Palace Software began in a shop. “The very first part of the Palace group was The Video Palace, which I originally set up,” Pete Stone, who ran the software company, told Amstrad User in December 1987. It was “London’s first video mega-store”, in Berwick Street in Soho, and in 1982 and 1983 it sold computers and games as well as videos. Stone remembered how the games arrived: “They’d come in with cardboard boxes and carrier bags full of cassettes, often with just typed or even handwritten labels. And we were selling them by the lorry load.” Palace’s first programmer came off the same shop floor, and within three years the company had made two of the Spectrum’s best-reviewed arcade adventures and one of the most argued-about game covers of the decade.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1984, as the games arm of the Palace film and video group; its first game was The Evil Dead.
- Run by: Pete Stone, who had come to games “from the record industry”.
- Based: London, in offices above the Scala cinema on Pentonville Road.
- People: Richard Leinfellner (first programmer), Steve Brown (designer of Cauldron, Cauldron II and Barbarian), Dan Malone (artist and designer of The Sacred Armour of Antiriad), Richard Joseph (music).
- CRASH scores: Cauldron 91%, Cauldron II 91%, The Sacred Armour of Antiriad 89%, Barbarian 85%.
- Second label: Outlaw Productions, from late 1987, launched with Sensible Software’s Shoot-’Em-Up Construction Kit.
- Sold: in 1991 to Leisure Holding of Paris, owner of Titus.
The shop and the film
Stone said he wanted to sell games “in a slicker, more professional manner”, but found that “you can devise slick packaging and a marketing concept, but it means nothing unless you’ve got a good game inside it”. The programmer was close to hand. “A guy called Richard Leinfellner used to hang around the store, playing with the computers, while he was still at college. Eventually we gave him a job because he was one of the few people in the shop who knew what he was talking about as far as computers were concerned.”
For a subject, Palace looked to its own film business. Palace Pictures had just released the horror film The Evil Dead in cinemas and on video, and in June 1984 Personal Computer News reported that Palace Software was “bringing the horror of The Evil Dead to the micro” on the Commodore 64. Leinfellner programmed it. Stone was frank about the result: “By today’s standards it was rather awful, but it was good experience because we saw the direction that we needed to follow.” By the time the game came out, the film was caught up in the “video nasties” panic and, in Stone’s words, “being confiscated all over the country. But there’s an old saying that no publicity is bad publicity, and the outrage helped ensure good sales for the game.”
Cauldron and the team
Palace decided early how it would make games. “We realised that the best way to create a successful program, at least for us, was as a team effort,” Stone said. “Principally we wanted an artist, a programmer and a musician.” It went looking for a graphics specialist and found Steve Brown, and on the next game a fourth job appeared: “During the writing of Cauldron a fourth element surfaced, which was gameplay. Steve had come in to handle graphics but was taking over the making of Cauldron, throwing in more and more good ideas until it became his game in the end.”
Cauldron began as an idea for a game of the film Halloween that, Stone said, “didn’t make a good scenario”, so it became a game of witches and pumpkins instead. CRASH gave it 91% in July 1985. Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back (1986), “based almost solely on Steve’s ideas”, scored 91% as well. Richard Joseph wrote the music from Cauldron II onwards, and Stone credited him with “a lot of input”.
Then Dan Malone answered an advertisement for a comic-style artist, drew sprites for the Amstrad Cauldron, and designed The Sacred Armour of Antiriad (1986), which CRASH gave 89%. Stone described what followed as “a sort of production line, whereby we had Steve and Dan as the main instigators of the games, both working on the graphics, and we had a team of programmers for the different machines”. Brown began Barbarian while Antiriad was still being written. Asked in 1987 to describe a Palace game, Stone said it depended on the person making it: “It’s more a case of there being a Steve Brown game, a Dan Malone game.”
Barbarian
Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior (1987) is a one-on-one sword fight in which a well-timed swing takes off the opponent’s head. CRASH gave it 85%. What made it notorious was the cover: a photograph of the Page 3 model Maria Whittaker in a bikini beside a muscular barbarian. Boots, Amstrad User reported, banned the original inlay card.
Stone told Amstrad User that the idea was the designer’s, as part of the game:
It was Steve Brown’s idea originally. When he conceives a game he conceives it in total, including the package. He wanted a sword fighting game based round the swords and sorcery theme, and he wanted a cover in the style of the fantasy artist Boris. So he hit on the idea of using Maria Whittaker.
Brown built the set and made the costume, which kept coming apart during the shoot, so that “he had to get a pair of pliers to fit the metal clasps back together again”. Stone was unrepentant about the complaints. “People who complained that it was a sexist cover seem to forget that it was an idea set in a certain genre, which is all about men with huge muscles and women with rather large bosoms. We were slightly upset that people didn’t see the funny side of things.” He added that “there’s a male as well as a female on that cover”, and that Boots “told us that we couldn’t have a semi-naked woman, but that we could have a semi-naked man”.
ACE’s readers argued about it in the letters pages from February to April 1988. One pointed out that the man in the advertisement was scantily clad too. Another replied that the picture still degraded women more than men, because both were shown as “nothing more than a set of physical attributes” but “the male is clearly stronger”. In April a woman wrote that she was “not in the least bit offended” and that models such as Maria Whittaker “know exactly what they are doing”.
