Probe Software | Code Like It's 198x

For about fifteen years, if a British publisher had bought the home rights to an arcade hit or a film and needed it on every format at once, there was a good chance the work went to an office block in Croydon, south London. Probe Software converted Out Run for the 8-bit computers, Golden Axe and Smash TV for the 16-bit ones, and Mortal Kombat for the Mega Drive. By 1995 3DO Magazine called it “the UK’s largest independent developer”. Its founder, Fergus McGovern, was still a teenager when he started it, and by Edge’s account never wrote a line of code: the business side was his job.

Fast facts

Founded: 7 June 1984, by Fergus McGovern and the programmer Vakis Paraskeva.
Based: Croydon, south London.
Business: at first a small publisher of its own games; from about 1986 a developer working for other publishers, above all on arcade conversions and film licences.
Clients: U.S. Gold, Ocean, Firebird, Mastertronic, Mirrorsoft, Virgin, Sega and Acclaim, among others.
Bought by: Acclaim, in 1995. Renamed Acclaim Studios London by 1999; the studio closed in 2000.

A publisher first

McGovern came to computers through a summer job. At 16 he was the third employee of P&P Micros, a distributor of Apple computers, and his brother Kevin, later Probe’s financial director, was the fifth. McGovern told Edge that the firm began when his next-door neighbours made £1,800 selling on a single copy of the spreadsheet VisiCalc that they had brought back from California.

His friend Vakis Paraskeva was writing Commodore 16 and 64 games for Romik Software. McGovern persuaded him that they should work for themselves, “with him writing the games and me handling the sales and marketing”. According to Amiga Power, Probe started on 7 June 1984, and a friend of McGovern’s thought up the name one night at a disco. Its first game was Escape from Alcatraz for the Commodore 64. It followed that with Defence 16, a Defender-style game for the Commodore 16, and was delighted when WH Smith agreed to stock it. Then came Devil’s Crown for the Amstrad CPC, written by Brian O’Shaughnessy, which McGovern called “our most successful game at that time”: it sold well in Europe and even reached Harrods. Probe also published The Adventures of Basildon Bond, starring the television comedian Russ Abbot. “The licence cost us nothing,” McGovern said in 1992; it was done on a royalty basis.

Everything, from the packaging to the marketing, was done by the two directors, and it was “turning into a 24 hours a day job”. The company had cash but no sales team, so it could not afford to fund original games. After selling its Spectrum version of Devil’s Crown to Mastertronic, Probe stopped publishing and began developing games for other publishers, “letting them add their own marketing expertise and take their own risks”.

A conversion house

In August 1988 Amstrad Computer User visited Probe’s “bright, modern rooms in an award-winning block in Croydon”, where an arcade 1943 machine cycled through its demo. McGovern listed what the company had converted: Xevious, Metrocross, Slap Fight, Arkanoid, Solomon’s Key and more, for Ocean, U.S. Gold, Activision, Mirrorsoft, Psygnosis, Epyx, Mastertronic and Firebird. “We’d transformed into coin-op specialist,” he said. Probe did not keep its programmers in one room. It grouped them into small internal teams of two programmers, an artist and a musician, and rented four-bedroom houses around the country for them to live and work in.

The games that made its name came in 1987 and 1988. For U.S. Gold it converted Sega’s Out Run. The 8-bit versions were not well reviewed: CRASH’s three reviewers disagreed wildly over the Spectrum version, and Edge later called it “an appalling imitation of a state-of-the-art coin-op”. But it sold. McGovern remembered it as “a number one title that sat in the charts for nine months”, and his initials appear on the game’s Ferrari. Looking back in 1992, he was frank: “At the time I was pleased with what we managed but with hindsight I’m not so happy.”

Probe also made games of its own design for other labels. Trantor: The Last Stormtrooper (Go!, 1987) scored 68% in CRASH, and Savage (Firebird, 1988), a three-part fantasy action game, was written by David Perry, who later founded Shiny Entertainment in California. The access code to Savage’s last section was FERGUS. Raffaele Cecco converted his Cybernoid to the Spectrum for Probe, and Probe’s own Spectrum Turrican won 93% from CRASH in 1990.

Consoles, and the Mortal Kombat games

Probe’s way into consoles was a chess program. Frank Herman, who had bought games from Probe before, passed on a request from Sega in Japan for a Master System chess game in five months. Writing a chess engine from scratch in that time looked impossible, so Probe found an electronic chess board that used the same Z80 processor as the Master System, licensed its program from the author, removed the parts that talked to the board’s hardware and added Master System graphics. “It worked and we finished it in four months,” McGovern said. “That was it — we were official console developers.” Its music was the first Master System job for Matt Furniss of Krisalis, who went on to score many more Probe console games.

By March 1992 Probe had “nearly 60 programmers and graphic artists” working for it. McGovern explained the economics to Amiga Power: “the publisher gets 80 percent of the profit and we only see around 20 percent”, but the publisher took the risk, and if a game flopped the developer still kept its advance. The deadlines were the hard part. On Smash TV, he said, the promised arcade graphics arrived four days after the conversion was finished, so the team had drawn them all from scratch. Film licences such as Terminator 2, Alien 3 and RoboCop 3 followed, alongside Sega arcade games including Golden Axe, Super Monaco GP and Turbo OutRun. On Virgin’s Golden Axe in 1990, Probe answered for all the computer conversions, with Neil Young as its producer, but the Amiga and Atari ST versions were written by the Dementia team, the Spectrum and Amstrad versions by David Shea, and the Commodore 64 version by Probe’s Mark Kelly with graphics by Steve Crow.

