In the late 1980s Rainbow Arts was the German label whose games British magazines kept giving top marks. Two of them never made it to British shops. The Great Giana Sisters was withdrawn in 1988 after Nintendo objected to its likeness to Super Mario Bros., and Katakis was stopped weeks later because Activision thought it looked too much like R-Type. The same team came back with Turrican, which ZZAP! gave 97% in 1990. Rainbow Arts also gave the composer Chris Hülsbeck his first job, and it launched programmers who went on to found Factor 5 and Blue Byte.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1984 or 1985 (accounts differ), in Gütersloh, by Marc Alexander Ullrich.
- Moved: to Düsseldorf in 1988, with 20 permanent staff.
- Owner: one of several labels sold through the Softgold group, alongside Time Warp, Golden Goblins and Reline.
- UK distribution: U.S. Gold, from 1988.
- People: Manfred Trenz, Andreas Escher, Chris Hülsbeck, Ramiro Vaca, Hans Ippisch, Armin Gessert, Thomas Hertzler.
- Notable games: The Great Giana Sisters (1987), Katakis (1988), X-Out (1990), Turrican (1990), Turrican II (1991), Mad TV (1991).
- End: a label of Softgold under THQ by 1999.
Gütersloh and the C64
The German magazine GO64! told the company’s history in 2000. Marc Alexander Ullrich started the label with application programs for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, such as a vocabulary trainer and a disk-drive alignment program, before it became a limited company (GmbH) in Gütersloh and moved into games. The magazine’s reasoning was that Germany had programmers, artists, musicians and plenty of computer owners, “but no software company that could be taken serious”; British imports ruled the market.
The early staff became the company’s best-known names. Hülsbeck wrote the music for almost all the first games. Hans Ippisch wrote Bad Cat, whose PC version GO64! called the first game for IBM compatibles from a German company. Manfred Trenz from Saarbrücken joined in 1987 as a graphic artist and was soon programming. Thomas Hertzler, a project manager, programmed the Amiga Giana Sisters; he left in 1988 and co-founded Blue Byte.
Rainbow Arts was never quite independent. CRASH explained to its readers in December 1988 that it was “one of a group of labels marketed by German trade agency Softgold”, and that U.S. Gold distributed its software in Britain. The Softgold family also included Time Warp Productions, Golden Goblins and Reline Software. In 1988 Rainbow Arts moved to Düsseldorf and grew to 20 permanent employees.
The Great Giana Sisters
The Great Giana Sisters (1987) was the company’s first big hit in Germany. Armin Gessert programmed the C64 version with graphics by Trenz, and Hülsbeck wrote the music. Nobody pretended it was original. Commodore Computing International previewed it in May 1988 as “a version of the superb Nintendo game ‘Super Mario Brothers’”. Giana jumped on monsters and headbutted bricks for bonuses, and ACE noted in August 1988 that she looked “more than a little like Super Mario Brothers”. ACE still rated it 701 on the C64 and 713 on the Atari ST and Amiga. U.S. Gold released it in Britain on its GO! label, and CRASH made the Spectrum version a CRASH Smash in August 1988.
By October it was gone. CRASH told readers who were “scouring the streets” for the game to stop, and quoted Dave Baxter of Rainbow Arts’ Birmingham office: “Nintendo are getting heavy.” In December ACE reported that “US Gold withdrew Great Giana Sisters following pressure from Nintendo who felt it looked a bit too much like Super Mario Brothers.” Computer and Video Games added that a sequel, Giana Sisters in the Future World, would not be released after Nintendo objected with the threat of legal action. It wondered why Nintendo had not reacted as strongly to the first game.
The Spectrum version never went on sale. CRASH said so in December 1988 and again in its review of the year: “legal action by Nintendo ensured the game would sadly never be released.” Copies of the C64 and Amiga versions that had reached the shops, and pirated copies, kept it in circulation. The next platform game from the Softgold stable, Hard’n’Heavy (1989, on the Reline label), came from the same programming team, and GO64! noted that the credits carried only pseudonyms “to avoid any trouble with Nintendo this time”.
Katakis and R-Type
Katakis was Manfred Trenz and Andreas Escher’s first game together, a horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-up for the C64 that both of them had based on their favourite arcade games. “Back then – R-Type and Darius, no doubt about it,” Escher told GO64!. It left the building before it was finished. Commodore User reported in June 1988 that the German cracking group Triad was spreading a pre-release copy. ACE reported that one demo “apparently featured a message from the programmers to the effect of thank you to R-Type and the inspiration it has given us”.
Activision held the British home licence for Irem’s R-Type. In October 1988 CRASH reported that Katakis “has also had the brakes put on it and will never see the light of day”, because Activision thought it looked “a bit too much like R-Type”. U.S. Gold withdrew the game, as the Irem entry describes. Escher’s version is that “various minor similarities were more or less imminent”, and that Rainbow Arts made a deal: “As a compensation, we had the C64 version of ‘R-Type’ finished in only six weeks.” GO64! adds that Activision objected mainly to the second level. Katakis was reissued in 1989 as Denaris, with a new second level. Factor 5, which had written the Amiga Katakis, went on to program the official Amiga R-Type.
