Rainbird | Code Like It's 198x

Rainbird’s first releases were not games. They were The Music System, a program for writing music on the Commodore 64, and The Art Studio, a drawing package for the Spectrum. Within a year the same label had a CRASH readers’ Game of the Year that cost nearly twice as much as an ordinary Spectrum game, and it had signed the two most admired adventure writers in Britain. Rainbird was the full-price side of British Telecom’s games business, and for a few years it published some of the best-regarded software in the country.

Fast facts

Owner: British Telecom, through its New Information Services division and later Telecomsoft; sold to MicroProse in 1989.
Named after: Tony Rainbird, who ran the label at the start and resigned in November 1986.
Sister labels: Firebird and, from 1988, the budget label Silverbird.
Prices: £14.95 for Spectrum cassettes of The Art Studio, Starglider and The Pawn; £24.95 for Atari ST and Amiga games.
Developers: Argonaut, Realtime Games, Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9, Graftgold, Maelstrom.

A label for “state-of-the-art packages”

Commodore Horizons announced the new label in January 1986. Rainbird was “headed by Tony Rainbird”, was “part of Telecom’s New Information Services division”, and would “specialise in state-of-the-art packages including strategy games, applications packages, arcade games and simulations”. Some of them would be too complex to sell on cassette. Firebird Licensees Inc. would sell them in the United States.

Tony Rainbird had been part of the business from the beginning. He left his own label, Micro-Gold, to join Firebird in June 1984, and argued for Firebird’s cheap Silver range on the grounds that a small profit on a large volume of sales could add up to more money overall. His new label went the other way. The Music System cost £14.95 on cassette and £17.95 on disk, and the Advanced Music System £39.95. CRASH reviewed The Art Studio, written by James Hutchby for OCP, in January 1986 and thought it “an excellent buy” at £14.95. Rainbird’s advertisements the next month told buyers to make cheques payable to Rainbird Software, “a division of British Telecommunications plc”.

The same Commodore Horizons report named a coming game: Starglider, “a vector graphic combat simulator for the Atari 520 ST, and eventually the Commodore Amiga”. The French magazine ST Magazine had already listed Starglider and The Pawn as coming from Rainbird in December 1985.

Starglider

Argonaut wrote Starglider for the Atari ST. The Spectrum version came from Realtime Games, the team behind 3D Starstrike. CRASH found it good on the 48K Spectrum and extraordinary on the 128K, where it had a David Lowe title tune and speech recorded by Clare Edgeley of Rainbird. One reviewer thought the speech knocked “the stuffing out of the Atari ST version”. CRASH gave it 95%, and 97% for the 128K version.

Readers agreed. In CRASH’s awards for 1986, Starglider was voted Best Game Overall with 12.5% of the vote, ahead of Ocean’s The Great Escape and Hewson’s Uridium and Quazatron. The magazine noted that it had won “even though it costs nearly twice as much as most ‘full price’ Spectrum games”. Andrew Onions of Realtime accepted: “This is the first time we’ve received any sort of accolade in two and a half years.”

Two adventure houses

Rainbird announced deals with Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls at the Consumer Electronics Show at Olympia in the last week of April 1986. CRASH photographed Tony Rainbird and Paula Byrne signing with the Austin family of Level 9. Rainbird would sell selected Level 9 games in Britain and the United States, starting with a revamped version of the Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure trilogy, with graphics added and an improved parser. Level 9 would stay independent and keep publishing under its own name. CRASH also found Paula Byrne on the Rainbird stand, “still hung over from her farewell party at Melbourne House, two days before”.

The trilogy came out as Jewels of Darkness, and CRASH gave it 94%. The Pawn, Magnetic Scrolls’ first adventure, reached the Spectrum at £14.95 and scored 90%. Level 9’s Knight Orc and Magnetic Scrolls’ The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption and Fish! followed on Rainbird, and between them they won the adventure categories of the Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, 1987 and 1988.

Neither partnership lasted. In March 1988 ACE reported that “Level 9 have severed relations with Rainbird Software” for an exclusive deal with Mandarin, a new label owned by Europress. Mandarin would publish Time and Magik “instead of Rainbird”: the game had been “endlessly delayed under the Rainbird” label.

Magnetic Scrolls left when Telecomsoft was sold. ACE reported in July 1989 that, according to Anita Sinclair, Magnetic Scrolls’ contract with BT “was not ‘assignable’”: if BT sold the business, the rights to distribute Magnetic Scrolls’ games did not go with it. MicroProse’s UK head, Stuart Bell, called them “quality adventures that we’d be proud to sell”, but Magnetic Scrolls was looking for a new publisher. Sinclair blamed Telecomsoft for the months before the sale: “Our products were not properly distributed during this time and Fish in particular was very badly affected. As far as we’re concerned, the whole story is one of complete mismanagement by Telecomsoft.”

The 16-bit catalogue

As the ST and Amiga took over, Rainbird became mainly a 16-bit publisher, at £24.95 a game. Its April 1988 advertisements in ACE offered Realtime’s Carrier Command on the ST that month and on the Amiga in June. Argonaut’s Starglider 2 followed that summer. In May 1988 ACE reported that Rainbird’s ST and Amiga versions of David Braben’s Archimedes game Zarch would be late and might go out as Bird of Prey. It came out as Virus, on Firebird.

