In August 1985 a Liverpool company nobody had heard of took a CRASH Smash with its first game. Nodes of Yesod sent a spaceman in a blazer down through the caves of the moon with a mole that ate walls, and the reviewers said they had to look twice to make sure it was not by Ultimate. That was the point. Odin had set out to be Liverpool’s Ultimate, with lavish adverts and boxes to match, and its next game, Robin of the Wood, scored even higher. Within two years the team had signed up to make ten games in a year for British Telecom’s games business, the games got worse, and the company was gone.
Fast facts
- Based: Liverpool.
- Run by: Paul McKenna, who also ran the publishing label Thor.
- Formed: late 1984, named Odin by February 1985.
- Known for: Nodes of Yesod (1985), Robin of the Wood (1985), The Arc of Yesod (1986), Heartland (1986).
- People: Steve Wetherill, Colin Grunes, Stuart Fotheringham, Paul Salmon, Marc Dawson.
- From 1986: marketed by Telecomsoft, British Telecom’s games business.
- Closed: 1987 or 1988.
Thor, then Odin
Thor was Paul McKenna’s publishing label, with games such as Jack and the Beanstalk, Giant’s Revenge and The House That Jack Built. When CRASH visited in September 1985, it described Thor as “a publishing company, rather than a programming company”, concentrating on marketing and distribution. Towards the end of 1984, as the idea for Nodes of Yesod took shape, McKenna set up a second company to write original games of its own. It had its name, Odin, by February 1985. Mark Butler, one of Imagine’s founders, had been a director, and had recently left.
The team came from the wreckage of Liverpool’s earlier software houses, “some from Software Projects, some from Imagine”, as CRASH put it. Stuart Fotheringham and Marc Dawson had spent three months at Software Projects working with Matthew Smith on a third Jet Set Willy game that was never finished. Fotheringham told Edge how a character drawn for a lost Noddy licence became the game’s hero: Colin Grunes stuck “a space helmet and backpack” on Big Ears, the two of them went to see Thor, and “this meeting led directly to Nodes of Yesod and the creation of Odin Computer Graphics”. The company’s offices sat across a windswept plaza from the empty offices of Bug-Byte. In Fotheringham’s memory the working day ran into the night: the team went to the pub at 7pm, clubbing until 2am, and then back to the office “to sleep under the desks”.
Ultimate was the model. Edge wrote that “it was no secret that Odin openly set out to emulate the games produced by Ultimate”, and CRASH, looking back in 1987, called Odin’s launch advert “very classy”, run for two months before the game appeared.
Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood
Nodes of Yesod took its premise from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Charlemagne “Charlie” Fotheringham-Grunes, named after two of the team, explores the caves under the moon’s surface for eight crystals, the alchiems, that open the way to a black monolith. A friendly mole chews through cave walls to open new routes. CRASH gave it 93% in August 1985 and compared it, without complaint, to Ultimate’s Underwurlde. Steve Wetherill programmed the Spectrum version, with graphics by Grunes and Paul Salmon. Odin converted it in-house for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad, and Wetherill later wrote a level editor that let the team place every platform by hand and check that each jump could be made.
Robin of the Wood followed for Christmas 1985. Robin crosses Sherwood Forest to win the Silver Arrow at the Sheriff’s archery contest, buying a bow, a sword and magic arrows from an Ent with bags of gold taken from the Bishop of Peterborough. CRASH gave it 94% and wrote that “the programmers are obviously perfectionists”. It reached the British sales charts in early 1986, and The Arc of Yesod, the sequel to Nodes, scored 89% in CRASH that March.
The Telecomsoft deal
In April 1986 Zzap!64 reported that “only days ago Odin/Thor announced marketing deals with BT”. By the autumn CRASH reported that Odin’s marketing was “now taken care of by Telecomsoft”, the group behind Firebird and Rainbird, and in early 1987 ZX Computing listed Odin with Firebird and Beyond inside the Telecomsoft group.
The deal was for volume. Fotheringham told Retro Gamer in 2004 that it “involved producing ten titles” for Telecomsoft, and Edge in 2007 described “a deal … to come up with ten games in one year”. Both accounts say the team broke up under it, and Edge judged that “the conveyor belt nature of producing so many games in such a short period clearly had a huge impact on creativity and quality”. Fotheringham left for Denton Designs and later persuaded Wetherill, Grunes and Paul Salmon to follow him.
The scores show the slide. The arcade adventure Heartland (1986) was still praised: CRASH’s reviewer of the shoot-’em-up ICUPS, which appeared under the Thor name, complained that “Thor have really let me down” when “their stablemates Odin turn out really respectable games like Heartland and Nodes”. Wetherill and Grunes’s Sidewize came out under Firebird in 1987 and scored 50%, and its sequel Crosswize 69% in 1988. By then Odin had stopped trading. In August 1988 ACE described it as a label Telecomsoft had “bought and then lost in the mists of time”.
