Ocean Software | Code Like It's 198x

In July 1984 David Ward told Sinclair User something most software houses would not have said out loud: that it was possible to plan deliberately for a top ten game. “We want only good top ten games,” he said, “with an even chance of reaching number one.” His release schedule for the coming months, the magazine reported, was “designed as a sustained attack on the software charts”.

Ocean Software, the Manchester company Ward ran with Jon Woods, spent the next decade doing exactly that. It bought the rights to arcade machines, athletes, pop groups, television series and, eventually, Hollywood’s biggest films, and put them out on every home computer that sold. By 1986 ZZAP!64 counted Ocean and its Imagine label as “one of the largest software houses in Britain”, with a reputation for heavy promotion and for not always keeping to its release dates. Its catalogue ran from some of the best-reviewed games of the 8-bit era to some of the worst, sometimes in the same month.

From Spectrum Games to Ocean

Ward and Woods had known each other since they were about 17, growing up on the Wirral. Neither came from computing. In the 1970s they ran clothes shops in the north-west, and Ward then spent several years in Los Angeles, where he opened a nightclub. Sinclair User’s 1984 profile describes a “six-year stint in Hollywood, involved with coin-operated machines”. In Ward’s own later account, the arcade machines arrived in his club through a local operator, and people who should have been dancing queued to play Galaxian, Pac-Man and Space Invaders.

Back in England, Ward bought his son a ZX81 and was unimpressed by the games in the shops. “The games I saw in the States were so much better,” he told Sinclair User. “There was obviously a market, if only for games like Defender or Space Invaders.” In the autumn of 1982, the magazine reports, he set up a small mail-order company “which was later to become Ocean Software”.

It started as Spectrum Games. According to The History of Ocean Software, written with Ward and Woods, the pair bought the back page of Your Computer to advertise four games that did not yet exist, with a tick-box asking readers which computer they owned and which game they wanted. The postal orders that came back told them what to make. The first catalogue was written by local enthusiasts and copied arcade favourites, with the names changed to avoid copyright trouble: Road Frog, Hopper, Missile Attack, Monster Muncher, Rocket Command and Kong. When a buyer at Boots pointed out that a company called Spectrum Games was also selling VIC-20 games, they renamed it. Paul Finnegan remembers a van going past the window with “Ocean Transport” on its side, and Woods shouting, “What about Ocean?” “Spectrum Games was so brief,” Woods said. “It was only two or three months.”

Getting into the shops was the work of Paul Finnegan, who had sold games for Imagine in Liverpool. The company could barely pay his wages, so he took ten per cent of its shares instead. The early office was in the Ralli Building, a warehouse on the River Irwell, rented at forty pence a square foot.

The book describes the founders as a pair who divided the work. Finnegan called Woods, the company’s managing director, “the Engineer”, and Ward, its chairman, “the raconteur and visionary, or ‘the Brains’”. “The two of us had a chat, that was our board meeting,” Woods said.

Hunchback, written between O-levels

Ocean’s first licence was an arcade game. Hunchback had been made by Century Electronics, which turned out to be in Oldham, a few miles away. Woods remembers the price: “Three thousand.”

To write the Spectrum version Ward turned to Christian Urquhart, a teenager from Wallasey who had answered his advert for programs. Sinclair User told his story in the same 1984 issue. Urquhart had caught the computer bug at an international school in Abu Dhabi, then taught himself Z80 machine code on a friend’s Spectrum. Ward needed the program quickly, and Urquhart agreed, “in spite of the fact that his bid for O level glory had not been a great success”. He wrote Hunchback and passed seven O-levels at the same time. His account of building it shows how an arcade conversion got made in 1983:

The first job was to design the various screens on paper, of which there are 15 in Hunchback. Machine code routines were then written to print them on to the screen. Next I introduced the little man. He started as a box — a hunchbox — and then became an animated hunchbox. After the man I did the fireballs and arrows.

Sinclair User called Hunchback “the best-selling game from Ocean Software”. By the time of the profile Urquhart had left school and was working at Ocean full-time, commuting from Wallasey to Manchester every day.

