PSS

Personal Software Services, of Coventry, spent the eighties doing something most British publishers did not: serious wargames, on machines mostly bought to play arcade games on.

Fast facts

Based: Coventry. Founded: 1981.
Named in the press as: Gary Mays, co-founder and partner, and Richard Cockayne, director.
Series: the Wargamers line — Theatre Europe was the second, Battle of Britain the third, both at £9.95.
Also: Tobruk, Bismarck, Sorcerer Lord, The Covenant, Swords ‘n’ Sorcery.
Afterwards: absorbed into Mirrorsoft, which reworked Theatre Europe for 16-bit machines as Conflict Europe.

“Our first and biggest mistake”

Ask most companies about their name and you get a founding myth. Amstrad Action went to Coventry in March 1986 and got the opposite: Gary Mays “looks rather pained”, gives a sigh, and explains that the name “was our first and biggest mistake” — pleading in mitigation that they had handled their own early publicity.

Personal Software Services is a name from the era when it was not yet obvious that games would be the business. It says software house, in the way a firm selling accounts packages to small companies might. What PSS sold was the Warsaw Pact rolling into West Germany.

The hex grid comes home — and does not stay there

Board wargaming — hexagonal maps, cardboard counters, combat-results tables — was a substantial hobby with its own publishers and magazines long before home computers. PSS’s first insight was the obvious one: the computer keeps the map, tracks supply, and works out the odds, leaving the player the decisions.

Its second insight is the one worth recording, because it is a design decision rather than a port.

PSS put arcade sequences inside its wargames, and let them change the result. Computer Gamer, previewing Theatre Europe in 1985: you plan strategy through map and radar screens, “however, you will also need a keen fire button as individual battles are fought out with a joystick on action screens”. In Battle of Britain the same year, the action screens put you in a Spitfire cockpit and behind anti-aircraft guns — and the magazine spells out the consequence: “your skill in this stage will affect the outcome of the battles, as in Theatre Europe”.

That is a deliberate bridge between two audiences who did not otherwise buy the same games. The strategist gets a campaign; the fourteen-year-old who bought the machine for Jet Set Willy gets something to shoot at; and the two are wired together so that neither is decoration. Whether it satisfied either group completely is a fair question, but as an answer to “how do you sell a hex-grid wargame to a Spectrum owner” it is a real one.

It worked well enough. By August 1985 Theatre Europe was in the Gallup Commodore 64 top ten and on the Amstrad chart at the same time.

Theatre Europe

Theatre Europe (1985) simulates the first thirty days of a conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact for control of West Germany. You take either supreme commander. The Warsaw Pact wins by taking West Germany; NATO wins by stopping it.

There are three levels: a non-nuclear setting for beginners, the accepted NATO and Warsaw Pact doctrines for more advanced players, and — in Computer Gamer’s description — “a highly unpredictable strategy that should only be tackled by experts”.

Chemical and nuclear release are available to the player. Using them ends the game in the way that ending is usually depicted.

⚠ Theatre Europe is widely said to have carried a CND telephone number on its packaging. Period coverage does discuss a CND association — the March 1986 Amstrad Action interview turns to it directly — but that passage of the scan is too damaged to quote or to confirm the specific claim from. What is legible is Mays’s own retreat from the subject: asked about it, he says “I’m not sure any more”, and the magazine records that the next releases in the series “will not pose such weighty” questions.

That is worth more than the packaging detail. A publisher took a position, found it harder to hold than expected, and stepped back from it within a year.

The context is not abstract. Theatre Europe was published at the height of the Euromissile crisis, when cruise and Pershing deployments were live news, Threads had recently been broadcast, and a substantial part of its audience genuinely expected this to happen. A game asking a teenager whether to authorise a first strike was a different proposition in 1985 than it reads as now.

“There’s no need for such devices”

The other thing PSS is on the record for is a stance on piracy that cost it money.

Acorn User, October 1984: “PSS, a Coventry software house, has adopted a policy of not advertising in any magazine which carries adverts for tape or disc copiers.” Director Richard Cockayne said he was “fairly appalled” at companies selling copier programs, and gave both the commercial argument and the alternative:

In the longer term they are cutting their own throat. There’s no need for such devices. We will replace any tape which doesn’t load.

Set that beside the Guild of Software Houses charter of the year before, which committed members to replacing defective stock. PSS’s position is the same promise made unilaterally, with a boycott attached — and a small publisher declining to advertise in the magazines that reviewed it is not a cheap gesture.

Why it mattered

PSS is evidence that the British 8-bit market was broader than its reputation. Alongside the arcade conversions and platform games there was a real, sustained business in simulation and strategy.

But the more interesting lesson is the compromise. PSS did not simply port a hobby onto a games machine and wait for an audience to find it; it re-engineered the form so that a wargame could be sold to somebody who had never seen a hex grid, and accepted the hybrid that produced. That is a commercial answer to a design problem, and the sort of thing that gets edited out when the period is remembered as either “arcade games” or “serious software”.

And Theatre Europe is one of the earliest examples of a computer game treated as comment, not entertainment — reviewed, and occasionally objected to, on the strength of what it was about, not how it played.

Wargames for the bedroom