Commodore Format gave Odin a short obituary in 1992: “ODIN - Or Thor, as they were sometimes known. From their Valhalla came the ace arcade adventures Nodes Of Yesod, Arc Of Yesod and Robin Of The Wood … But one day, like the people who worshipped the Norse gods after whom the company was named, everyone stopped believing in them.”
Marc Dawson
Marc Dawson’s career shows how these Liverpool programmers moved from company to company. In 1989 the Danish magazine Amiga Interface interviewed him at 24. He had started at Imagine at 18, then worked for “the now closed software houses, Odin and Thor”. He was now setting up his own development company with Steve Wetherill, and their first game, the arcade adventure Astaroth, was to be published by Hewson. He later went back to his birth name, Marc Wilding. He worked on the Commodore 64 versions of Nodes of Yesod and Robin of the Wood, and on Mission AD and Hypa-Ball, a C64 sports game loosely based on 2000 AD’s “Harlem Heroes” strip.
He also warned would-be programmers what the work was like: “The problem with programming is that most of game development consists of boring programming. You start with the interesting part, where you work out all your ideas, but the ending is very, very hard. It is a constant fight against boredom.”
Later history
Paul McKenna re-formed Odin Computer Graphics Ltd in 2005 to make games for mobile phones. Wetherill, who went on to work for Electronic Arts on games such as the Command & Conquer series, made a version of Nodes of Yesod for the Pocket PC in 2003. He had been working on the game for mobile handsets since, and Edge told readers in 2007 that a working demo could be found at the revived company’s website, odincomputergraphics.com.
Sources
- CRASH issue 19, August 1985, pp. 12–13: Nodes of Yesod review (producer Odin Computer Graphics, £9.95; “to make sure that it was not by Ultimate”; the comparison with Underwurlde; CRASH Smash, 93%).
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, pp. 42–44: “Down in the Dockland” (Thor as a publishing company; Odin formed late in 1984 and named by February 1985; Paul McKenna; Mark Butler’s departure as director; programmers “some from Software Projects, some from Imagine”; the office opposite Bug-Byte; Robin of the Wood and Paul Salmon).
- CRASH issue 24, Christmas 1985/January 1986, pp. 10–12: Robin of the Wood review (the Ent, the Bishop, the Silver Arrow; “the programmers are obviously perfectionists”; 94%).
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986, p. 130: The Arc of Yesod review (89%). Sales charts: Your Computer, February 1986, p. 21, and Sinclair User issue 47, February 1986, p. 33.
- Zzap!64 issue 12, April 1986, p. 9: Odin/Thor’s marketing deals with BT.
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986, p. 119: ICUPS review (producer Thor; “Thor have really let me down”; 74%).
- ZX Computing, March 1987, p. 80, and April 1987, p. 65: Odin within the Telecomsoft group.
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987, p. 103: Sidewize review (Firebird, author Odin; 50%). CRASH issue 53, June 1988, p. 18: Crosswize (Firebird; 69%).
- CRASH issue 46, November 1987, “The CRASH History”, p. 26: Odin’s launch advert; “just another name for Thor”.
- ACE issue 11, August 1988, p. 10: Telecomsoft and Odin (“bought and then lost in the mists of time”).
- Amiga Interface (Denmark) no. 3, 1989, p. 15: Steve Cooke’s profile of Marc Dawson (Imagine at 18; Odin and Thor “now closed”; the company with Steve Wetherill; Astaroth for Hewson; Hypa-ball; the remark on boring programming, translated from the Danish).
- Commodore Format issue 22, July 1992, p. 54: the entry on Odin in its A–Z of the departed.
- Retro Gamer issue 5, 2004, pp. 45–48: Stuart Fotheringham interview (the Mega-Tree project; Odin’s founding team; the Telecomsoft deal for ten titles; his move to Denton Designs).
- Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, pp. 79–80: Fotheringham on Thor and Odin and the Ultimate model.
- “The Making Of… Nodes of Yesod”, Edge issue 176, June 2007, pp. 85–88 (the Noddy origin; the meeting with McKenna; office life; Wetherill’s rewrite and level editor; emulating Ultimate; the Telecomsoft deal; Wetherill’s later career and the mobile demo).
- The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2016), pp. 232–235: Marc Wilding interview (the name Marc Dawson; his C64 work on Nodes of Yesod, Robin of the Wood, Mission AD and Hypa-Ball).
- Kim Justice, “The sad tale of Odin Computer Graphics”, Wireframe issue 68, November 2022, p. 42: the deal for ten games inside a year and the fall in quality.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, Ocean: The History (Revival Retro Events, 2013), p. 33: the two-year Telecomsoft contract; McKenna’s re-formed company of 2005.
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 1 (CC BY-NC-ND), p. 288: Odin and Thor, Paul McKenna, the later games, the closure.