Planning a hit on purpose

The rest of that 1984 profile reads like a business plan. Ward aimed to release two games every two months, promote them on television, and sell through distributors rather than directly to small shops. Ocean had its own art department and did its own advertising, because agencies did not understand the product: “We went to Saatchi & Saatchi and tried to explain what we were doing. They were thinking in terms of toys which you had to plug in.” He had bought the rights to Roland Rat, the puppet star of TV-am, and planned three games that year and four in 1985, to be advertised on TV-am around Roland Rat’s own slots.

The licence that changed Ocean’s fortunes came that summer. Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, credited by CRASH to Paul Owens and Christian Urquhart on the Spectrum, had to be ready for the Los Angeles Olympics. CRASH noted it going straight into its November 1984 chart at number 16, and Woods later recalled that it went to number one. Under the athletics rules of the time, the fee went to the Amateur Athletic Association, not to Thompson himself.

In the book, Paul Patterson, who later became Ocean’s sales director, says it was Ward’s idea to pursue licences of every kind, and that a licence was worth more than its marketing:

As far as I am concerned a licence not only gave me an obvious marketing strategy, it also allowed me to approach Commodore, Atari and several other companies with bundle offers. We were one of the first companies to do this and over the years it increased Ocean’s turnover by millions.

A hardware maker wanted a famous name in the box with its computer, and Ocean was the publisher holding the names. By 1989 Ocean’s Batman was bundled with the Amiga as the “Batman Pack”. Jon Woods later said it was Commodore that agreed: “If we had asked Warners or DC Comics… they’d never have allowed it, but Commodore did.” Patterson also claimed that Ocean was the first to sign a personality (Daley Thompson), the first to sign a film (The Neverending Story, 1985) and the first to convert a hit coin-op. He hedged those claims with “I believe”, and the public record does not settle them.

US Gold and the Imagine name

In September 1984 Ocean joined forces with CentreSoft, the Birmingham distributor, to import and manufacture American software under licence. CRASH’s October 1984 news story carried a photograph captioned “Jon Woods and David Ward, directors of Ocean”, with Anne and Geoff Brown of CentreSoft. The label was U.S. Gold, and Woods and Ward held half of it until CentreGold bought them out in 1991.

The same year Liverpool’s Imagine Software was wound up, on 9 July 1984, with a BBC documentary crew still filming. Ocean bought the label from the liquidators, “not the company, its assets and liabilities, only the name”, in Ward’s words. It needed a second brand to win over Konami, which feared its games would disappear inside Ocean’s. From 1985 the Imagine label carried Konami conversions such as Hypersports, Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Green Beret, and games from other Japanese arcade companies. The book counts nine Konami titles and seven from other Japanese companies between 1985 and 1989.

When ZZAP!64’s Julian Rignall visited in the spring of 1986, Ocean had moved to modest offices in Central Street, Manchester, in a former Quaker meeting house whose basement programmers called “the dungeon”. Colin Stokes, once Imagine’s sales manager, told him the group had up to sixty programmers under contract at one time. Ward described how the business had changed since the mail-order days, when “programmers would be working in their attic after school, but now it has become far more sophisticated.”

Special FX

In September 1987 Paul Finnegan left to found Special FX in Liverpool’s Albert Dock, taking Ocean programmer Jonathan “Joffa” Smith with him. Ocean kept first option on everything the new studio made. Special FX developed Batman: The Caped Crusader (1988) and conversions such as Midnight Resistance for Ocean. By Finnegan’s account, Ocean later took the studio over and then stopped funding it, and in about 1991 he went on to found Rage.

