Thalamus | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1986 a young Finnish programmer called Stavros Fasoulas walked up to the Newsfield people at a Commodore show and showed Roger Kean a shoot-’em-up he called Rainbow Warrior. Kean was impressed enough to talk his fellow directors into starting a software label to publish it. So the company behind CRASH and ZZAP!64 went into the games business, and Rainbow Warrior came out as Sanxion.

For the next five years Thalamus published a small number of carefully made Commodore 64 games, several of which ZZAP!64 rated among the best on the machine. It survived the collapse of Newsfield in 1991 and kept going for two more years. The name came back in 2017.

Fast facts

Founded: 1986, by Newsfield, publisher of CRASH, ZZAP!64 and Amtix!.
Run by: Andrew Wright, with Gary Liddon as technical executive (1986–87); then Paul Cooper; David Birch by the early 1990s.
Offices: Canonbury, north London (1986); 2 Minerva House, then 1 Saturn House, Calleva Park, Aldermaston, Berkshire (1988–91); as Thalamus Europe, Riverside Business Centre, High Wycombe (1992–93).
Known for: Sanxion (1986), Delta (1987), Quedex (1987), Hunter’s Moon (1987), Hawkeye (1988), Armalyte (1988), Creatures (1990) and Creatures 2: Torture Trouble (1992), Nobby the Aardvark (1993).
Later: Thalamus Digital Publishing, from 2017.

A software house from a magazine publisher

ZZAP!64 broke the news in August 1986 under the heading “A change at ZZAP! Towers”. Its staff writer Gary Liddon was leaving to become technical executive of a new software house, so “ZZAP! can no longer use his services in the games reviewing department”. The house was called Thalamus, after the part of the brain that relays signals to and from the body. The magazine said it had been “founded, and is backed by Newsfield”, and in the same breath that it was “independent of Newsfield and the magazines ZZAP!64, CRASH and AMTIX!”. Its office was in Canonbury, in north London, and it was run by Andrew Wright, formerly Activision’s press officer. The first games were due in September for the Commodore 64 and the Spectrum, with Amstrad games to follow.

The link to the magazines was plain to readers anyway. A competition in the same issue called Thalamus “the new Newsfield software house”, and in 1988 Commodore User twice called it “Newsfield-owned Thalamus”. When the label’s games scored well in ZZAP!64, Thalamus used those scores in its adverts. Its advert for Hawkeye in the September 1988 ZZAP!64 carried the magazine’s own verdict across the page: “An addictive and beautifully presented shoot ’em up of the highest calibre! GOLD MEDAL ZZAP! 64”. The reader was left to weigh a review from the label’s own parent company.

CRASH told the founding story in January 1988. Fasoulas introduced himself “in halting English” at the July 1986 Commodore Show; Kean “persuaded the other directors to start a label and market the game”; Liddon moved over from the magazines “to look after programming technicalities”; and Wright and Liddon came up with the name. Liddon, interviewed by Retro Gamer in 2005, remembered Fasoulas approaching the ZZAP! stand at a PCW show instead, and confirmed that Newsfield put up the money.

Fasoulas, Hubbard and the first games

Sanxion came out in the autumn of 1986. It was a horizontally scrolling shooter in which the player patrolled ten sectors of Earth, with a bonus “ReGen” stage between them. ZZAP!64 made it a Sizzler in November 1986, praising its parallax scrolling and its variety; one reviewer thought it owed more to Konami’s arcade game Nemesis than to Uridium, the obvious comparison. Rob Hubbard wrote the music, and ZZAP!’s readers voted it the best music of 1986. The tape used Cyberload, a loading system that John Twiddy had just finished “to stop all those pirates out there nicking my program”.

Fasoulas’s second game, Delta, followed in the spring of 1987, with graphics by Bob Stevenson and music by Hubbard again. Its loader, “Mix-E-Load”, let the player remix Hubbard’s tune while the game loaded, an idea Liddon developed with Nick Pelling. His third, Quedex (1987), surprised ZZAP!: after two horizontally scrolling shooters it was a puzzle game with no shooting at all, in which the player rolled a ball through ten “planes” that scrolled in every direction. ZZAP!64 gave it 92% and a Sizzler in November 1987, at £9.95 on cassette.

