back from 1990, described the arrangement precisely: the British operation “was set up as a UK software publishing base in 1982 for Australia-based Fred and Naomi Milgrom”, with product “sourced mainly from the Milgroms’ Beam Software”. Melbourne House was an Australian development studio with a London publisher attached.

Fast facts

Founders: Alfred Milgrom (a.k.a. Fred Milgrom) and Naomi Besen.
Founded: 1977, Melbourne, Australia. Australian incorporation.
Original business: General trade book publishing.
Software arm launched: ~1981.
In-house development studio: Beam Software (founded 1980 by Milgrom and Adam Lancman).
Major properties: The Hobbit (1982), Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), Lord of the Rings games (1985-86), Shadowfire (1985), Mugsy (1984), Sherlock (1984).
UK publishing base: established 1982; Greenwich, then Richmond by 1984.
Acquired: by Mastertronic in February 1987 (per ACE’s contemporaneous review of that year), then by Infogrames (1999); Beam Software continued as Krome Studios Melbourne until 2010.

The Hobbit (1982)

The Hobbit was designed by Veronika Megler, then a computer science student at Melbourne University, and programmed by Philip Mitchell, who was working on it part-time while finishing his own degree. CRASH visited the team in April 1984 and found a third name that usually gets lost: Stuart Ritchie, credited there as the designer of Inglish itself. Milgrom, CRASH noted, presided over the whole. The project was his idea — Computer & Video Games called it “the brain child of Melbourne’s ideas man and managing director, Alfred Milgrom” — and it took two years to finish.

The Hobbit shipped in 1982 across multiple home computers — most prominently the ZX Spectrum — and became one of the era’s defining text adventures. The game’s distinctive features:

Inglish parser. Ritchie and Mitchell’s natural-language parser accepted full sentences: “Give the sword to Thorin and ask him to follow you.” The parser was widely cited at the time as the most sophisticated in any commercial home-computer game.
Independent NPCs. Characters acted on their own initiative — Thorin would wander off, sing songs, sit down. The behaviour could be helpful or maddening depending on circumstance. The unpredictability gave the game an almost emergent quality unusual for the parser-adventure genre.
Illustrations. Graphics accompanied text on capable machines — a meaningful upgrade from pure text adventures.
Tolkien licence. Rare in the era; Melbourne House negotiated rights with the Tolkien estate, which gave the game commercial visibility and brand pull beyond the gaming press.

The game sold over a million copies across all formats — an extraordinary figure for the period — and is consistently cited in retrospectives of British and Australian home-computer software.

⚠ Edge called it “arguably the world’s first graphic adventure” in 1997. Treat that as enthusiasm rather than fact: On-Line Systems’ Mystery House shipped illustrated text adventures on the Apple II in 1980. The Hobbit’s claim is to the parser and the independent NPCs, and it does not need the other one.

Way of the Exploding Fist (1985)

Way of the Exploding Fist shipped in 1985 on Spectrum and C64 at £8.95 and established the 8-bit fighting-game template that subsequent titles would copy and refine. Gregg Barnett — “Greg Barnett” in the period press — gets the design credit and has given the fullest account of it since, but CRASH’s October 1985 review credits five people: Barnett, Greg Holland, Stephan Taylor, Damian Watharow and William Teng. Features:

Multiple attack types. Crouching, jumping, spinning kicks, throws — a substantially larger move list than contemporary action games, driven from eight directions plus fire rather than a button per move.
Smooth animation. The character sprites are notably more fluid than the era’s norm. The C64 version is widely considered the platform’s best 8-bit fighter.
Two-player versus. A defining design choice; the genre’s social-play model traces to this game.
Genre-defining. Way of the Exploding Fist and rival International Karate (System 3) between them defined what an 8-bit beat-’em-up looked like.

It reached number one: Commodore User’s general C64 chart for September 1985 has it at the top, and Your Sinclair counted it among the Spectrum number ones of that winter on the Gallup-compiled MicroScope chart. The trade press was unambiguous about what it had started. Reviewing the sequel in March 1987, CRASH wrote that the original “was virtually unique… It founded the entire beat ’em up genre, and imitations have poured forth ever since” — and Amstrad Action, still grumbling about it in 1994, agreed that every one-on-one fighting game since followed “a direct lineage” from it.

The book division

Melbourne House’s identity as a publisher rather than a pure software developer matters historically, and the ROM books are the clearest case. The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly is usually described as though it arrived from nowhere in 1983. It did not. It was the fourth book in a run that Melbourne House had been building since 1981, across three machines, with the same author.

