Palace Software

Palace Software is usually introduced as the games division of Palace Pictures, the London independent behind The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa. That is the wrong end of the company. In December 1987 Pete Stone, who ran it, told Amstrad User where the group came from:

The very first part of the Palace group was The Video Palace, which I originally set up. This was London’s first video mega-store.

Berwick Street, Soho. Stone had come “from the record industry”, and games reached him across a shop counter.

Fast facts

• Based: London — offices above the Scala cinema, Pentonville Road.
• Run by: Pete Stone.
• Named in the press as: Steve Brown, designer (Cauldron, Cauldron II, Barbarian, Barbarian II, Rimrunner); Dan Malone, artist (The Sacred Armour of Antiriad); Richard Leinfellner, first programmer; Richard Joseph, musician; Dave Chapman, who programmed Barbarian II on Amiga.
• Press evidence in this library: CRASH, ZZAP!64, Amstrad Action, ACE and Amiga Power between 1985 and 1992, at £8.99–£25.99.
• Confirmed CRASH scores: Cauldron 91% (issue 18, Jul 1985, p34), Cauldron II 91% (issue 31, Aug 1986, p113), Barbarian 85% (issue 41, Jun 1987).
• Second label: Outlaw Productions, launched late 1987.

The shop floor

Stone dates his involvement to “the retail end, right back at the start of computer games, in ’82–’83”, and his description of the trade at that moment is the best one-paragraph picture of the British software industry before it had an industry:

We were actually buying programs from the programmers in those days. 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.

The first Palace programmer came off that same shop floor. 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.”

The Evil Dead, and where the instinct came from

Palace’s first game was an adaptation of The Evil Dead, a film Palace Pictures had just put into British cinemas and onto video. Stone is blunt about the game — “By today’s standards it was rather awful, but it was good experience because we saw the direction that we needed to follow” — and completely unembarrassed about what happened around it.

By the time the game shipped, The Evil Dead was at the centre of the video nasties panic and “being confiscated all over the country”. Stone:

there’s an old saying that no publicity is bad publicity, and the outrage helped ensure good sales for the game.

That is worth pinning down, because it moves the story of Palace’s marketing back three years and out of the Barbarian section where it usually sits. The company learned that a moral panic sells copies in 1984, from a horror film, in the middle of the same scare that produced the Video Recordings Act 1984 — the Act CRL would later invoke to get its games certificated. Palace and CRL took opposite lessons from the same events: CRL submitted itself for classification, Palace did not.

Four jobs, not one

The other thing Stone was doing early is more quietly influential. Asked how Palace made games, he describes a division of labour that reads as unremarkable now and was not then:

We realised that the best way to create a successful program, at least for us, was as a team effort. Principally we wanted an artist, a programmer and a musician.

A fourth role surfaced during Cauldron: gameplay, as a job someone owns. The company had to go looking for the artist, since nobody was advertising for one, and found Steve Brown — who came in to do graphics and ended up running the game. Stone: “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 (1985) started as a Halloween-movie licence, was abandoned as a bad scenario, and became witches and pumpkins instead. It took 91% in CRASH. Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back inverted the premise, put the player in the pumpkin, and took 91% again — and was “based almost solely on Steve’s ideas”.

Then a second artist, Dan Malone, arrived on The Sacred Armour of Antiriad, and Palace ran what Stone calls “a sort of production line”: Brown and Malone generating games, a team of programmers porting them across machines. Brown began Barbarian while Antiriad was still in development.

By the end of 1987 Stone would not describe a house style at all — only authors: “It’s more a case of there being a Steve Brown game, a Dan Malone game.”

Barbarian, and the cover

Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior (1987) is a one-on-one sword fight with a decapitation move. CRASH gave it 85%.

What everyone remembers is the packaging: the Page 3 model Maria Whittaker in a fur bikini beside a barbarian. The received version is that a film company applied film marketing to a game. Palace’s own account, given to Amstrad User while the row was still running, is smaller and stranger than that. It was the designer’s idea, 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 himself and made the costume, which did not survive contact with the shoot: “the bra and knickers kept falling apart during the photo shoot and he had to get a pair of pliers to fit the metal clasps back together again.”

Two things followed that the entry for a marketing triumph usually leaves out.

It was banned from a high street. “Boots told us that we couldn’t have a semi-naked woman, but that we could have a semi-naked man.” Palace reissued the inlay.

It was banned from a country. West Germany’s Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften put Barbarian on its list of prohibited publications — the same list that caught MicroProse’s Silent Service — which meant no advertising, and sale only through premises licensed to exclude minors. Barbarian II was still being introduced in 1989 as “the game which got banned in Germany”.

Stone’s defence, in his own words:

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 also pointed out, correctly and beside the point, that “there’s a male as well as a female on that cover”.

Read now it is straightforward eighties tabloid sexism, and it read that way to plenty of people at the time. ACE’s letters pages carried the argument through February, March and April 1988 — readers arguing about exploitation, about whether Palace expected women to buy the game, about whether the objection was prudishness. That is a games magazine audience conducting a public argument about advertising and women, in 1988, because a publisher started it.

Where Palace stood on censorship

Worth recording, because it is the exact counterpart to CRL’s position and was printed on the same pages.

Asked by ACE in February 1988 whether the Video Recordings Act applied to his games, Stone said he “honestly [didn’t] feel that Barbarian is a case where the Act applies” — and drew the line somewhere else entirely:

[If I] believed that Barbarian incite[d] violence, I wouldn’t release it. But I don’t believe it does.

Clement Chambers of CRL was arguing that games were legally video works and had to be submitted. Stone was arguing that the question was whether a game caused harm, and that his did not. Neither man was talking about the other’s test.

Stone held the same line on piracy after Barbarian II was cracked, telling Amiga Action in 1989 that hackers “seem to think that software houses are the fat cats who just sit there absorbing all the money. It’s simply not true.”

Outlaw Productions

In late 1987 Palace launched a second label, Outlaw Productions, to publish work by outside teams — Stone’s reasoning being that “there are a lot of very good programming teams around” with four or five years’ experience behind them.

Its first release came from Sensible Software, fresh from Wizball and Parallax: the Shoot ’Em Up Construction Kit. A publisher that had spent three years insisting games needed an artist, a programmer, a musician and a gameplay designer put out a product that let a fourteen-year-old skip all four.

Sold, 1991

⚠ Palace did not just stop; it was sold. Amstrad Action reported the end in May 1991: Palace Software had been bought by the French company Leisure Holding, which also owned Titus — “which is good news, because the company is coming back to the CPC market.”

Head of the Palace group Chris Craib on the sale: “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.”

That matters for reading anything published under the Palace name afterwards. From 1991 the label belonged to a French group, so everything described above is a property of the 1984–1991 company and not of the name.

Why it mattered

The standard reading — film company brings film marketing to games — is tidy and mostly wrong. Palace came out of video retail, its boss came out of records, and its most notorious image was conceived by the game’s designer as part of the game, not by a marketing department.

What Palace genuinely introduced was less photogenic and more durable: the idea that a game is made by named specialists. An artist, a programmer, a musician, and someone whose job is gameplay — assembled deliberately in 1984, at a moment when the industry’s own retailers were still buying finished cassettes out of carrier bags. By 1987 Palace could no longer describe its own house style except by naming which of its designers made a given game, which is how every studio has described itself since.

See also

• CRL Group — the opposite answer to the same censorship question.
• Commodore 64
• ZX Spectrum
• CRASH
• Ocean Software