U.S. Gold | Code Like It's 198x

U.S. Gold was a brand before it was a publisher. In 1984 Geoff Brown, a former teacher who ran a games distributor in the West Midlands, decided that American computer games would sell better in Britain if they came in one recognisable box. He wanted a logo “with stars on it and a typeface to make it look all American”, and the name promised the rest. Over the next twelve years the company went from reboxing American Commodore 64 cassettes to paying seven-figure guarantees for arcade licences such as Gauntlet and Out Run. Its catalogue included games that CRASH scored above 90% and games it scored below 30%, sometimes in the same year.

Fast facts

Founders: Geoff and Anne Brown.
Founded: 12 March 1984, by renaming an off-the-shelf company, Covsound Ltd. By the end of 1984 its address was an industrial unit on Heneage Street, Birmingham.
Backed by: CentreSoft, the Browns’ distribution company.
Part-owners: Ocean’s Jon Woods and David Ward, who took a 50% stake in September 1984.
Labels: Kixx (budget, from 1988) and GO! (full price, from 1987).
Best-known licences: Epyx and Access Software from America; Gauntlet from Atari; Out Run from Sega; Street Fighter and Strider from Capcom.
Ended: bought, as part of CentreGold, by Eidos in 1996. Eidos then dropped the U.S. Gold name.

From Galactic Chase to CentreSoft

Geoff Brown came to games through selling them. As a part-time assistant in a Birmingham music shop that also sold Atari machines, he read the American magazine Compute! and ordered an Atari cassette he liked the look of, a Galaxian clone called Galactic Chase. A buyer at the Currys store in Birmingham loaded it up and asked for twenty copies. Brown had never phoned America, but he did, and the American publisher offered him 30 days’ credit. “I buy these copies and it’s not costing me anything up front!” he remembered telling his wife Anne.

That import business became CentreSoft. Companies House records the company as incorporated on 26 October 1982 as Bamville Ltd and renamed CentreSoft on 28 April 1983; it worked from Halesowen and then Tipton. The Story of US Gold puts its 1983 turnover at £3.3 million. It sold British games to shops as well as American ones, and it had the one thing a new publisher needed: a £100,000 facility from the local NatWest bank.

The guarantee that started U.S. Gold

On a trip to America in late 1983, Brown visited Cosmi in Pasadena and Access Software in Salt Lake City. He came home with rights to three Commodore 64 games: Access’s Beach-Head and Cosmi’s Forbidden Forest and Aztec Challenge. The price was a promise. Access wanted a guarantee of sales, so, in his words, “I’d plucked a number out of the air and I told them we’ll guarantee a hundred thousand units; something ridiculous.”

The licensors wanted those guarantees secured by letters of credit, which a bank issues only against money it can block. The Story of US Gold puts the Access royalty at £1.20 a copy, about £119,800 for the 100,000 copies of Beach-Head alone, and CentreSoft’s exposure across all three games at more than £359,000. The distributor’s credit carried the publisher from the start.

Brown decided to sell the games under a new brand instead of the American labels. On 12 March 1984 the Browns bought an off-the-shelf company, Covsound Ltd, and renamed it U.S. Gold Ltd. In May 1984 Computer & Video Games reported the new label’s plan: to “import the best of America’s games for the Atari and Commodore 64”. U.S. Gold’s own advertisement in the same issue promised “the best in American software at a sensible price”.

The price was not low. Brown set U.S. Gold’s Commodore 64 cassettes at £9.95 when many British games cost £5.95. “My games are so much better than yours,” he remembered saying. “We’re going to sell ours at £9.95.” The American data needed no changes, so apart from new inlays and loading screens the only work was duplication, at Ablex in Telford.

Ocean’s half

The licences needed more cash than CentreSoft could raise. In September 1984, by the account in The Story of US Gold, Jon Woods and David Ward of Ocean Software took a 50% stake in U.S. Gold. Tim Chaney, who had run software sales at Commodore, became its managing director.