Ian Logan was, as the 1981 advertisements put it, “the first person to disassemble the Sinclair ZX80 Monitor”, and co-author of the ZX80 Companion. In 1981 he won the Rosetta Stone Award — given to the best independent product, software package or application for the ZX80 or ZX81 — for his work on how the ZX81 ROM operates. Melbourne House published him four times over:

Book	Author	Price	What it covered
Understanding Your ZX81 ROM (1981)	Ian Logan	£8.95	The ZX81 monitor explained, with a section on calling ROM routines from BASIC
ZX81 ROM Disassembly Part A	Ian Logan	£7.00	Every routine from `0000H` to `0F54H` — all functions except the floating-point calculator
ZX81 ROM Disassembly Part B	Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara	£8.00	`0F55H` to `1DFFH`, including the whole floating-point calculator
The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly (1983)	Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara	£9.95	The entire 16 KB Spectrum ROM, line by line

Two things fall out of that table. The Logan–O’Hara partnership that produced the Spectrum book formed on the ZX81, on Part B, where the floating-point calculator was hard enough to need a second mathematician. And the format — a commercially published, line-by-line, annotated disassembly of a machine’s entire ROM, sold to hobbyists at book-shop prices — was worked out over two years on two smaller machines before it was applied to the Spectrum. By September 1982 Melbourne House was already advertising the Spectrum volume as “sure to become the definitive book on the Spectrum”. It was right.

The Spectrum book remains the reference work for Spectrum machine-code programming; every serious British Spectrum developer of the 1980s owned a copy or had access to one. For the curriculum-tradition reasons covered in machine code for beginners, it occupies a structural position in the Spectrum scene that doesn’t have a real equivalent on most other platforms. What the ZX81 lineage adds is that the position was earned, incrementally, by a publisher that had decided documenting a ROM was a thing worth doing commercially — and had tested that belief twice before the Spectrum existed.

Other Melbourne House books included Machine Language Programming Made Simple For Your Sinclair (£8.95), Spectrum-specific programming primers, BASIC introductions, and the Spectrum Machine Code Made Easy series by James Walsh — a two-volume introductory assembly course that, alongside Usborne’s Machine Code for Beginners, was the standard entry point for the BASIC-to-assembly transition.

Beam Software

The Melbourne-based development studio that produced the games. Founded 1980 by Alfred Milgrom and Adam Lancman. Beam Software grew through the 1980s into a substantial studio (50+ developers at its peak) producing not just Melbourne House’s own titles but contract work for other publishers. Notable Beam Software titles beyond those listed: The Way of the Tiger (1986), Bangkok Knights (1987), Rock’n Wrestle (1985), The Hobbit’s sequels (Lord of the Rings, Shadows of Mordor, The Crack of Doom — 1985-89), and many more across all major 8-bit and 16-bit platforms.

By 1987 Beam employed 25 programmers working in groups of four or five, each group taking a game from start to finish — which CRASH reckoned made it the biggest programming team outside Japan and the United States.

The record, on two scales

Game	Score	Issue	Scale
Starion	94%	16	percentage
Dodgy Geezers	86%	38	percentage
Mugsy	73%	6	percentage
Fighting Warrior	73%	22	percentage
Enterprise	59%	41	percentage
Fist II	58%	33	percentage
Knucklebusters	52%	40	percentage
Bazooka Bill	42%	38	percentage
Sherlock	8/10	9	Adventure Trail
Mordon’s Quest	8/10	19	Adventure Trail
Hampstead	7/10	10	Adventure Trail

⚠ The last three are scored out of ten, on CRASH’s separate Adventure Trail scale. They are not percentages and must not be read as 80% and 70%.

Two things stand out. Melbourne House’s highest-scoring Spectrum game is Starion, at 94% — not The Hobbit, not Exploding Fist, and not a book tie-in. And the Exploding Fist sequel fell to 58%, with Knucklebusters at 52% and Bazooka Bill at 42%: the company that defined the one-on-one fighting game in 1985 was, three years later, being outscored in its own genre.

What Mastertronic did with it

ACE dated the takeover precisely in its review of 1987: “Mastertronic swallowed up Melbourne House in February; eight months later, Virgin bought a substantial minority interest in Mastertronic.”

Milgrom’s own account of why he sold, given to Edge ten years later, is that the company did not have the depth to run publishing and development at once, so it sold the publishing side and kept Beam. What followed was worse than the alternative: “Mastertronic decided that Melbourne House should move directly to 16bit and ditch its 8bit heritage, and as a result we spent a whole year developing products that went nowhere. They never got published. It was a complete waste of time.”

That is the note the label goes out on — not a failure of the games, but a new owner discarding the platform the name had been built on. Melbourne House survived afterwards as a badge inside Virgin Mastertronic. Beam Software continued as a studio, was renamed Krome Studios Melbourne in 2006, and closed in 2010.

Why Melbourne House matters for Code Like It’s 198x

Two reasons:

The Logan/O’Hara disassembly is the reference book the Project’s assembly track sits in the lineage of. The Spectrum ROM-disassembly tradition — that the bytes in the ROM are inspectable, named, documented — is fundamental to the Project’s view of the platform as a teachable system. Melbourne House made that disassembly available to a generation of British readers.
Beam Software’s Hobbit and Exploding Fist are reference points for what a small remote studio could ship at the top commercial bar of the platform. The Project’s curriculum bar is not a million-seller bar, but the existence of those games in the canonical Spectrum top tier is part of how that bar gets defined.