By then the founders had gone. In April 1987 CRASH reported that Wright and Liddon had “deserted us for Pastures New” and that Paul Cooper had taken over. Liddon’s own explanation, in 2005, was money: “We both felt we were running the company and making good money for Newsfield, but not getting a slice.” Cooper told CRASH that Thalamus had been “a very Commodore orientated company” and that he was looking for Spectrum programmers. The Spectrum did get Sanxion: The Spectrum Remix, reviewed in CRASH in February 1989, but the label’s work stayed mostly on the Commodore 64.

Hunter’s Moon, Hawkeye and Armalyte

Hunter’s Moon (1987) was written by Martin Walker, who also kept a development diary for ZZAP!. He told the magazine that he had approached Thalamus after seeing Delta: “I think they’re an ideal company to publish original games which need a different sort of marketing to tie-ins and arcade conversions. It’s good because they don’t push the game out until both the programmer and the game are ready.” It did not sell as well as ZZAP! thought it should. In November 1988 the magazine called it “one of the greatest injustices of recent times” that Hunter’s Moon “didn’t receive the sales it deserved”, and ranked it third in its list of the ten best Commodore 64 shoot-’em-ups, with Delta fifth.

Fasoulas also brought in the next team. He introduced three Dutch programmers who called themselves The Boys Without Brains: Mario van ’t Riet (code), Arthur van Jole (graphics) and Jeroen Tel (music). Cooper signed them at the PCW Show in 1987, and their first game, Hawkeye, won a ZZAP!64 Gold Medal in August 1988. It was a horizontally scrolling platform shoot-’em-up with parallax backgrounds and twelve levels loaded one at a time, and the reviewers were most struck by its presentation, starting with an animated alien face that briefed the player on the mission. It cost £9.99 on cassette and £12.99 on disk.

By then Thalamus had moved to Calleva Park, an office estate at Aldermaston in Berkshire: to 2 Minerva House by January 1988 and to 1 Saturn House by September. Armalyte, by Cyberdyne Systems, won the label another ZZAP! Gold Medal in November 1988. It was a horizontal shooter for one or two players, and ZZAP! judged that “everything about the game is so highly polished that it really does knock the competition into a cocked hat.”

Creatures

The last big Thalamus game of the 8-bit years was Creatures (1990), by John and Steve Rowlands, who worked as Apex Computer Productions and had already written Retrograde (1989) for the label. The brothers wrote a development diary for ZZAP! while they made it, and admitted in the autumn of 1990 that they were running “a lot behind schedule”. The finished game, a platformer starring a small furry creature called Clyde Radcliffe, won a ZZAP!64 Gold Medal with 96% in the magazine’s Christmas 1990 issue. Thalamus priced it at £9.99 on cassette and £14.99 on disk, with Amiga and Atari ST versions at £24.99, and put “a Fuzzy Wuzzy in every pack”. A sequel, Creatures 2: Torture Trouble, followed in 1992. Creatures, Hunter’s Moon and other Thalamus games were later reissued at budget price on Kixx.

After Newsfield

Newsfield went into voluntary liquidation in September 1991, and its magazines passed to Europress Impact. Thalamus kept going. In February 1992 Your Sinclair reported that “Thalamus, the software arm of Newsfield, are up and running once more”, with Spectrum versions of Creatures and Armalyte “on the cards”. An Amiga Format glossary the same year put it more bluntly: “Newsfield no longer exists, but Thalamus is still going strong.”

It now traded as Thalamus Europe, from Unit 29, Riverside Business Centre, High Wycombe, and was run by David Birch, whom Commodore Format called “Thalamus boss-man” in March 1992. Its games moved towards the Amiga: Arsenal FC, a football game by Cirrus Software, was advertised in 1992 at £25.99 for the Amiga and Atari ST. Not every project came through. Asked about a rally game that never appeared, Birch told Amiga Power in October 1992: “The programmers went bust.”

Thalamus’s last Commodore 64 game was Nobby the Aardvark (1993), which Commodore Format reviewed at 96% in April 1993. After that the magazines report no new Thalamus releases. Public histories of the company say it closed soon afterwards, as the cost of its Amiga projects outran its income, but give no period source for the date.

The name afterwards

The name had two later lives. In the late 1990s Oliver Frey, one of Newsfield’s founders, was publishing director of Thalamus Publishing, a publisher of illustrated history books in Shropshire; see the Newsfield and Oliver Frey entries.

