Quicksilva

Software when there was barely an industry

One of the first British software labels: a Southampton mail-order house selling arcade clones for the ZX81 at £3.95, competing head-to-head with Bug-Byte and Psion for the Spectrum Space Invaders market in 1982, and publishing Sandy White's Ant Attack in 1983. It helped found the industry's first trade body, and was swallowed by Argus Press Software in 1984.

sinclair-zx-spectrumcommodore-64publisheruk8-bitearly1979–1984 (acquired)

Quicksilva belongs to the earliest days of British commercial software — the stretch around 1980 when a “software company” might be two people, a duplicating deck and a small ad in the back of a magazine. It started in Southampton, selling programs for the ZX80 and ZX81 by post, and grew into one of the first recognisable labels of the Spectrum era.

Fast facts

Based: Southampton — 95 Upper Brownhill Road, Maybush in 1982, 15 Palmerston Road by 1984.
Trading as: Quicksilva, and QS on the ZX81 labels.
In the press from: 1982, at £4.95–£5.95 for ZX81 and early Spectrum tapes, rising to £6.95–£14.95 by 1984.
Known for: Ant Attack, Time Gate, Meteor Storm, Aquaplane, Bugaboo (The Flea), Games Designer, Velnor’s Lair.
Also sold: hardware and tools — a ZX81 character generator, Music Maker, Ultisynth, BeebArt.

What it sold

The early catalogue is more specific than “one of the first British software labels” suggests, and the specificity is the interesting part.

In May 1982, Computer & Video Games listed Quicksilva of 95 Upper Brownhill Road, Maybush, Southampton as having three games on the market: “all versions of popular arcade games, and include space invaders, defender and asteroids, and all cost £5.50.” On the ZX81 these went out under the QS prefix — QS Defenda by Nick Lambert, QS Asteroids by John Hollis, QS Invaders — later at £3.95 each.

That is what an early British software house was: not an original-design studio, but a shop reproducing arcade games on a machine with 1K of screen and no sprites. C&VG gave them the compliment that mattered in September 1982 — Quicksilva “have already won themselves a good reputation for producing good arcade replicas within the limitations of the ZX81”.

It also sold hardware. The same 1982 round-up lists a Quicksilva programmable character generator at £26.00 for the ZX81, letting the user define lower-case letters, scientific notation “and space invader-type meanies”, supplied with a demonstration cassette of machine-code routines. A software house selling you a ROM to change your computer’s character set is a good marker of how undivided the market still was.

Racing Bug-Byte to the same games

When the Spectrum arrived, Quicksilva went straight at it and straight at its competitors. C&VG in November 1982: “Southampton firm Quicksilva were hot on the heels of Bug Byte with their version of Invaders for the Spectrum — Space Intruders.”

The magazine reviewed three Spectrum Space Invaders clones side by side — Quicksilva’s, Bug-Byte’s and Psion’s — and Quicksilva lost: “for my £5 Bug Byte offers the best game of Space Invaders on the Spectrum so far.” Two months later it ran the same exercise for Asteroids clones and Quicksilva won, its Meteor Storm judged “marginally better because of its extra facilities and graphics”, and the only one of the three that let you enter your initials in a top-ten table.

Three companies shipping the same arcade game to the same machine in the same season, reviewed against each other by price, is what the market looked like before original design was the point.

The catalogue turns

By 1984 the advertisements read differently. Quicksilva’s full-page listings — under the slogan “Quicksilva are the game lords” — credit their authors by name and span five machines:

Title	Author	Price
Ant Attack (Spectrum)	Sandy White	£6.95
Games Designer (Spectrum)	John Hollis	£14.95
Aquaplane	John Hollis	£7.95
Bugaboo (The Flea)	Indescomp	£6.95 — 92% in CRASH issue 1
Gridrunner, Traxx	Jeff Minter / Salamander	£6.95
Velnor’s Lair	Derek Brewster	£6.95
Mined Out	Ian Andrew & Ian Rowlings	£6.95
3D Strategy	Freddy Vachha	£6.95
Purple Turtles (C64)	Mark & Richard Moore	£7.95
Ultisynth (C64)	Nalin Sharma	£14.95
BeebArt, The Generators (BBC)	Dave Mendes	£14.95 / £6.95

Two names there run on into other entries in this Vault. Jeff Minter’s Gridrunner reached the Spectrum through Quicksilva. And Mined Out is by Ian Andrew, who went on to found Incentive and build Freescape.

