Melbourne House sold British Spectrum owners two of the things they kept longest: The Hobbit, the adventure that talked back, and The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly, the book that explained every byte of the machine’s 16K ROM. Both came from a company run from the other side of the world. Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen founded it in Melbourne in 1977 as a general publisher, and CRASH explained in 1984 that the company “derives its name from the city in Australia where it is based”. Its games were written in Melbourne by the couple’s development studio, Beam Software, and sold in Britain by a publishing office in London.
Books first
CRASH credited the move into computers to Milgrom’s knowledge of computer science and Besen’s marketing expertise. In August 1980, it said, the company published one of the first books for the personal computer market, 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80, and it was “an overwhelming success”.
British readers met the company through its books. In the August/September 1981 Your Computer, the London dealer The Essential Software Company advertised Not Only 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX81 1K at £6.95, “Published by Melbourne House Publishers Ltd”. By November the list included Ian Logan’s Understanding Your ZX81 ROM (£8.95). In December a full-page Melbourne House advertisement offered The Complete Sinclair ZX81 BASIC Course, “over 240 pages” in a ring binder at £17.50, with its programs on cassette, and called the company “the world’s leading publisher of books and software for the Sinclair ZX 81”. Orders went to 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London.
The ROM books
The ROM books were a run of four by the same author, built up over two years and three machines. The 1981 advertisements called Logan “the first person to disassemble the Sinclair ZX80 Monitor”, a claim no independent source confirms. In March 1982 the American newsletter SYNTAX ZX80 reported that he had won its first annual Rosetta Stone award for his 8K ROM disassembly. Melbourne House put a photograph of him receiving it in its advertisements that summer, under the headline “Why is this man smiling?”
| Book | Author | Price | What it covered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understanding Your ZX81 ROM (1981) | Ian Logan | £8.95 | How the ZX81’s ROM is organised, with a section on calling machine code from BASIC |
| ZX81 ROM Disassembly Part A (1982) | Ian Logan | £7.00 | Every location from 0000H to 0F54H: everything except the floating-point calculator |
| ZX81 ROM Disassembly Part B (1982) | Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara | £8.00 | 0F55H to 1DFFH, including the floating-point calculator |
| The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly (1983) | Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara | £9.95 | The whole 16K Spectrum ROM, routine by routine |
The partnership that produced the Spectrum book began on the ZX81, with Part B. The same advertisements, in August and September 1982, announced that Logan was working on Understanding Your Spectrum, “sure to become the definitive book on the Spectrum”. Melbourne House also sold Machine Language Programming Made Simple for Your Sinclair (£8.95), and by 1984 CRASH could list a “very wide range of books for several computers”, including the Spectrum Hardware Manual and Logan’s Spectrum Microdrive Book. Milgrom told Computer & Video Games in 1983 that the books had a purpose beyond sales: they were there “to help people” bring their own programming ideas up to a publishable standard.
The Hobbit
The Hobbit was Milgrom’s project. Computer & Video Games called it “the brain child of Melbourne’s ideas man and managing director, Alfred Milgrom”. Philip Mitchell started on it part-time while still studying computer science, and it took another two years to finish. Mitchell insisted it was a team effort: “Alfred assembled a team… myself and another programmer called Veronica” (Veronika Megler). When CRASH visited in 1984 it also named Stuart Richie as “the designer of Inglish”, the game’s parser, with the whole “presided over by Alfred Milgrom”.
It came out for the 48K Spectrum at £14.95 with a paperback of Tolkien’s novel in the box. Inglish accepted whole sentences and chains of commands, and the other characters acted on their own, talking “not only with the player but also with the other characters”, as C&VG put it in January 1983. CRASH noticed the side effect: characters “didn’t always do the same thing twice”, and could turn up dead “as if some disaster had overtaken them while your back was turned”. CRASH called it “the biggest selling adventure for the Spectrum of all time”, and said The Hobbit and Melbourne House’s Scramble-style shooter Penetrator had been the two best-selling Spectrum programs of 1983. Readers of C&VG voted The Hobbit Best Strategy Game of 1983, and runner-up for Game of the Year.