Then in August 2017 a new company, Thalamus Digital Publishing Ltd, announced that it would bring the games back, starting with a remastered Hunter’s Moon funded through Kickstarter, and working with Martin Walker, the graphic artist Robin Levy and the musician Matt Gray. It has since reissued the old catalogue, including an Evercade cartridge, Thalamus Collection 1 (2024), with eleven Commodore 64 games from Snare and Hawkeye to Creatures II. It also publishes new games for old machines: in May 2026 it released Colin Porch’s Return to Blacktooth, a sequel to Head Over Heels, for the Amiga and Atari ST.

Sources

ZZAP!64 issue 16, August 1986: “A change at ZZAP! Towers” (Gary Liddon leaves; Thalamus founded and backed by Newsfield but “independent of Newsfield and the magazines”; Canonbury; Andrew Wright; September launch plans); competition calling Thalamus “the new Newsfield software house”.
ZZAP!64 issue 19, November 1986, p. 122: Sanxion review and Sizzler. Issue 23, March 1987, p. 83: readers’ awards for 1986 (best music).
ZZAP!64 issue 19, November 1986, pp. 86–87: John Twiddy interview (the loading system for Thalamus).
CRASH issue 39, April 1987: Wright and Liddon leave; Paul Cooper runs Thalamus.
ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987: Quedex review (£9.95, 92%, Sizzler); Martin Walker on Hunter’s Moon and Thalamus.
CRASH issue 46, November 1987: Gary Liddon’s move from the magazines to Thalamus. Issue 48, January 1988: Newsfield history (the July 1986 Commodore Show, Rainbow Warrior, the name).
ZZAP!64 issue 33, January 1988: advertisement with the 2 Minerva House address.
The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988: The Boys Without Brains and Hawkeye (the three members; Fasoulas’s introduction; Paul Cooper signing them at the PCW Show).
Commodore User, August and September 1988: “Newsfield-owned Thalamus”.
ZZAP!64 issue 40, August 1988: Hawkeye review (£9.99 cassette, £12.99 disk) and Gold Medal. Issue 41, September 1988: Hawkeye advertisement (“An addictive and beautifully presented shoot ’em up of the highest calibre! GOLD MEDAL ZZAP! 64”; 1 Saturn House).
ZZAP!64 issue 43, November 1988: Armalyte review and Gold Medal; shoot-’em-up retrospective (Sanxion, Delta and its team, Hunter’s Moon and its sales, the top ten).
CRASH issue 61, February 1989, p. 96: Sanxion: The Spectrum Remix review.
ZZAP!64 issue 66, October 1990: the Rowlands’ Creatures diary. Issue 68, Christmas Special 1990: Creatures review (Gold Medal) and advertisement (96%, prices, Apex Computer Productions).
Commodore Format issue 1, October 1990: Creatures and Apex Computer Productions.
Your Sinclair issue 74, February 1992: Thalamus “up and running once more”.
Commodore Format issue 18, March 1992: Creatures 2 competition, David Birch as “Thalamus boss-man”. Issue 31, April 1993: Nobby the Aardvark (96%, as recalled in issue 61, October 1995).
Amiga Format Special issue 4, 1992: glossary entry on Thalamus.
The One issue 47, August 1992: Arsenal FC advertisement (Thalamus Europe, High Wycombe, £25.99).
Amiga Power issue 18, October 1992: David Birch on a cancelled rally game.
Commodore Force issue 7, July 1993: Thalamus Europe copyright line and address.
Retro Gamer issue 22, 2005: Gary Liddon profile (the founding, Mix-E-Load with Nick Pelling, why he and Wright left).
Indie Retro News, “Thalamus Digital Publishing Ltd – The rebirth of the old retro gaming publisher ‘Thalamus’”, 29 August 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.indieretronews.com/2017/08/thalamus-digital-publishing-ltd-rebirth.html
Companies House, Thalamus Digital Publishing Ltd, company 10838302, incorporated 27 June 2017 (public record). https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10838302
Retro Arcadia, “Game Review: Thalamus Collection 1 (on Commodore 64) for Evercade”, 4 September 2024 (web, secondary): the eleven games. https://retroarcadia.blog/2024/09/04/game-review-thalamus-collection-1-commodore-64-on-evercade/
Where Were They Now?, “Thalamus”, February 2024, and C64-Wiki, “Thalamus Ltd” (web, secondary): the closure after 1993. https://whereweretheynow.blogspot.com/2024/02/thalamus.html
Return to Blacktooth: see the sources for Head Over Heels. Thalamus Publishing: see the sources for Newsfield.