The two Manchester and Birmingham houses then behaved more like partners than rivals. In The Story of US Gold the U.S. Gold side describes an unwritten division of the arcade makers: “They went after Taito, we went after Sega, they went after Nintendo, we went after Capcom.” Chaney insisted there was “never a meeting” to agree it. According to Chaney, the GO! label, launched in 1987, existed partly to move games out of the company that Ocean half-owned. The partnership lasted until the early 1990s, when CentreGold bought out Woods and Ward’s half.

American imports

For its first years U.S. Gold was mostly what its name said. CRASH, the Spectrum magazine, liked much of what came across the Atlantic. It gave Datasoft’s Bruce Lee 91% and Access’s Raid Over Moscow 92%, Epyx’s Winter Games 93% and Accolade’s Killed Until Dead 93%. Epyx’s Impossible Mission got 76%. Beach-Head got 79%, and one CRASH reviewer told Spectrum owners to tell Commodore owners that their version was “every bit as good as the 64 version, if not better!”

The imports were not all hits. Datasoft’s Goonies managed 60%, and CRASH’s own history of its first four years called it “a dispiriting mishmash of a game”. By 1988 a CRASH reviewer of Out Run was complaining: “Why are US Gold doing this to me? First California Games turns out to be a massive disappointment…”

World Cup Carnival

The release that did the most damage to U.S. Gold’s name in the period press was a football game. U.S. Gold held a licence for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, and in the summer of 1986 it sold World Cup Carnival at £9.95, with two A2 posters, a wall chart and a sew-on badge. The game inside was a modified version of a football game Artic Computing had released two years earlier.

Retailers and distributors complained. CRASH reported the row in July 1986 under the headline “Sick as parrots?” Tim Chaney told the trade paper CTW that World Cup Carnival was “a modified, improved, enhanced, localised version of another piece of software”. Meanwhile the original Artic game was on sale from a remainder dealer for about a fifth of the price.

CRASH had given Artic’s original 71% in 1984. It gave World Cup Carnival 26%. “This game is awful; avoid it at all costs,” wrote one reviewer. The verdict line read: “Nice freebies, shame about the recycled two-year old game!” Amtix, the Amstrad magazine, printed its readers’ vote for the least pleasing game of 1986. Ocean’s Knight Rider won, and the runners-up were two U.S. Gold games, Beach-Head and World Cup Carnival.

Looking back in January 1988, CRASH wrote that U.S. Gold had later admitted it had planned a better game, but “programming delays and marketing problems had overtaken them”, so it bought and repackaged the Artic game instead. ACE magazine still remembered it in December 1988. It gave U.S. Gold a mock “Most Artful Save of the Season Award” for its “last-minute solution to a painful problem, even though many customers were left sick as parrots”.

Arcade licences

Elite’s conversion of Capcom’s Commando reached number one for Christmas 1985. That, according to Tim Chaney, is when U.S. Gold “went after coin-ops like crazy”. Brown flew to Japan to see Sega and came back with rights to its arcade games, including Out Run. In America he signed Atari Games’ Gauntlet and 720°. “I could go in and guarantee a million dollars to the licensor,” he said. “I signed loads of million-dollar guarantees and fulfilled them.”

Gauntlet was the first big test. U.S. Gold built the conversion in Birmingham with a team that included Gremlin programmers and its own Tony Porter, aiming at Christmas 1986. CRASH scored the Spectrum version 92% in February 1987. It could manage two players instead of the arcade’s four, and loaded eight levels at a time from tape. “What puny little graphics,” wrote one reviewer, “but WOW! — what a game!”
Out Run reached the shops on the Spectrum and Commodore 64 before Christmas 1987, ahead of the magazines’ review copies. U.S. Gold claimed 200,000 copies sold in its first two weeks. Chaney recalled a guarantee of about a quarter of a million. CRASH was split: one reviewer gave it 93%, the other two 63% and 59%. They complained about “one of the worst multiloads in history” and called the game “a full-price, full-scale letdown”. It scored 72% overall. Zzap!64 found the Commodore version fast but too easy to finish: “Out Run isn’t a disaster, but only offers a few hours’ entertainment — which isn’t enough for a tenner.”
Street Fighter, on the GO! label and converted by Tiertex, got 69% in CRASH in June 1988, “well converted, but too easy to be of any lasting interest”. Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 36%, “an unfortunately poor conversion of a very well received arcade game”.
Thunder Blade, Sega’s helicopter game, also converted by Tiertex, was a CRASH Smash at 91% at Christmas 1988.
Strider, from Capcom via Tiertex again, got 77% on the Spectrum in October 1989. One reviewer thought it “every bit as good” as the arcade game; another could not get on with its “impossible control system”.