The team’s next adventure pushed the parser further. Sherlock (1984), with Holmes questioning suspects and trying to convince Lestrade, needed Inglish “refined and improved enormously”, CRASH reported. Its Adventure Trail column gave it 8/10. The Lord of the Rings followed in March 1986 (9/10), and Shadows of Mordor in June 1987.
The Way of the Exploding Fist
The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985, £8.95) was a one-on-one karate game whose CRASH review credited five people: Greg Barnett (later spelt Gregg), Greg Holland, Stephan Taylor, Damian Watharow and William Teng. It scored 92% in CRASH, and in September 1985 it was number one in both Commodore User’s general chart and its Commodore 64 chart. On the Spectrum, Your Sinclair counted it among that winter’s number ones on the Gallup chart. Readers of C&VG made it Game of the Year for 1985 and Melbourne House Software House of the Year, ending two years in which Ultimate had taken the top award. Paula Byrne, who had been handling Melbourne House’s publicity in 1984, and Geoff Heath collected the awards. Edge later put the game’s sales at 500,000 across Europe.
The press agreed about what it had started. Reviewing the sequel in March 1987, CRASH said the original “founded the entire beat ’em up genre, and imitations have poured forth ever since”. Amstrad Action was still saying in 1994 that “every one-on-one beat-em-up ever follows a direct lineage from” it.
Beam Software
Beam was the Melbourne half of the business, founded in 1980; ACE called it “the Milgroms’ Beam Software”, and said the London company existed to publish what it made. When CRASH interviewed the Beam programmer Steve Taylor in April 1987, Beam had 25 programmers working in groups of four or five, each taking a game from start to finish, which the magazine reckoned made it “the biggest programming team outside Japan and the US”. A second division, Arcade Machine, made shoot-’em-ups such as Bazooka Bill.
The rest of the Melbourne House record shows how uneven the output could be. In CRASH’s ratings, the best were the space shooter Starion (94%), Exploding Fist (92%), Shadows of Mordor (93%) and Dodgy Geezers (86%). Rock ’n Wrestle managed 48%, and in the months around the sale Fist II got 58%, Bazooka Bill 42% and Knucklebusters 52%. Looking back, CRASH said Melbourne House “had been going through a poor patch for some six months”.
The sale to Mastertronic
In February 1987 Mastertronic, the £1.99 budget publisher, bought Melbourne House. CRASH heard the news while its Steve Taylor interview was going to press, and noted that the deal “had been under discussion for some time”. Geoff Heath, by then at Mastertronic, promised that Melbourne House would keep its own identity and would not produce budget titles.
Milgrom gave Edge his reasons ten years later. Around 1987, he said, many of the UK staff had moved to other companies while the industry was moving from 8-bit to 16-bit machines, and “we didn’t have the management depth at that time to run both the publishing and development sides of things, so we ended up selling off the Melbourne House publishing side”. Beam stayed with the Milgroms. What followed, in his account, was wasted: “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.” ACE reported in 1990 that Melbourne House still existed as a label within Virgin Mastertronic.
Later history
Beam turned to writing games for other publishers. ACE described it in 1990 as a Nintendo-approved developer working almost entirely on Nintendo games for Japan and America, and by 1997 Edge counted 28 NES games, 14 for the Super NES and 25 for the Game Boy, among others. Beam’s managing director, Adam Lancman, told Edge that “Virgin simply let the Melbourne House name lapse… So we took it back”. The real-time strategy game Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy, released in March 1997, was the first Beam game under the Melbourne House label in almost ten years.