In February 1988 ACE reported that Telecomsoft had won the right to publish Graftgold’s Morpheus and Magnetron, which Hewson had been preparing to release. A High Court injunction had “restrained Hewson from publishing the titles until the case can be tried”. Magnetron went to Firebird and Andrew Braybrook’s Morpheus to Rainbird. The Telecomsoft and Graftgold entries tell that story in full.

“Who’s afraid of the big, bad birds?”

By the summer of 1988 Telecomsoft’s size was itself a story. ACE reported in August that “some people in the industry actually seem to be afraid of our feathered friends”, who thought that “big is bad, bad, bad”: a company practising “cheque-book publishing” that could “march into the market and spend millions”, and afford to lose money when others could not. Its critics would not be named.

Paula Byrne, by then running Telecomsoft, called it “a load of nonsense”: “Frankly we’ve heard all these criticisms three years ago.” Programmers wanted to work with Telecomsoft “as they trust the name of British Telecom”, she said, and it had “a large development team of 14 people who offer our programmers support”. The last word went to Andrew Hewson, who had lost Graftgold to BT the year before and was, the magazine said, surprisingly in favour of the big companies: “It doesn’t matter how big your cheque-book is — if you make silly decisions, you’re still going to lose money.”

After BT

British Telecom sold Telecomsoft to MicroProse in the spring of 1989. Stuart Bell told ACE he was “totally confident” that Firebird and Rainbird would carry on releasing games, and they did for a while: Realtime’s Carrier Command reached the Spectrum as part of the first MicroProse-era Rainbird line-up. Rainbird published Maelstrom’s Midwinter in 1990 and its sequel, Flames of Freedom, in 1991, advertised as coming from “Rainbird, the Masters of Strategy”. Amiga Power credited the Amiga version of UMS II to “Rainbird (MicroProse)” in February 1992. Retro Gamer’s 2004 history of Telecomsoft says that MicroProse then published its new games under its own labels and let Firebird and Rainbird lapse.

Looking back in October 1991, The One said that Hewson never really recovered from losing Turner and Braybrook, which it misdated to 1989, and that “Telecomsoft never really recovered either — its labels were sold to MicroProse not long afterwards”.

Sources

ST Magazine (France) issue 3, December 1985: Starglider and The Pawn listed as coming from Rainbird.
Commodore Horizons, January 1986, p. 35: “Rainbird” (the new label; Tony Rainbird; New Information Services; Firebird Licensees Inc.; The Music System as the first Rainbird product and its prices; The Art Studio and Starglider coming).
ZZAP!64 issue 9, January 1986: The Advanced Music System, Rainbird, £39.95.
CRASH issue 16, May 1985, pp. 105–108: “The Boys from Buzby” (Tony Rainbird joining from Micro-Gold in June 1984; his case for the Silver range).
CRASH issue 24, January 1986: The Art Studio review (James Hutchby; £14.95). Issue 25, February 1986: The Art Studio advertisement (“a division of British Telecommunications plc”).
CRASH issue 29, June 1986, p. 12: the Consumer Electronics Show (Rainbird, Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls; the Level 9 signing; Paula Byrne).
CRASH issue 36, Christmas 1986 (January 1987): Starglider review (Realtime; David Lowe; Clare Edgeley); Jewels of Darkness.
CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 33: readers’ awards for 1986 (Starglider Best Game Overall; 12.5%; Andrew Onions).
CRASH issue 41, June 1987, p. 58: The Pawn review.
CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews (Starglider 95%, 128K version 97%; Jewels of Darkness 94%; The Pawn 90%).
Amtix! issue 17, March 1987: Tony Rainbird’s resignation in November 1986.
ACE issue 5, February 1988: “BT get Graftgold games”.
ACE issue 6, March 1988: “Level 9 join Mandarin”.
ACE issue 7, April 1988: Rainbird advertisement (Carrier Command, ST and Amiga, £24.95).
ACE issue 8, May 1988: news (Zarch and Bird of Prey).
ACE issue 11, August 1988, p. 10: “Who’s afraid of the big, bad birds?” (Paula Byrne; Andrew Hewson). The same issue’s specials list credits Virus to Firebird.
ACE issue 22, July 1989: MicroProse’s plans for the labels (Stuart Bell); “Scrolled off…” (Anita Sinclair on the contract and on Telecomsoft).
ACE issue 30, March 1990: Midwinter as a Rainbird game. Issue 42, March 1991: Flames of Freedom advertisement (“Rainbird, the Masters of Strategy”).
Amiga Power issue 10, February 1992: UMS II, “Rainbird (MicroProse)”.
The One for ST Games issue 37, October 1991: Hewson and Telecomsoft.
Computer & Video Games issue 66, April 1987; issue 79, May 1988; issue 92, June 1989: the Golden Joystick Awards for 1986, 1987 and 1988.
“Memories of Telecomsoft”, Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: the fate of the labels under MicroProse.