Not every U.S. Gold arcade licence fared as well. CRASH called Kung Fu Master “a flaccid beat-’em-up” at 56%. Data East’s Breakthru got 43% and The Last Mission 48%.

Tiertex

Many of the later conversions came from Tiertex, a Manchester developer that worked from a house on Palatine Road in Didsbury. It was not an in-house studio. U.S. Gold bought a stake in it because, as Martyn Savage put it, “Before we bought a stake in Tiertex they were just a coding shop and went wherever the work was.”

Tiertex worked fast. Anthony Ball, who converted Mercs there, remembered that “virtually every one from Tiertex was coded and published within six months”. The programmers had no arcade source code and learned each game by playing it. “A lot of people used to complain about Tiertex games,” he said. The period reviews above show why its name divides opinion: Street Fighter was panned on the Commodore 64, while Thunder Blade was a Spectrum Smash.

Ultimate

In about 1985 or 1986 the Stamper brothers sold U.S. Gold a minority interest in Ultimate Play the Game, the Spectrum label they ran before Rare. The brothers dated the deal “two years ago” in an interview recorded in December 1987. CRASH described it as a takeover, but noted that the Stampers kept a majority shareholding.

Two 1987 games, Martianoids and Bubbler, came out under the Ultimate name. Ultimate’s address appeared on their advertisement in CRASH, but The Story of US Gold says the advertising space was booked by U.S. Gold. According to Tim Chaney, “They were certainly not programmed by Ultimate.” CRASH’s reviewers sensed it at the time: “Ultimate return with a new distributor, but the same old 3D game… don’t buy it because of the name.”

Later the Stampers sold U.S. Gold the rights to the Ultimate back catalogue. Fans have long told a story about Mire Mare, the promised fourth Sabreman game. In the version The Story of US Gold repeats, Brown wanted it for the £2.99 Kixx label while the Stampers wanted a full-price finale, U.S. Gold would not pay to finish it, and the Stampers said it was months from completion. Mire Mare has never been released. Savage’s own verdict was on the catalogue as a whole: “I think it was a lost opportunity. We didn’t do much with the Ultimate back catalogue.”

CentreGold

In August 1991 U.S. Gold, CentreSoft and the group’s smaller businesses were brought together as CentreGold, owned through Brown’s holding company. By 1993 U.S. Gold was publishing for Sega’s consoles and, from 1992, Nintendo’s. Its sports licences included the Barcelona Olympics, the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and the 1994 World Cup, and several of those games were programmed by Tiertex.

CentreGold floated on the stock market in October 1993. The Birmingham Post reported a valuation of about £50 million and noted that Brown, “a one-time rock guitarist”, was keeping a 35% stake. According to The Story of US Gold, the share offer was oversubscribed more than fourteen times.

On 26 October 1994 CentreGold agreed to buy Core Design of Derby for £5.34 million. Brown had seen an early version of a Core game in development. “I’d seen development on Tomb Raider and I thought, Shit! That is a fantastic product,” he said.

Eidos

The next year was hard. Sales of games for the ageing 8-bit and 16-bit machines fell as buyers waited for the new 32-bit consoles. In March 1996 Computer Business Review reported that Eidos had agreed to buy “games distributor CentreGold Plc” for about 40p a share, valuing it at £17.2 million. The shares had been placed at 125p in 1993.

So Eidos did not bring Tomb Raider to the deal; it acquired the game with CentreGold, months before its release. Brown became Eidos’s worldwide publishing director. He recalled telling a meeting of Eidos staff and magazine writers at Birmingham’s International Convention Centre, “Tomb Raider is going to be a phenomenal game.”