Infogrames bought Beam in 1999 and renamed it Infogrames Melbourne House. It became Atari Melbourne House in 2003, when Infogrames took the Atari name. In November 2006 Krome Studios bought the studio from Atari and renamed it Krome Studios Melbourne. Krome closed it on 15 October 2010.
Sources
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984, pp. 56–58: Melbourne House feature (founded in 1977 by Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen; the name; 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80 in August 1980; the book range; The Hobbit and Penetrator as 1983’s best sellers; the Sherlock team, including Stuart Richie as “the designer of Inglish”; Paula Byrne in charge of PR; the Richmond headquarters).
- Your Computer, August/September 1981, p. 58, and October 1981: The Essential Software Company advertisement for Not Only 30 Programs (£6.95). November 1981: Melbourne House advertisement for Understanding Your ZX81 ROM (“the first person to dissassemble the Sinclair ZX80 Monitor”). December 1981: Melbourne House advertisement (The Complete Sinclair ZX81 BASIC Course, £17.50; “the world’s leading publisher”; Machine Language Programming Made Simple, £8.95; 131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich).
- Sinclair User issue 3, June 1982, p. 8: advertisement for ZX81 ROM Disassembly Parts A and B. Issue 5, August 1982, and issue 6, September 1982, p. 4: “Why is this man smiling?” advertisement (prices; Understanding Your Spectrum “sure to become the definitive book on the Spectrum”).
- SYNTAX ZX80 vol. 3 no. 3 (The Harvard Group, March 1982), p. 1: Logan’s Rosetta Stone award.
- Ian Logan and Frank O’Hara, The Complete Spectrum ROM Disassembly (Melbourne House, 1983); price from Sinclair User issue 12, March 1983, p. 8.
- Computer & Video Games issue 25, November 1983: Alfred Milgrom on why Melbourne House published books.
- Computer & Video Games Book of Adventure, supplement to issue 27, January 1984: Philip Mitchell interview (The Hobbit as “the brain child of” Milgrom; the team).
- Computer & Video Games issue 15, January 1983: The Hobbit (48K Spectrum, £14.95, book included; characters communicating with each other). Issue 29, March 1984, p. 15: Golden Joystick Awards for 1983. Issue 55, May 1986, pp. 90–91: Golden Joystick Awards for 1985.
- CRASH issue 21, October 1985, p. 12: The Way of the Exploding Fist review and credits.
- Commodore User, September 1985, p. 35: general and Commodore 64 charts.
- Your Sinclair issue 4, April 1986: the Spectrum number ones of the previous four months.
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 100: Fist II review (58%; “founded the entire beat ’em up genre”).
- Amstrad Action issue 109, October 1994: “a direct lineage”.
- CRASH issue 39, April 1987, p. 88: Steve Taylor interview (Beam’s 25 programmers; Arcade Machine). The same issue: news of the Mastertronic purchase and Geoff Heath’s promises.
- CRASH Christmas Special 1987: review index (scores for Starion, Exploding Fist, Sherlock, Dodgy Geezers, Rock ’n Wrestle, Bazooka Bill, Knucklebusters); feature on book tie-ins, p. 38 (The Lord of the Rings, March 1986; Shadows of Mordor, June 1987, 93%); “The CRASH History”, p. 78 (the sale “under discussion for some time”; “a poor patch”).
- ACE issue 5, February 1988: review of 1987 (Mastertronic buys Melbourne House in February). Issue 29, February 1990: “where are they now” survey (the UK publishing base; “the Milgroms’ Beam Software”; the label within Virgin Mastertronic; Beam as a Nintendo developer).
- Edge issue 46, June 1997: Beam Software profile (Milgrom on the sale and afterwards; Fist sales; Beam’s console work; Adam Lancman on reclaiming the name; Krush Kill ‘n’ Destroy).
- Wikipedia, “Beam Software” (web, secondary): Infogrames purchase in 1999, Atari Melbourne House in 2003, Krome Studios in November 2006, closure on 15 October 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_Software