What the scores show

CRASH published an index of every review it had printed in January 1988. Ocean’s Spectrum games in it make the range plain:

Game	Score	Issue	Kind
Head Over Heels	97%	39	original
The Great Escape	96%	35	original
Frankie Goes to Hollywood	94%	19	pop licence
Batman	93%	28	comic licence
Cobra	93%	35	film licence
Cosmic Wartoad	88%	26	original
Cavelon	86%	7	arcade licence
Daley Thompson’s Decathlon	82%	10	sports licence
Daley Thompson’s Supertest	76%	22	sports licence
Hunchback	66%	2	arcade licence
Highlander	57%	37	film licence
Army Moves	54%	41	licence
Donkey Kong	48%	37	arcade licence
It’s a Knockout	39%	37	TV licence

The two highest scores went to originals: Head Over Heels, by Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond, and The Great Escape, by Denton Designs. The licences sit at both ends of the table. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, also by Denton Designs, and Ritman and Drummond’s Batman scored in the nineties. It’s a Knockout scored 39%.

Readers kept their own score. In April 1987 Amtix’s readers voted Ocean’s long-delayed Knight Rider the least pleasing game of 1986, with 11% of the vote. Ward was unavailable for comment. CRASH was blunter in its look back at 1987, calling Knight Rider “the biggest disappointment, though hardly a surprise”. Gary Bracey, who ran Ocean’s software development, later explained what had gone wrong with Knight Rider and Street Hawk. They had been commissioned from freelance teams on a handshake, three months and £10,000, with half paid up front. Mail-order catalogues such as Kays printed months ahead and fined publishers whose games were late.

Films

In 1987 Ocean took the world rights to Platoon on all formats because, Woods said, American publishers would not touch it. Then Woods sent Bracey the script of RoboCop. Bracey wrote “Get this. I think it could be big” on a Post-It note, and Woods negotiated the licence from Orion Pictures before the film came out. Ocean then licensed the arcade and pinball rights back to Data East, so a home-computer publisher’s game went into Japanese-made arcade cabinets. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 92% in December 1988 and called it “a superb implementation of the licence”. Bracey remembered RoboCop as Ocean’s first million-selling game.

Batman: The Movie followed in 1989 and took 93% in CRASH. Ocean’s arcade conversions of the same period included Taito’s Operation Wolf and Chase H.Q., which took 95% in CRASH in December 1989. In April 1990 Ocean collected the Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick for software house of the year.

The licences grew more expensive. Ward said the first had cost a few thousand dollars and Jurassic Park, Ocean’s last film licence, cost three million. Bracey met Steven Spielberg about the game in 1992, and Ocean tried to build a 3D game in six months. “We just couldn’t do justice to it,” he said.

The music

Ocean employed its own musicians. Martin Galway wrote Commodore 64 music for Ocean and Imagine games including Rambo, Arkanoid, and Sensible Software’s Parallax and Wizball. ZZAP!64‘s readers’ chart for November 1987 had his title tunes for Arkanoid and Wizball alongside Rob Hubbard’s. Jonathan Dunn wrote the music for RoboCop and Operation Wolf, and CRASH praised his “excellent” title tune for the Spectrum Operation Wolf. ZZAP!‘s readers’ music chart, published in August 1990, credited Matthew Cannon with the C64 music for The Untouchables and Batman: The Movie, and Dunn with the Amiga Batman: The Movie. Most of the packaging art came from the freelance illustrator Bob Wakelin.

Consoles, France and America

Ocean looked abroad early. Ocean Software France was set up in 1986, run by Marc Djan. Ocean of America followed in 1988 or 1989 with offices in San Jose. Its head was Ray Musci, formerly Data East’s chief salesman in America. At home Ocean moved from 8-bit cassettes to the Amiga and Atari ST, and then to Nintendo’s cartridges. Those meant ordering and paying for stock months ahead. “With Nintendo,” Woods said, “there was a lead time of many months before you got the games into the shops.” As full-price cassette sales fell, Ocean reissued its back catalogue on its own budget label, The Hit Squad.

In 1992 the company moved to larger offices in Castlefield, Manchester. From May 1995 it was the exclusive distributor of Team17‘s games, which carried both companies’ logos.

Infogrames

By the 1990s the bills had grown faster than the business. Patterson said that Ocean’s decision to put its in-house programmers on original PC games brought an overhead that “affected Ocean greatly”. In 1994 the French group Chargeurs, owner of the film company Pathé, bought 23% of the company. From the autumn of 1995 Ward was talking to Infogrames.

