Probe Software
Conversions, at industrial scale
A London studio that made its living turning arcade and film licences into console games — and ended up absorbed by the publisher it worked for, which is how most successful British developers finished.
Probe converted other people’s games onto other people’s machines, for over a decade, at a pace few British studios matched. OutRun, T2: The Arcade Game, Alien 3, the console Mortal Kombat conversions — the Amiga Power writers refer to “Probe’s 3D conversion of…” and “the original OutRun conversion” as landmarks their readers would recognise without explanation.
Fast facts
- Founded: London, 1984, by Fergus McGovern.
- Press evidence in this library: across the 8-bit and 16-bit years; T2: The Arcade Game in Amiga Power, 1994.
- Specialised in: arcade conversions, film licences, and multi-platform console versions.
- Later: absorbed by Acclaim and renamed Acclaim Studios London.
The licence conversion as a job
Probe’s work sat at the intersection of the two hardest commercial constraints in the industry.
A licence has a date. A film tie-in ships when the film does, an arcade conversion while the cabinet is still in arcades. The deadline is set by somebody else and does not move, which inverts the usual relationship between scope and schedule: you cut the game to fit the calendar.
A conversion has a reference. Everyone reviewing it has played the original, and the review is a comparison. There is no credit available for a good game that differs from the arcade version — the job is fidelity on hardware that cannot manage it, which means deciding what to sacrifice and being judged on that choice.
Doing this repeatedly, on time, across a dozen machines, is a genuine industrial capability, and it is nothing like the capability that makes an original game good. It also pays reliably, which mattered.
How British developers ended
Probe’s ending is the most common one in this Vault, and worth naming as a pattern, not an event.
A studio does good work for a publisher. The publisher, which owns the licences and the distribution, comes to depend on it and buys it — this is cheaper and safer than losing it to a competitor. The studio becomes an internal team, renamed after its owner, and its own name disappears. When the publisher later contracts, the team goes with it.
Probe became Acclaim Studios London. Gremlin went to Infogrames, Impressions into Sierra, Beyond into British Telecom’s software arm. The independent British studio of the eighties usually finished as a wing of somebody larger, and the trail goes cold at the point the name changes — which is why, as the Impressions entry argues, following people works where following companies does not.
Why it mattered
Probe is conversion as a craft and a business — the work that made a game exist on the machine you owned.
It also marks something about how the British industry’s skills were spent. A studio capable of shipping accurate, on-time versions of somebody else’s game on five platforms is an impressive thing to have built, and almost none of what it produced is remembered under its own name.
The UK’s largest independent developer
3DO Magazine, October 1995, on who was converting Primal Rage, states the company’s standing flatly:
Probe Software are the UK’s largest independent developer and virtually the only choice for converting Primal Rage.
That single sentence does more than the review evidence above, because it places Probe by size rather than by catalogue — and size, in a conversion house, is the product.
The scale is in the detail. Project manager Robert O’Farrell — “universally known as Barg, after an AD&D character” — had been responsible for Probe’s “massively acclaimed Mortal Kombat II conversions” and oversaw testing on the original chart-topping Mortal Kombat games. He had started work on Primal Rage a year earlier, for no less than 17 formats.
Seventeen versions of one game, run by one project manager. That is the industrial end of what Elite and Krisalis were doing a decade earlier at a handful of machines apiece, and it explains why the conversion house outlived most of the publishers it worked for: the fragmentation that made porting miserable also made it indispensable.
O’Farrell is also candid about working blind on new hardware, which is the conversion programmer’s permanent condition:
When I first heard I was doing a 3DO version — Probe’s first 3DO game in fact — I was a bit worried. From its reputation, I thought it would be a slow machine. In fact, the finished game will run in 2 frames… I’m really pleased with it.
One further connection worth recording: Primal Rage was “developed by Time-Warner’s old Atari Games division” — see Atari Games. By 1995 the arcade division that had spent the late eighties suing Nintendo was supplying coin-ops to a British conversion house for a Korean-manufactured console.