Thalamus
The magazine that started a label
Newsfield, publisher of CRASH and ZZAP!64, launched its own software house — and used its magazines' standards as the brief.
Thalamus is the unusual case of a games label started by a games magazine publisher. Newsfield — the company behind CRASH and ZZAP!64 — set it up to publish software instead of writing about it, and aimed it squarely at the Commodore 64 at the point where that machine’s programmers were at their most technically ambitious.
Fast facts
- Parent: Newsfield Publications.
- Focus: Commodore 64, later Amiga.
- Press evidence in this library: reviewed in ZZAP!64 and Amiga Power from 1987 to 1994, at £9.95 on 8-bit and £25.99 on 16-bit.
- Known for: Hawkeye, Sanxion, Delta, Armalyte, Quedex, Creatures.
A magazine’s taste, made into a catalogue
The premise was straightforward and slightly audacious: ZZAP!64 spent every issue telling readers what an excellent C64 game looked like, so its publisher would make some.
What that meant in practice was a house style — technically showy games that pushed the machine’s scrolling and sound hard, with strong soundtracks and a visual polish that reviewed well precisely because it was built to the standards the reviewers had spent years articulating. Hawkeye is the emblematic release: smooth multi-directional scrolling, a much-praised soundtrack, and a look that announced the machine was being taken seriously.
The obvious awkwardness — a magazine publisher owning a label its own magazines reviewed — was noted at the time, and is part of why Thalamus is interesting and not just another publisher. It sits at the exact point where the British games press stopped only observing the industry and started being part of it.
The conflict, documented
The entry above says the awkwardness “was noted at the time”. Here is what it looked like in practice.
Thalamus’s own advertising for Hawkeye — credited to The Boys Without Brains — carries its review quote across the top of the page:
An addictive and beautifully presented shoot ’em up of the highest calibre! GOLD MEDAL — ZZAP!64
ZZAP!64’s highest award, given to a game published by ZZAP!64’s owner, and then printed in that game’s adverts as independent endorsement.
⚠ Stating this is not the same as alleging the review was bought. Newsfield’s magazines had a reputation for hard scoring that this Vault relies on throughout — the same index that gives Hawkeye’s label a Gold Medal gives Krakout 46% and Masters of the Universe 28%. The point is structural, not accusatory: there was no mechanism by which a reader could tell the difference, and that is a fact about the period’s press worth recording plainly.
The label outlived the magazines
The ending is the part that inverts the usual story about magazines and the industry.
Newsfield went under in 1991. Thalamus did not. Amiga Format, writing in 1992:
Thalamus was formed as the software offshoot of the publishing house Newsfield, which produced the early magazines for 8-bit enthusiasts, Crash and Zzap!. Newsfield no longer exists, but Thalamus is still going strong and has just recently released Creatures, a cute platform game, which is a conversion of an old C64 game.
The company had moved by then to 47 Corve Street, Ludlow, Shropshire — Newsfield’s own town — having started out at 1 Saturn House, Calleva Park, Aldermaston, Berkshire.
A publisher spun a software label out of its magazines; the magazines died and the label carried on. Whatever else the venture was, it was not a vanity project.
Why it mattered
The label shows something the era tends to obscure: the magazines were not neutral observers. They shaped what got made, set the criteria games were judged by, employed the people who would go on to run studios, and in this case funded the software directly.
Thalamus also belongs to a specific moment of C64 craft — the late-eighties period when programmers had exhausted the obvious tricks and were competing on how much they could get the machine to do at once. Its catalogue is a reasonable shortlist for what that looked like at its best.