How Ant Attack arrived

The table above credits Ant Attack to Sandy White and stops there. Retro Gamer’s interview with White supplies the part that says what a publisher like Quicksilva was for.

He went to Sinclair Research first, sending them a videotape of the game running. They sat on it for a month or two, and the eventual phone call ended with the tape being returned. He then took a chance on Quicksilva — and by his account was in their Southampton offices signing a contract within twenty-four hours of them receiving it.

That contrast is the entry in miniature. The machine’s own manufacturer could not decide about an original game in two months; a mail-order house in Southampton could decide in a day. Quicksilva’s competitive advantage over a far larger company was the ability to say yes quickly.

The same piece credits the inlay art to David Rowe, whose surrealist cover it rates well above the usual standard — worth recording because packaging was doing real work at this price point, and the artist is almost never named.

The catalogue kept moving

Quicksilva was still releasing after the Argus purchase, and onto machines the entry does not list. Retro Gamer’s reconstruction of March 1985 has Bugaboo and The Snowman, both Quicksilva, arriving for the MSX — alongside Level 9 announcing its own MSX conversions.

⚠ That is after the 1984 acquisition described below, and consistent with it: the label continued while the company behind it did not.

Games, and not only games

The press evidence catches something the era tends to obscure about early publishers. Music Maker, Ultisynth and BeebArt are tools, not games, and they sat in the same advertisement as Ant Attack at similar or higher prices.

The line between “software” and “games” had not yet hardened. A publisher of this era might sell you a game, a utility, a music package, a programming aid or a character-generator ROM from the same catalogue, because the customer was understood as someone with a computer, not someone who wanted to play something. That distinction sharpened over the decade, and Quicksilva’s lists are a record of the period before it did.

GOSH

In 1983 Quicksilva was one of the companies that founded the Guild of Software Houses — the industry’s first attempt at self-regulation, and the body that published a Customers’ Charter promising mail-order delivery times, replacement of defective tapes, and no advertising of products before they existed.

Commodore Computing International named the instigators in October 1983: “leading software houses such as Quicksilva, Virgin Games and Bug-Byte founded the guild in response to the public’s need for a little more discipline from the software houses themselves.”

The three founders are the three oldest mail-order houses in the business. They had been taking postal orders since before there was a distribution network, and they were the ones who knew exactly which promises the trade was breaking.

Bought, 1984

Quicksilva did not fade out; it was acquired — in 1984, by Argus Press Software, “part of the massive BET group”. CRASH reported the consequence in September 1985 in a sentence worth quoting in full:

Sadly, much of the pioneering firm’s identity was submerged when Quicksilva was bought by Argus, part of the massive BET group, last year.

A companion piece records that Quicksilva “was sold to Argus Press Software… and the team disbanded”. By April 1985 CRASH was treating the purchase as old news, joking about “Argus Press Software’s shopping list for other companies” at the LET trade show — where Argus also took over production and marketing for Lothlorien, and Quicksilva bought exclusive rights to seven Bug-Byte titles.

Rod Cousens, Quicksilva’s MD, is the figure quoted throughout, promising “considerable expansion in the field of publishing third party software”.

So by 1985 the mail-order pioneer had become an acquisition vehicle inside a magazine publisher’s software arm. Argus Press Software was itself renamed a couple of years later — it is the company this Vault covers as Grandslam.

Everything described above about Quicksilva’s early years therefore belongs to 1979–1985. After that the name continues and the company behind it does not.

Why it mattered

Quicksilva is a good answer to “who was doing this first”. Not the largest publisher, not the longest-lived, but present at the point where selling programs to home users stopped being a hobby and became a trade — and its catalogue shows what that looked like before anyone knew the shape it would take.