Piranha

Piranha was Macmillan’s games imprint — a book publisher of long standing deciding, in the mid-eighties, that software was another kind of publishing. It lasted about two years, and its catalogue is a near-perfect snapshot of what a licensing-minded publisher thought British teenagers wanted.

Fast facts

• Parent: Macmillan Publishers.
• Press evidence in this library: reviewed in CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amstrad Action from 1986 to 1988, at £6.95–£8.95, with budget re-releases at £1.98.
• Known for: The Trap Door and its sequel Through the Trap Door, Rogue Trooper, The Colour of Magic, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Strike Force Cobra, Flunky, Lifeforce.

Licences, and where they came from

What makes the catalogue worth looking at is where the licences were drawn from — not arcade cabinets, which is where most publishers shopped, but the properties a book-and-media company had relationships with:

• The Trap Door — the stop-motion children’s television series, and a genuinely well-liked game.
• Rogue Trooper — the 2000 AD strip.
• The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel, adapted as an illustrated adventure while the series was still young.
• Nosferatu the Vampyre — Herzog’s film.

That is not a games publisher’s list. It is a publisher’s list, assembled by people whose instinct was that a strong property transfers to any medium.

The scores

Game	Score	Issue
The Big Sleaze	93%	43
Nosferatu	91%	36
Trapdoor	88%	33
Rogue Trooper	79%	36
Through the Trap Door	70%	47
Yogi Bear	62%	47
Flunky	60%	44

Not a bad two years. Three titles at 88% or better is a better hit rate than several publishers in this Vault that lasted a decade.

Piranha sinks

ACE reported the end in July 1988 under that headline, and was blunt about the cause:

The [latest] software house to sink is Piranha, the label set up by book publishers Macmillan to dip the corporate toe in the games software market. While the name conjures up images of aggressive marketing, Piranha never really cut it — [hits] were few and far between, with the result that the Macmillan board pulled the plug.

The more interesting account came five months later, in ACE’s round-up of the year’s failures, and it is about what a closure does to the things a company was holding:

The ravenous Piranha [had acquired] Roy of the Rovers and a clutch of 2000AD characters (collected for a mere £1,000 [apiece], so the rumour has it). Piranha spent a lot of time and money developing games before parent company Macmillan pulled the plug out of the aquarium, asphyxiating Piranha and leaving the licences high and dry. So far, Gremlin have picked up Roy, but as for the rest…

⚠ The £1,000 figure is reported as rumour by the magazine and is carried here as such.

Two things worth taking from that. British comic characters were cheap — a thousand pounds an item for Roy of the Rovers and 2000AD properties, against the sums Ocean and US Gold were paying for film rights. And a licence is not an asset that survives its holder: when Macmillan closed the label, the rights sat unusable until somebody else bought them, and most of them never produced a game at all.

Why it mattered

Piranha is a small, short-lived label that illustrates something structural: in the mid-eighties, British software looked lucrative enough that established media companies came in to try it — and mostly found that a games catalogue is not much like a book list.

The Macmillan experiment ended quickly, as did most of them. But the pattern recurs across the decade — Newsfield starting Thalamus, Mirror Group running Mirrorsoft, Virgin and Telecom launching labels. Piranha is one of the clearest examples, because its licences make the parent company’s DNA so visible.

See also

• Thalamus — the other magazine-and-media-parent label
• ZX Spectrum
• CRASH
• Budget games