Rainbird

Rainbird was the premium imprint of Telecomsoft, British Telecom’s software operation. Where its sibling Firebird sold £2.50 cassettes off a newsagent’s rack, Rainbird sold full-price simulations and adventures — and, increasingly, 16-bit games at £24.95.

The name is a person. Tony Rainbird was persuaded away from his own label, Micro-Gold, in June 1984 to get BT’s software operation moving; the premium imprint carries his name. The fuller account of Telecomsoft’s founding, its budget model and its 1989 sale sits in the Firebird entry — this one covers the label above it.

Fast facts

Parent: Telecomsoft, a division of British Telecom.
Siblings: Firebird (full-price and, as Silverbird, budget).
Prices: £14.95 on 8-bit, rising to £24.95 on ST and Amiga.
Published: Starglider and Starglider 2, The Pawn, Carrier Command, Jewels of Darkness, Time and Magik, Morpheus, Zarch.
Legal status: “Rainbird” was a registered trademark of British Telecom — printed as such in its own advertising.

What it published, and how it scored

Rainbird’s catalogue is short and unusually strong.

Game	Score	Where
Starglider	95% (128K version 97%)	CRASH issue 36
Jewels of Darkness (Level 9 compilation)	94%	CRASH issue 36
The Pawn (Magnetic Scrolls)	90%	CRASH issue 41

Starglider did more than review well. CRASH’s readers voted it Best Game of 1986 overall, taking 12.5% of the vote — ahead of The Great Escape, Uridium and Quazatron — despite costing, as the magazine noted, “nearly twice as much as most ‘full price’ Spectrum games”.

The strategy: buy the best developers

Rainbird’s method was to sign the strongest independent houses in the country rather than develop in-house. At the April 1986 Consumer Electronics Show it announced tie-ins with Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 simultaneously — the two best-regarded British adventure developers, on one label, in one announcement.

Its 16-bit line came the same way: Starglider and Starglider 2 from Argonaut, Carrier Command from Realtime, Zarch from David Braben — the ST and Amiga versions of which ACE reported in May 1988 were running late and might “not even be called Zarch”, the working title having become Bird of Prey.

Both adventure houses, and how each ended

Rainbird held the two names that mattered in British adventure publishing, and lost them in opposite ways.

Level 9 walked. ACE, March 1988: “Level 9 have severed relations with Rainbird Software and have tied up an exclusive distribution deal with a new label called Mandarin.” The grievance was delay — Time and Magik had been “endlessly delayed” under Rainbird.

Magnetic Scrolls stayed, and had planned for it. Anita Sinclair had written a change-of-control clause into the BT contract, so when Telecomsoft was sold to MicroProse in 1989, the distribution rights to the Scrolls catalogue did not transfer with it.

One label, two of the country’s best developers, and neither relationship survived it.

The Graftgold injunction

The sharpest thing Telecomsoft ever did was take a rival’s authors and then go to court to keep their games. ACE, February 1988, under the headline “BT GET GRAFTGOLD GAMES”:

After months of wrangling, Telecomsoft have announced that they will be bringing out the disputed games Morpheus and Magnetron. The titles fell into their hands at the PCW show when Graftgold programmers Steve Turner and Andrew Braybrook, long time associates of Hewson, signed long term programming contracts.

Rights were “disputed fiercely”, and the matter was settled — temporarily — in the High Court:

BT successfully restrained Hewson from publishing the titles until the case can be tried… Hewson had already geared up to publish the games themselves, so Telecomsoft would have to make good whatever financial loss their injunction caused.

The spoils were split across the two labels: “Firebird will get Magnetron while Morpheus goes to sister label Rainbird.”

This is the clearest single illustration of what the phone company’s arrival meant. A publisher with BT’s legal department behind it could injunct a mid-sized British software house out of publishing games it had already manufactured for.

“Big is bad, bad, bad”

By 1988 the industry was saying so out loud, and ACE put the accusations to Telecomsoft’s Paula Byrne in August:

Rainbird, Silverbird and Firebird are beginning to prove a very potent combination, and some people in the industry actually seem to be afraid of our feathered friends. They reckon that in Telecomsoft’s case, big is bad, bad, bad — a company which represents a deadly form of cheque-book publishing, a company who can march into the market and spend millions.

Byrne’s answer was that the money bought support, not just a higher bid:

The reason Telecomsoft puts out such high quality product is that top programmers want to work with Telecomsoft as they trust the name of British Telecom… Telecomsoft has a large development team of 14 people who offer our programmers support.

⚠ Both things were true. The catalogue above is genuinely excellent, and it was assembled by a state-privatised telecoms monopoly outspending independent publishers for the country’s best developers — then, in Graftgold’s case, injuncting one of them.

The end

Telecomsoft was sold to MicroProse in 1989 and the Rainbird name went with the rest of the catalogue. The One’s verdict in October 1991 covers both halves of the Graftgold affair: Hewson “never really recovered from Turner and Braybrook’s defection”, and “Telecomsoft never really recovered either — its labels were sold to MicroProse not long afterwards.”

British Telecom's premium label