Mikro-Gen

The company that sold you a Spectrum upgrade to play its game

Bracknell's Wally Week comedies were among the best-reviewed Spectrum games of 1984-85 — 93, 93, 92, 91, 90. Then Mikro-Gen shipped Shadow of the Unicorn with a hardware cartridge in the box, at £15, to beat the pirates. CRASH said the price would do more damage than piracy ever could. ACE later recorded that Mikro-Gen faded away not long after.

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Mikro-Gen, of 44 The Broadway, Bracknell, Berkshire, published a run of Spectrum arcade adventures built around a recurring everyman — Wally Week — that reviewed as well as anything on the machine. Commodore Format, looking back in 1992, gave the fair summary: “Mikrogen’s approach to the arcade adventure was novel.”

It is also one of the era’s clearest cautionary tales, and the two facts are connected.

Fast facts

Based: 44 The Broadway, Bracknell, Berkshire.
Press evidence in this library: CRASH, Amtix, Amstrad Action, ACE and Computer & Video Games, 1984 to 1988, at £6.95–£14.95.
The Wally series: Pyjamarama, Everyone’s a Wally, Herbert’s Dummy Run, Three Weeks in Paradise.
The hardware: the Mikro-Plus interface, 1985.

Confirmed CRASH scores, from the issue 48 index:

Game	Score	Issue
Everyone’s a Wally	93%	14
Three Weeks in Paradise	93%	26
Pyjamarama	92%	10
Sir Fred	91%	26
Herbert’s Dummy Run	90%	18
Stainless Steel	89%	32
Frost Byte	86%	35
Laserwarp	77%	2
Battle of the Planets	71%	26
Cop-Out	65%	37
Cruise Attack	62%	2
Knockout	62%	2
Pat the Postman	52%	2

The shape is worth reading: four early games in the fifties, sixties and seventies, then a sustained run in the nineties, then a fall back. Mikro-Gen learned how to make its game, made it four times, and then stopped.

The foam suit

Before the Mikro-Plus, Mikro-Gen knew how to sell a game. Retro Gamer’s account of the LET trade show of February 1985 has the company previewing Everyone’s a Wally with a man in a large foam Wally Week suit and a theme song the magazine remembers as about the most annoying ever recorded.

The show mattered: Dun Darach and Alien 8 were being previewed in the same halls. The game went on sale for the Spectrum the following month and took 93% — the joint-highest score in the table above.

⚠ Worth holding beside what follows. This is a company that understood mascot marketing, trade shows and a recurring character years before that was standard practice, and whose games were reviewing at the top of the machine. The Mikro-Plus was not the mistake of a company that did not know what it was doing.

The Mikro-Plus

In August 1985 CRASH put it on the cover: “At last the 64K Spectrum! MIKRO-PLUS — 16, 48, now 64K of Program Power.”

The Mikro-Plus was an interface that plugged into a Spectrum and, in CRASH’s description three months later, “upgrades your Spectrum’s memory to 64K by using a shadow ROM” — and let programs written for it be transferred to Microdrive. Games that used it shipped with the hardware in the box, at around £15 against a normal full price of £9.95.

The game was Shadow of the Unicorn.

The pitch was anti-piracy: you cannot copy a cartridge onto a C90. CRASH’s own pokes columnist, in December 1985, worked through what that meant for the reader and did not like the answer:

With the advent of Mikro Plus pokes will be a thing of the past, because the EPROM inside the interface takes over the Spectrum’s ROM so there is no BASIC. As a result, if you can’t complete a game that uses Mikro-Plus then it’s tough.

Then he made the commercial prediction, in print, in 1985:

Mikro-Gen’s advertisements in the trade press boast of beating the pirates, but I would venture to suggest that the £15 price mark carried by Mikro-Plus games is likely to do more damage to sales than the pirates ever could.

He was right. ACE, three years later, in a feature on the industry’s great failures, filed Mikro-Gen under Company Closed: “Mikro-Gen faded away not long after their unicorn.”

What that episode is about

The Mikro-Plus reads as a company being stupid about copy protection. It is more interesting than that, and the details matter.

It solved the wrong problem competently. The hardware worked. It genuinely gave the machine 64K and genuinely could not be pirated. What it could not do was be bought — a teenager choosing between one £15 game and one and a half £9.95 games is not weighing copy protection.

It broke the reader’s relationship with the game. CRASH’s objection is not economic first, it is cultural. Pokes, cheats and infinite-lives listings were a core part of what Spectrum magazines were for. A machine state with no BASIC underneath it is a machine you cannot get into. Mikro-Gen shipped a product that made its own games unhackable and, in the same stroke, made them undiscussable in the pages that sold them.

It bet the company on a format nobody else adopted. A proprietary interface is only worth owning if there are games for it. There were not, because no other publisher was going to put Mikro-Gen’s hardware in their box.

Afterwards

Commodore Format’s 1992 retrospective traces the tail: after the Wally games and a licence — Battle of the Planets, 71% — came “a brief foray with the 16-bits” and then the Sega Mega Drive. The company that had produced five straight Spectrum games at 89% or better did not produce anything comparable again.

Why it mattered

Mikro-Gen is piracy panic as a commercial decision, and a study in what happens when a publisher answers a real problem with a solution its customers did not ask for.

Every British publisher of the period was losing money to home taping. Most responded with inlay cards, holograms (Elite), replacement guarantees (PSS) or complaint. Mikro-Gen responded by changing the computer, and the cost of that decision is legible in CRASH’s pokes column in December 1985 and in ACE’s obituary column three years later.

The Wally games deserve to be remembered on their own terms — 93, 93, 92, 90 is a run almost nobody matched. It is a real loss that the company is remembered for the box it put them in instead.