If you bought a U.S. Gold arcade conversion in the late 1980s, there is a good chance it was written in a house in south Manchester. Tiertex, set up in 1987 by Donald Campbell and John Prince, converted Atari’s 720°, Sega’s Thunder Blade and Capcom’s Street Fighter, Strider and Mercs, usually for every home format at once and usually against a deadline. The results were uneven, and the period magazines show just how uneven. CRASH made Thunder Blade a Smash at 91%; Zzap!64 gave Human Killing Machine 31% and told its readers to avoid it. The same Tiertex Strider scored 96% on the Amiga and 42% on the Commodore 64.
Fast facts
- Founders: Donald Campbell, an electronics engineer, and John Prince, a physicist.
- Founded: 1987, in Manchester.
- Main client: U.S. Gold, which bought a stake in the company.
- Formats: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and PC; later Sega and Nintendo consoles and the Game Boy.
- Size: 15 staff by January 1990; about a hundred people passed through it over sixteen years, by Campbell’s count.
- Ended: stopped trading in about 2003.
Two founders from Artic
Campbell and Prince met writing Spectrum games for Artic Computing. Campbell wrote Artic’s World Cup Football in two or three weeks of a university Easter break, and it paid his way through his degree. It came back to haunt him: in 1986 U.S. Gold repackaged it as World Cup Carnival, which CRASH scored 26%. After Artic folded, the two men joined Charles Cecil in a company called Paragon Programming. Paragon was based in Wandsworth, and the two northerners “didn’t really feel part of” it, Campbell said, so in 1987 they left and formed Tiertex.
The magazines liked the founders’ credentials. CRASH introduced them in 1988 as “physicist John Prince and electronics engineer Donald Campbell (they should know what they’re doing!)”. The One called Prince “Dr John”. Asked by CRASH that Christmas for his favourite Spectrum games, Campbell put 3-D Deathchase first; the programmer he most admired was Jon Ritman, because “whether it’s football games or isometric arcade adventures, all his stuff is very well thought out and technically competent”.
U.S. Gold’s conversion house
The first job was Atari’s 720° for U.S. Gold, and Prince did most of it. CRASH scored the Spectrum version 81% in December 1987. More coin-op licences followed: Rolling Thunder, Street Fighter, Last Duel, Thunder Blade, Black Tiger, Strider, Dynasty Wars, UN Squadron, Mercs and Alien Storm, along with the film tie-in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the football game Italy 1990. “It wasn’t long before we were effectively ‘US Gold’s development house’,” Campbell said.
What U.S. Gold bought was speed and scale. Tiertex did (mostly) all the graphics, music and code in-house, so one contract could cover up to eight formats. Geoff Brown explained why that suited U.S. Gold: “Tiertex, for instance, did 720º and Rolling Thunder for us on all formats. It was cheaper that way – a hundred thousand pounds for four formats whereas it might be fifty thousand for one.” Eventually U.S. Gold bought a stake in the company. Martyn Savage, who advised on the deal, said that before it Tiertex “were just a coding shop and went wherever the work was”. A U.S. Gold producer, Simon Hadlington, remembered that there was then “a preference to use Tiertex whenever possible because of US Gold having a stake in them”. When CentreGold floated in 1993, Tiertex became independent again.
The team grew from the two founders to eleven staff by September 1989 and fifteen by January 1990, “crammed into a very nice office in South Manchester”, according to CRASH. The Story of US Gold photographs a house at 67 Palatine Road in Didsbury, “home turned office for the Tiertex team”.
How the conversions were made
Tiertex built its own tools. In November 1988 Sinclair User described an in-house development system: object code was assembled on an Atari ST and downloaded to the target machine along with the graphics. CRASH described the Spectrum side in 1990: arcade screenshots were grabbed onto the STs, which ran a Z80 editor and assembler and sprite-grabbing programs that pre-generated masks. Mark Tait, the company’s musician, arranged arcade tunes on an Akai sampler and converted the MIDI data for Tiertex’s own Spectrum music driver.