Banned in West Germany
In the autumn of 1987 West Germany’s Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften, the federal office that tested publications for harm to young people, put Barbarian on its index, so that it could no longer be sold to anyone under 18. ACE noted that Palace’s response “was surprisingly low on outrage: as with the controversy over Maria Whittaker’s scantily clad presence on the inlay, it seems that any publicity is good publicity”. Your Computer explained what that meant: the game could only be displayed where no one under 18 would see it, which “effectively means that Barbarian will only be on sale in sex shops”. MicroProse’s Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle were on the same list. Stone said the ban “did not come as a shock”: “I don’t agree with their point. Kids like violent things but it doesn’t make them go lopping heads off in real life.” Your Computer noted that Barbarian II would have monsters as its opponents rather than people. When it reached the Amiga in 1989, programmed by Dave Chapman, Amiga Computing introduced it as “the eagerly awaited sequel to the game which got banned in Germany”.
Palace and the Video Recordings Act
In February 1988 ACE asked British publishers whether the Video Recordings Act of 1984, which required films on video to be classified, should apply to games. Clement Chambers of CRL was submitting his Jack the Ripper to the British Board of Film Classification. Stone said he did not feel that Barbarian was a case where the Act applied, and put the question another way: if he believed Barbarian incited violence, he would not release it, “but I don’t believe it does”.
Outlaw and the 16-bit years
In late 1987 Palace started a second label, Outlaw Productions, for games by outside teams. “There are a lot more very good programming teams around,” Stone said. “People have got more experience.” Its first release came from Sensible Software, then known for Wizball and Parallax: the Shoot-’Em-Up Construction Kit for the Commodore 64, which let its owners design their own scrolling shoot-’em-ups. Palace itself published Binary Vision’s comic adventure Stifflip & Co in 1987.
Stone was already looking past the 8-bit machines. The American market, he said, “is going over to 16 bit very quickly”, and Palace would follow the Amiga and ST. Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax came to the Amiga in 1989, and Sensible Software’s International 3D Tennis followed in 1990. Stone was firmly against piracy. In November 1989 he told Amiga Action that crackers “seem to think that software houses are the fat cats who just sit there absorbing all the money. It’s simply not true.”
Sold to Leisure Holding
In May 1991 Amstrad Action, Amiga Action and ZZAP!64 all reported that the Palace film and video group had sold Palace Software to Leisure Holding, a Paris company that also owned Titus. Amiga Action said the deal included the right to use the Palace Software name, and ZZAP!64 that the group had decided its games business needed “more specific direction” than it could give in a “particularly competitive” market. Chris Craib, head of the Palace group, told Amstrad Action: “Having nurtured the software division over the years we will be sad to see it go. However we were impressed by Leisure Holding’s organisation, plans and enthusiasm and they made us a good offer.” Amstrad Action welcomed the sale, because it meant the company was “coming back to the CPC market”.
Sources
- Amstrad User, December 1987, pp. 46–48: Jerry Muir, “The secret of success”, interview with Pete Stone and Paul Norris (The Video Palace; the record industry; buying cassettes over the counter; Richard Leinfellner; The Evil Dead and the video nasties; artist, programmer and musician; Steve Brown and Cauldron; Cauldron II; Dan Malone and the production line; Outlaw and Sensible Software; 16-bit plans; “a Steve Brown game, a Dan Malone game”; Richard Joseph; Maria Whittaker, Boots and the cover; the office above the Scala cinema).
- Personal Computer News, 2 June 1984: The Evil Dead announced for the Commodore 64.
- Commodore Computing International vol. 3 no. 3, September 1984: Palace enters the software market with Evil Dead; Richard Leinfellner.
- CRASH issue 18, July 1985, p. 34: Cauldron review. Issue 31, August 1986: Cauldron II review. Issue 35, December 1986: The Sacred Armour of Antiriad review (89%). Issue 41, June 1987: Barbarian review. Issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (Cauldron 91%, Cauldron II 91%, Barbarian 85%).
- ACE issue 2, November 1987: news, “Censored!” (the German ban; MicroProse’s submarine simulation banned earlier; Palace “surprisingly low on outrage”). Issue 5, February 1988: feature on violence in games and the Video Recordings Act (Pete Stone; Clement Chambers and Jack the Ripper). Issues 6 and 7, March and April 1988: letters on the Barbarian advertisement.
- Your Computer, December 1987: “Barbarian a ‘threat to youth’ decides German government” (Peter Stone on the ban; Barbarian II’s monsters). January 1988: “Gunship removed from blacklist” (Silent Service and F-15 Strike Eagle on the list).
- Computer and Video Games issue 81, July 1988: Barbarian II (Steve Brown’s concept).
- Amiga Computing, September 1989: Barbarian II on the Amiga (Dave Chapman; “the game which got banned in Germany”).
- Amiga Action issue 2, November 1989: piracy feature (Pete Stone on “fat cats”).
- Amstrad Action issue 68, May 1991; Amiga Action issue 20, May 1991; ZZAP!64 issue 73, May 1991: sale of Palace Software to Leisure Holding.