For Acclaim, Probe made the Mega Drive version of Mortal Kombat, released on “Mortal Monday”, 13 September 1993. Unlike Sculptured Software’s Super NES version, it kept all the fatalities behind a secret cheat. C&VG called it “the best one-on-one Megadrive beat ’em up ever”. Probe converted Mortal Kombat II as well, and for T2: The Arcade Game on the Amiga it worked from source code that came directly from the arcade machine.

By 1995 the scale of the work had grown. Probe’s project manager for Primal Rage, Robert O’Farrell, known as “Barg”, had started it a year earlier “for no less than 17 formats”. The 3DO version was Probe’s first game for that machine, and O’Farrell admitted: “From its reputation, I thought it would be a slow machine. In fact, the finished game will run in 2 frames.”

Acclaim

In 1995 Acclaim bought Probe, as it bought Iguana Entertainment and Sculptured Software the same year. Edge reported that the deal was rumoured to be worth £60 million, and that McGovern had been made a vice-president of Acclaim. Much of the payment was in Acclaim shares. Edge counted more than 400 Probe titles by then, with retail sales of over $1.6 billion.

Under Acclaim, Probe moved to 32-bit consoles and to original games: Alien Trilogy and Die Hard Trilogy for the PlayStation and Saturn, and Forsaken (1998), a PC game that Edge thought looked “like taking the Descent concept about as far as it can go”. In December 1997 Edge reported that Fergus and Kevin McGovern had left the company, though Acclaim at first denied it; by September 1998 it was describing Fergus as the “now-departed Probe founder”, with a new company of his own. By late 1999 the studio was working as Acclaim Studios London, “formerly Probe Entertainment”, on games such as Armorines for the Nintendo 64. In 2000 Edge reported that its Croydon studio, “formerly known as Probe, the veteran ‘hit’ factory”, was to close.

McGovern went on to co-found HotGen, a toys and games company, and served on the board of Crystal Palace Football Club. He died in February 2016, aged 50.

Sources

Amstrad Computer User issue 45, August 1988, pp. 24–26: interview with Fergus McGovern (P&P Micros, Defence 16 and WH Smith, Devil’s Crown, Basildon Bond, Dirty Den, the move to development, the conversions and clients, the Croydon office, programmers’ houses).
CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Trantor (68%, as recalled in issue 57). Issue 53, June 1988: Probe as authors of Lazer Tag and Trantor. Issue 57, October 1988: Savage “designed and programmed by Probe Software”. Issue 59, December 1988: Raffaele Cecco’s diary (“David Perry (who wrote Savage)”).
ACE issue 17, February 1989: Savage access code FERGUS; McGovern’s initials on the Out Run Ferrari.
ZZAP!64 issue 65, September 1990, p. 55: Mark Kelly of Probe on the C64 Golden Axe; “An Amiga version is also under development by Probe”.
ACE issue 39, December 1990, pp. 30–31: Golden Axe credits (Dementia on the Amiga, David Shea on the Spectrum and CPC, Mark Kelly and Steve Crow on the C64) and Neil Young, “Software Producer at Probe”. K (Italy) issue 23, December 1990, p. 25, the same feature in Italian: “Le conversioni per computer di Golden Axe sono opera della Probe”.
The One issue 27, December 1990, p. 81: Dementia, “the team behind the Amiga and Atari ST conversions of Golden Axe for Virgin”.
Amiga Power issue 11, March 1992: profile of Fergus McGovern (age 26; 7 June 1984; the name; early releases; Basildon Bond; the 80/20 split; nearly 60 staff; Out Run, Smash TV, Golden Axe).
Amiga Power issue 31, November 1993: T2: The Arcade Game at Probe, from the arcade source code.
3DO Magazine issue 6, October 1995: Primal Rage (Probe “the UK’s largest independent developer”; Robert O’Farrell; 17 formats; the 3DO version).
Edge issue 30, March 1996: McGovern “never having written a line of code in his life”.
Edge issue 28, January 1996: the Acclaim deal (“a rumoured £60 million”) and interview with Fergus McGovern (P&P Micros, Vakis Paraskeva, early games, Mastertronic, Out Run in the charts for nine months, Sega Chess, over 400 titles).
Edge issue 47, July 1997: visit to Probe in Croydon (founded 1984; coin-op and film work; Forsaken). Issue 52, December 1997: the McGovern brothers’ departure; payment in Acclaim stock. Issue 62, September 1998: “now-departed Probe founder”.
64 Extreme issue 7, November 1997: visit to Probe (founded 1984 by McGovern; film licences and 16-bit conversions).
Nintendo Power issue 127, December 1999: Armorines by “Acclaim Studios London, formerly Probe Entertainment”.
Edge issue 94, February 2001: review of 2000, the Croydon studio to close.
Mortal Kombat on the Mega Drive, Out Run, Turrican and Cybernoid: see the sources for Mortal Kombat, Out Run, Turrican and Raffaele Cecco. Sega Chess music: see Matt Furniss. The purchase of Iguana and Sculptured: see Acclaim.
Chris Kerr, “Obituary: Probe Software and HotGen co-founder Fergus McGovern”, Game Developer, 29 February 2016 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/obituary-probe-software-and-hotgen-co-founder-fergus-mcgovern
“Probe, Hotgen co-founder Fergus McGovern dies aged 50”, MCV/Develop, February 2016 (web, secondary). https://mcvuk.com/development-news/probe-hotgen-co-founder-fergus-mcgovern-dies-aged-50/
Wikipedia, “Probe Entertainment” (web, secondary): the renaming in May 1999 and closure in April 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_Entertainment