Players
New games at £1.99
A Devon budget label that published original games, not reissues — and whose biggest hit, Joe Blade, topped the full-price sales charts at a pound ninety-nine.
Budget software in Britain mostly meant one of two things: last year’s full-price games reissued cheaply, or new games made cheaply enough to sell for a pound or two. Players did the second, and did it well enough that one of its £1.99 cassettes outsold the full-price releases it shared a chart with.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: reviewed in CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amstrad Action from 1986 to 1988, almost always at exactly £1.99.
- Known for: Joe Blade, Deviants, Tanium, Killapede, Trollie Wallie, Velocipede II, Metal Army, Fungus.
- Recurring programmer: Colin Swinbourne, credited on Joe Blade, Deviants and Tanium.
The launch, in CRASH’s words
CRASH covered the launch from the Consumer Electronics Show at Olympia in April 1986:
Richard Jones of Interceptor was at the CES show, proud to be launching a new budget label — Players. Players games will sell for £1.99 retail, and the range kicks off on 29th April with sixteen titles for the popular machines.
Sixteen titles on day one is the budget model stated as a quantity. A full-price publisher launched with one game and an advertising campaign; a budget label launched with a shelf.
The magazine also noticed where the effort had gone. Jones had “examples of the packaging and a very neat promotional video on his CES stand, but no games running”, and CRASH records his assurance that “lots of work has gone into the packaging design as well as the software”. At £1.99 the box is doing the selling, because there is no budget for anything else — the arithmetic in budget games shows exactly why.
It was a second venture rather than a first: Players was Interceptor’s move into budget, aiming, in CRASH’s phrasing, “to catch a significant share of the budget market”.
Joe Blade
CRASH gave Joe Blade 84% in issue 44, September 1987, and returned to it four months later to note that it “sat at the top of the sales charts for more than a month”. That is a £1.99 cassette beating games sold at five times the price.
The economics are worth sitting with. At full price a Spectrum game cost £7.95 to £9.95 and had to justify itself against a limited pocket-money budget; a bad one was a month’s disappointment. At £1.99 the calculation changed completely. The buyer risked almost nothing, so a game only had to be interesting enough to be worth a punt — and a game that turned out to be genuinely good, as Joe Blade did, spread by word of mouth faster than anything at the top of the market.
The follow-up shows the other side. Deviants (1988) was by the same programmer at the same price, and CRASH was blunt: playable, varied, “disappointing from the author of Joe Blade”, 65%. Budget publishing gave a programmer the chance to be a hit and the chance to be forgotten, in the same year, on the same terms.
The same game, at seventeen times the price
Players’ whole proposition was £1.99, so it is worth recording what happened to Joe Blade when it left Britain.
Amazing Computing’s Amiga product guides list it through 1989 and 1990, published in the United States by DigiTek Software of Tampa, Florida, with the mission described in full — “rescue six world leaders being held hostage by the leader of an infamous group of terrorists, Crax Bloodfinger” — and a price of:
$34.95
A cassette that sold in a British newsagent for £1.99 was sold in America as a full-price Amiga release. Some of that is the platform and some is the exchange rate, but not seventeen-fold’s worth of either.
⚠ Do not read this as the British price being wrong. It is evidence that £1.99 was a distribution strategy, not a statement about the game’s worth — the same software, moved to a market with different retail habits and a more expensive machine, was priced like anything else on the shelf. The budget tier was a British answer to a British problem: how to reach buyers who were nowhere near a computer shop.
Original, not reissued
The distinction between Players and a label like Kixx matters. Kixx sold US Gold’s back catalogue at £2.99 — proven games with the development already paid for. Players commissioned new work, which means a first-time programmer could get a game published, in shops, reviewed in the national magazines, without ever going near a full-price publisher.
That is a genuinely different thing from cheap reissues, and it is one of the routes by which the British bedroom coder became a professional. The pay was small. The barrier was almost nothing.
Why it mattered
Players is the case for budget as a place where new games happened, and not only where old ones went to die. Its catalogue is uneven, its production values are frankly modest, and one of its releases still reached number one.
It is also a reminder of how compressed the British market was in 1987. A programmer in Devon, a cassette costing less than a magazine, and a route to the top of the same chart the big publishers were fighting over.