ACE put both withdrawals in a longer history in December 1988. Cloning arcade games had been normal in Britain for years. “Everyone was doing versions of arcade games, so you just joined in,” said the publisher Andrew Hewson. The difference in 1988, as ACE saw it, was that the big publishers had now paid for arcade licences and were prepared to defend them.
Turrican and the Softgold years
Trenz’s next game was Turrican, previewed at the start of 1990 as Hurrican and renamed at his request. ZZAP! gave the C64 version a Gold Medal and 97% in May 1990, and Factor 5’s Amiga version had 94% in August. Rainbow Arts also looked outside for staff: it hired Boris Schneider and Martin Gaksch, two editors of the magazine Power Play, and signed a co-operation agreement with Lucasfilm. It also tried the CD early. Its First CD Edition put ten C64 games on an audio CD, read through an adapter plugged into the cassette port.
After Turrican II and the puzzle game Logical, the label left the C64. Its later games included Mad TV (1991). In 1994 advertisements still named Rainbow Arts as “a label of Softgold Computerspiele GmbH”, then of Kaarst, and it launched a Rainbow Kids label for educational games. Edge said in 1995 that Rainbow Arts had “only recently started developing again”, and credited it with “laying the foundations of the German games industry with Factor 5 and its Turrican series”.
Under THQ
By 1999 Softgold belonged to the American publisher THQ, and German magazines listed Rainbow Arts as “Rainbow Arts/THQ”. The last game announced under the name was Turrican 3D, a new game by Manfred Trenz. In June 1999 PC Player expected it in the last quarter of that year, and it was still on the magazine’s release lists in early 2001. THQ stopped its development, and it was never released.
Sources
- GO64! April 2000, Volker Rust, “Nostalgia: Portrait of Rainbow Arts”: the founding by Marc Alexander Ullrich, the application programs and the GmbH, the Softgold labels, Hülsbeck, Ippisch and Bad Cat, Trenz joining in 1987, the move to Düsseldorf and the 20 staff, Hertzler and Blue Byte, Giana Sisters’ short time in the shops, Katakis and the six-week R-Type deal, Denaris. In the same issue, the Andreas Escher interview by Volker Rust and Helmut Bieg (Katakis, R-Type and Darius, the six weeks).
- GO64! May 2000, “Nostalgia: Portrait of Rainbow Arts”, part two: Hard’n’Heavy’s pseudonyms, Schneider and Gaksch, Lucasfilm, the First CD Edition, Hurrican renamed Turrican, Turrican II and Logical.
- The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988: Giana Sisters picked up by GO!; Thomas Hertzler (Amiga) and Armin Gessert (C64), graphics by Manfred Trenz.
- Commodore Computing International vol. 6 no. 10, May 1988: Giana Sisters preview.
- ACE issue 11, August 1988: The Great Giana Sisters review (C64 701, Atari ST 713, Amiga 713).
- CRASH issue 55, August 1988: Spectrum Giana Sisters, a CRASH Smash.
- CRASH issue 57, October 1988, news: Dave Baxter on Nintendo; Katakis stopped after Activision’s objection.
- Computer and Video Games issue 85, November 1988, news: Giana Sisters in the Future World cancelled.
- ACE issue 15, December 1988, “Licensed to Clone”: the withdrawal of Giana Sisters, the Katakis demo message, Andrew Hewson.
- CRASH issue 59, December 1988: Rainbow Arts as a Softgold label distributed by U.S. Gold; the Spectrum Giana Sisters and Katakis withdrawn. CRASH issue 60, January 1989, review of 1988.
- Commodore User, June 1988, piracy feature: Triad and the Katakis demo.
- ZZAP! issue 61, May 1990, pp. 8–9, and issue 64, August 1990, pp. 72–73: Turrican reviews.
- PC Games (Germany), March 1994: Mad TV (1991); PC Player, October 1994: “Rainbow Arts ist ein Label der Softgold Computerspiele GmbH”; January 1995: Rainbow Kids.
- Computer Gaming World issue 90, January 1992, and Compute! December 1992: Rainbow Arts c/o Softgold, Kaarst.
- Edge issue 20, May 1995: Rainbow Arts in a survey of German developers.
- PC Player, June 1999: Turrican 3D by Rainbow Arts/THQ for the fourth quarter of 1999; July 1999 to March 2001, release lists and publisher directories (“Rainbow Arts/THQ”, “Softgold – a THQ Company”).
- Wikipedia, “Turrican” (web, secondary): Turrican 3D halted by THQ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turrican
- Wikipedia (German), “Rainbow Arts” (web, secondary): the 1984 founding date and Thomas Meiertoberens as co-founder; THQ’s purchase of Rushware and Softgold in 1999. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Arts