There was no arcade source code. For Strider, The One reported, Capcom was “understandably wary about revealing its coin-op secrets”, so Prince built the game from long sessions on the arcade machine and a video of it being played through; the sprites for the ST and Amiga versions were digitised from the cabinet and retouched by hand. The whole job took just over six months. Anthony Ball, who converted Mercs there, remembered that the arcade machine lived in the attic, “where the main team of artists resided”.
Thunder Blade shows the ambition. Its 3D routines were developed alongside the ST and Amiga versions, and CRASH reported that “full 16-bit maths is used, even on the Spectrum’s 8-bit Z80 CPU”, with polygon-filled skyscrapers and more than 128K of graphics and object code, loaded in sections. Tiertex also folded the arcade cabinet’s separate speed control onto a single joystick.
The reviews
The period scores do not add up to one reputation. They show a studio whose best work was very good and whose rushed work was poor, sometimes on the same game:
| Game | Version | Magazine | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 720° | Spectrum | CRASH 47, December 1987 | 81% |
| Rolling Thunder | Spectrum | CRASH 50, March 1988 | 47% |
| Street Fighter | Spectrum | CRASH 53, June 1988 | 69% |
| Street Fighter | Commodore 64 | Zzap!64 40, August 1988 | 36% |
| Thunder Blade | Spectrum | CRASH 59, Christmas 1988 | 91% |
| Human Killing Machine | Commodore 64 / Amiga | Zzap!64 49, May 1989 | 31% / 45% |
| Strider | Amiga | Zzap!64 54, October 1989 | 96% |
| Strider | Spectrum | CRASH 69, October 1989 | 77% |
| Strider | Commodore 64 | Zzap!64, as recalled in issue 70 | 42% |
| World Class Leaderboard | Master System | Mean Machines 8, May 1991 | 92% |
| Super Kick Off | Master System | Mean Machines 14, November 1991 | 96% |
| World Cup USA 94 | PC | PC Gamer, July 1994 | 84% |
The best reviews were raves. CRASH called Thunder Blade “a superb conversion of the great coin-op – US Gold and Tiertex have definitely pulled off what others said couldn’t be done”. A Zzap! reviewer found Amiga Strider “simply one of the most playable games I’ve played”, though the magazine later felt the Commodore 64 version had been “hacked into smaller, lesser pieces”. Mean Machines thought “Programmers Tiertex have certainly come up with the goods” with World Class Leaderboard.
The worst were brutal. Human Killing Machine, an original fighting game Tiertex made as a follow-up to Street Fighter, drew this from one Zzap! reviewer: “The 64 version is ridiculously easy – so easy in fact, that I finished after just one go.” Another ended his comment with one word: “Avoid.” Amiga Format called Alien Storm in 1992 “mindless and only occasionally fun”.
People who worked there are frank about why. Mick West, who converted UN Squadron to the ST and Amiga at Tiertex, said “there was very little in the way of quality control… We were just to copy the game, and do it as quickly as possible”, and judged his own version “not a very good conversion”. Campbell said the company was sometimes “slated for doing quick Atari ST to Amiga ports but we simply didn’t have the budget to write an ST and an Amiga version”. Hadlington, from the publisher’s side, said U.S. Gold chose converters on “who was the cheapest and who could do it the quickest”.
Consoles and the Game Boy
When U.S. Gold turned to consoles, Tiertex went with it. Campbell recalled reverse-engineering an early Sega Master System, which arrived with “no documentation, tools or help”, to make a demo for Geoff Brown to show Sega. Tiertex went on to program U.S. Gold’s sports licences, including Olympic Gold for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Winter Olympics: Lillehammer 94 and World Cup USA 94, as well as the Master System Super Kick Off. PC Gamer praised World Cup USA 94’s “exhaustive options system that enables you to turn just about every feature on or off”. The studio also converted Delphine’s Flashback; Nintendo Magazine System reported in July 1993 that Tiertex was programming it for U.S. Gold, and Campbell listed SNES, PC CD, Mega CD, Jaguar, CD-i and 3DO versions.