The History of Ocean Software says that in 1996 Infogrames acquired Ocean “for a reputed $100 million”. Ward calls it a merger, paid for partly in Infogrames shares, and gives his reason: Ocean needed access to a public stock market to compete with Electronic Arts.

At the start of the 1990s we foresaw the necessity of having a public company to have access to funds to compete with Electronic Arts. That was why the merger took place, to give us that access to public funding. We had no choice.

Floating in America would have needed American managers Ocean did not have. France was familiar: Ocean had a decade of running its French company behind it, and Ward, by Bracey’s account, was a Francophile.

For a while Ocean stayed a brand. In April 1997 Infogrames’ president Bruno Bonnell told Edge that the Infogrames name would stand for family entertainment, and “the Ocean brand will be the action-based label, directed primarily at teenagers and arcade fans”. On 30 January 1998 the company was renamed Infogrames United Kingdom Limited. Games still came out under the Ocean name that year, such as Wetrix on the Nintendo 64, with the small print noting that Ocean was a trademark of Infogrames United Kingdom. Ward stayed with the group until 1999. Woods left the year after the sale.

Sources

Sinclair User, issue 28 (July 1984), pp. 51-53: Chris Bourne, “Knight moves” (the magazine spells the name “Urquart”). Ward’s time in Hollywood, the ZX81, the mail-order company of autumn 1982, Christian Urquhart and Hunchback, the top-ten quotes, distribution, Saatchi & Saatchi, Roland Rat and TV-am.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013). An interview-led book; figures and quotes from it are recollections. p. 8 (the founders; “the Engineer” and “the Brains”), pp. 9-11 (the clothes shops, Los Angeles and the arcade machines), pp. 13-16 (the Your Computer advert, Spectrum Games, the early games, Paul Finnegan, the name), p. 22 (the Ralli Building), p. 23 (Hunchback, Century Electronics and the £3,000), p. 33 (U.S. Gold, September 1984), pp. 34-35 (Special FX), pp. 36-38 (Central Street, Street Hawk, Knight Rider and Kays), pp. 42-43 (Daley Thompson’s Decathlon), pp. 44-45 (the Imagine label and Konami), p. 46 (Paul Patterson on licences and bundles), pp. 49-52 (Platoon and RoboCop), pp. 53 and 58 (Batman, Special FX and the Batman Pack), p. 61 (the Golden Joystick, April 1990), pp. 64-65 (Jurassic Park), pp. 67-73 (Nintendo, France, America, The Hit Squad), pp. 78-81 (Ward on Electronic Arts and the merger, Chargeurs, the sale to Infogrames, Castlefield), p. 91 (Rage; Ward stayed until 1999).
CRASH, issue 9 (October 1984), news: “US Gold for Britain”, with the photograph of Woods, Ward and the Browns. Issue 10 (November 1984): Daley Thompson’s Decathlon review (authors Paul Owens and Christian Urquhart) and chart commentary.
ZZAP!64, issue 13 (May 1986), pp. 100-103: Julian Rignall’s visit to Ocean and Imagine (“one of the largest software houses in Britain”; Colin Stokes on the Imagine name and sixty contracted programmers; Ward on the mail-order days).
CRASH, issue 48 (January 1988): review index (scores and issue numbers in the table) and the review of 1987 (Knight Rider).
Amtix, issue 18 (April 1987): readers’ awards for 1986, least pleasing game.
CRASH, issue 59 (December 1988): RoboCop review (92%) and Operation Wolf review. Issue 70 (November 1989): Batman: The Movie (93%). Issue 71 (December 1989): Chase H.Q. (95%). Issues 61-64 (1989): music chart credits for Jonathan Dunn.
ZZAP!64, issue 31 (November 1987): readers’ music chart. Issue 64 (August 1990): readers’ music chart.
Edge, issue 44 (April 1997): interview with Bruno Bonnell.
Computer and Video Games, issue 199 (June 1998): Ocean advertisement and release list.
Companies House, company 02133521, name history (web). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02133521