Superior Software | Code Like It's 198x

Superior Software Ltd was the leading publisher for Acorn’s home machines — the BBC Micro and the Electron — operating from Leeds while most of the British industry clustered around Manchester, London and the Midlands.

It is remembered for two games, Repton (1985) and Exile (1988). What follows is mostly about what came before them, because that is where the surviving Acorn coverage is.

⚠ Scope note. This Vault’s contemporary Acorn coverage is thin — Acorn User, Acorn Programs, Micro User, Electron User — so the 1984 section below is grounded in the company’s own advertising rather than in editorial. Retrospective coverage is better, and Retro Gamer’s verdict is unambiguous: Superior “was the daddy when it came to BBC and Electron software”.

Fast facts

Address, as printed: Superior Software Ltd, Dept. AP2, 69 Leeds Road, Bramhope, Leeds. Tel: 0532 842385.
Platforms sought: BBC Micro, Electron and Oric-1 — the last of which is not the association the company is usually given.
Prices, 1984: £7.95 for a 32K cassette game (a few at £6.95), £11.95 on 5¼-inch disc.
Royalties offered: up to 20%, raised in later insertions to 25%.
Distribution: named dealers across Britain plus “more than 300 other dealers throughout the UK and overseas”, and selected branches of Boots.

The 1984 catalogue

Before Repton, Superior sold what everyone sold — arcade clones and card games, at £7.95 a cassette:

Space Fighter, Galaxians, Star Trek Adventure, Invaders, Fruit Machine, Lost City, Cribbage, Gideon’s Gamble, Pontoon.

There is nothing distinctive in that list, which is the point. The company that would publish Exile began by selling a Galaxians clone to BBC Micro owners, and got where it got by being reliable rather than by being visionary.

The guarantee

The most interesting thing in Superior’s advertising is not the games. Every insertion carries a numbered guarantee, and it reads as a direct attack on how the rest of the industry behaved:

WE GUARANTEE THAT:

All our software runs correctly on all current operating systems and BASIC ROMs.

All our software is available before we advertise.

All our software is despatched within 48 hours by first-class post.

In the unlikely event that any of our software fails to load, return your cassette or disc to us and we will immediately send a replacement.

Read the second one again. “Available before we advertise” is a promise that the game in the advertisement exists — which is only worth printing in a market where that could not be assumed.

It could not. This Vault records Imagine selling the Megagames to the press for a year with, on the Receiver’s evidence, barely one disk to show for it; Beyond announcing Eye of the Moon and never shipping it; and Time and Magik “endlessly delayed” under Rainbird until Level 9 walked. A Leeds publisher made not doing that into a selling point, in a numbered list, next to the price of Pontoon.

Point 1 is the Acorn-specific version of the same discipline. The BBC Micro shipped in several operating-system and BASIC ROM revisions, and software that worked on one could fail on another. Guaranteeing compatibility across all current ROMs is a testing commitment, not a slogan.

What the royalty rate says

Superior advertised for submissions in the same space as it advertised games — “we pay up to 20% royalties for high quality BBC Micro, Electron and Oric-1 programs”, and in a later insertion 25%.

Set that against the rest of this Vault. The bedroom-coder entry records typical Spectrum terms of 10–25% of dealer price in 1985–87, and Graftgold’s Andrew Braybrook telling ACE in 1991 that about 7% of a £25 game reached the programmer. Superior was advertising the top of the contemporary range, publicly, as a recruitment tool — a small publisher on a minority platform competing for authors on terms rather than on reach.

Repton, and the reach of it

Repton (1985) is the game the company is remembered for, and the clearest surviving measure of its influence in this library comes from an unexpected direction. The Fred Fish public domain catalogue — reprinted in Amiga guides from 1990 through 1994 — describes the PD game Wanderer like this:

The idea for Wanderer came from games such as Boulder Dash, XOR, and the Repton games from Superior Software.

An Amiga PD author, years later and on another platform, citing a BBC Micro game as a founding influence alongside Boulder Dash — which is the company that spent 1984 selling Galaxians clones ending up in the same sentence as one of the decade’s landmark designs.

It is still trading

Most companies in this Vault ended in an acquisition or an administration. Superior did neither. Retro Gamer’s Acorn feature of 2004 points readers at “the new website from Superior Software” under the name Superior Interactive, still selling the catalogue — twenty years after the Galaxians clone and the four-point guarantee.

That is a rare thing in this Vault: an unbroken line from a 1984 Leeds mail-order operation to a going concern, with no change of ownership dramatic enough to be worth reporting.