From 1992 Tiertex also worked for other publishers, including Domark, Grandslam and EA. In its last years it wrote mainly for handhelds. Nintendo Power reported in November 1996 that Tiertex had packed “all the essentials” of Madden 97 into a 4-megabit cartridge for Black Pearl, and in June 1997 previewed its Game Boy Hercules for THQ, credited to “TierTex Design Studio”. Campbell listed Game Boy versions of Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and FIFA among its titles. In 2002 Edge named Tiertex Design Studios as the developer of the Game Boy Advance version of Galidor. By Campbell’s account, Tiertex “withdrew silently from the games development world” in about 2003, when the handheld market stalled.
Sources
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015). This modern book collects interviews and first-person pieces; the figures and quotes from it are recollections. p. 80 (Geoff Brown on one developer doing every format), p. 90 (Martyn Savage on buying a stake; 67 Palatine Road), p. 93 (Simon Hadlington on choosing converters and the preference for Tiertex), p. 100 (Tiertex regains its independence), p. 102 (Olympic Gold), p. 106 (Winter Olympics: Lillehammer 94 and World Cup USA 94), pp. 128–131 (Donald Campbell’s account: Artic, World Cup Football, Paragon, the 1987 founding, 720°, formats and staff, the Master System demo, U.S. Gold’s big licences, Human Killing Machine, Flashback, other publishers, Game Boy work and the end in about 2003), pp. 156–157 (Mick West on UN Squadron), pp. 164–165 (Anthony Ball on Mercs).
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, p. 26: 720° review, “Authors: Tiertex”.
- CRASH issue 53, June 1988: Street Fighter review, “Authors: Tiertex from a Capcom coin-op”, 69%.
- CRASH issue 58, November 1988, pp. 120–121: Thunder Blade preview (the founders; 16-bit maths on the Z80; 128K of graphics and code; joystick controls), with CRASH’s scores for 720° (81%, issue 47), Rolling Thunder (47%, issue 50) and Street Fighter (69%, issue 53).
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, p. 101 (programmers’ poll: Campbell’s favourite game and most admired programmer) and pp. 184–185 (Thunder Blade review, 91%).
- CRASH issue 69, October 1989, p. 46: Strider review, 77%.
- CRASH issue 72, January 1990, p. 62: Black Tiger preview and Tiertex profile (founded 1987, 15 staff, Mark Tait, the ST-based tools).
- Sinclair User issue 80, November 1988: Thunder Blade feature and Tiertex profile (the ST-based development system, Mark Haigh-Hutchinson, Chris Brunning, Mark Tait).
- Sinclair User issue 90, September 1989: Strider feature (eleven employees, Mark Tait’s music).
- The One issue 12, September 1989, pp. 58–60: Strider feature (“Dr John”, Capcom’s secrecy, digitised graphics, six months’ work).
- Zzap!64 issue 39, July 1988: Street Fighter preview naming Tiertex. Issue 40, August 1988, pp. 28–29: Street Fighter review, 36%.
- Zzap!64 issue 49, May 1989, p. 26: Human Killing Machine review, 31% (C64) and 45% (Amiga).
- Zzap!64 issue 54, October 1989, pp. 78–79: Amiga Strider review, 96%.
- Zzap!64 issue 70, February 1991, p. 59: compilation review recalling Strider’s C64 (42%) and Amiga (96%) scores.
- Amiga Format issue 31, February 1992: Alien Storm review.
- Mean Machines issue 8, May 1991, pp. 61–62: World Class Leaderboard (Master System) review, 92%.
- Mean Machines issue 14, November 1991, p. 50: Super Kick Off (Master System) review; issue 15, December 1991: news naming Tiertex as its programmers, “rated at 96% last month”.
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 10, July 1993: Flashback “currently being programmed by Tiertex for US Gold”.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 8, July 1994, pp. 56–57: World Cup USA 94 review, 84%.
- Nintendo Power issue 90, November 1996, Pak Watch (Madden 97) and issue 97, June 1997, Pak Watch (Hercules, developer “TierTex Design Studio”).
- Edge issue 112, July 2002: correction naming Tiertex Design Studios as developer of Galidor for Game Boy Advance.
See also
- U.S. Gold
- Arcade conversions and bad ports
- Strider, Street Fighter, Rolling Thunder, Flashback
- Probe Software, another of U.S. Gold’s regular converters