Olympic Games: Atlanta 1996 was the last game to carry the U.S. Gold logo. Eidos dropped the brand and in 1997 sold CentreSoft to Activision. “After fourteen years I was really glad to sell it,” Brown said.

Sources

Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015). This is a modern book built on interviews with Geoff Brown, Tim Chaney, Martyn Savage and others from U.S. Gold and CentreSoft; figures and quotes from it are their recollections. pp. 13–19 (Woodroffe’s, Compute!, Galactic Chase, Currys, the 30-day terms), pp. 19–26 (CentreSoft’s incorporation, the NatWest facility, the 1983 turnover, the trips to Cosmi and Access, the 100,000-unit guarantees), pp. 26–29 (the logo, Covsound Ltd, the letters of credit, the £1.20 royalty and £359,000 exposure, the £9.95 price, Ablex), pp. 35–36 (Tim Chaney’s hiring; Woods and Ward’s 50% stake, September 1984), pp. 50–51 (Commando, coin-op licences, Sega, Atari, Gauntlet and Tony Porter), pp. 69–70 (Kixx, GO! and Chaney’s account of why it was launched), pp. 73–74 (Martianoids, Bubbler, the back catalogue, Mire Mare, Savage’s “lost opportunity”), p. 75 (the division of licences with Ocean; the Out Run guarantee), p. 90 (Tiertex in Didsbury; Savage on buying a stake), p. 99 (CentreGold, August 1991; the purchase of Woods and Ward’s half), pp. 102–106 (Nintendo and Sega publishing, the sports licences, the October 1993 flotation and the Birmingham Post report), pp. 107–109 (the Core Design purchase and Brown on Tomb Raider), pp. 112–115 (the Eidos takeover as reported by Computer Business Review, the last U.S. Gold logo, the sale of CentreSoft, Brown at Eidos), p. 166 (Anthony Ball on Tiertex).
Computer & Video Games issue 31, May 1984, p. 17 (news: the new U.S. Gold label) and p. 42 (U.S. Gold advertisement, “the best in American software at a sensible price”).
Computer & Video Games issue 38, December 1984, p. 76: U.S. Gold advertisement giving its address at The Parkway Industrial Centre, Heneage Street, Birmingham.
CRASH issue 10, November 1984, p. 14: Beach-Head review, 79%.
CRASH issue 30, July 1986, p. 10 (news, “Sick as parrots?”, with Tim Chaney’s statement to CTW) and p. 14 (World Cup Carnival review, 26%).
CRASH issue 37, February 1987, pp. 16–17: Gauntlet review, 92%.
CRASH issue 48, Christmas Special 1987: “The CRASH History” supplement, pp. 60, 62 and 70 (World Cup Carnival, Kung Fu Master, Goonies), and its review index, which gives CRASH’s scores for U.S. Gold’s Spectrum releases from issue 1 to issue 46, including Bruce Lee (issue 16), Raid Over Moscow (15), Impossible Mission (22), Winter Games (26), Goonies (35), Breakthru (36), Killed Until Dead (42), The Last Mission (44) and Artic’s World Cup Football (issue 7, 71%).
CRASH issue 49, February 1988, pp. 22–23: Out Run review, 72%.
The Games Machine issue 3, February 1988, p. 60, and ACE issue 5, February 1988, p. 38: Out Run in the shops for Christmas 1987.
CRASH issue 53, June 1988, pp. 13–14: Street Fighter review, 69%.
CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, pp. 184–185: Thunder Blade review, 91%.
CRASH issue 69, October 1989, p. 46: Strider review, 77%.
Zzap!64 issue 34, February 1988, p. 87: Out Run review.
Zzap!64 issue 39, July 1988, p. 103: Street Fighter preview, naming Tiertex as programmers.
Zzap!64 issue 40, August 1988, pp. 28–29: Street Fighter review, 36%.
Amtix issue 18, April 1987, p. 43: readers’ awards for 1986, least pleasing game.
ACE issue 15, December 1988, p. 121: “Great Marketing Disasters”, the Most Artful Save of the Season Award.
For the Ultimate deal: The Games Machine issue 4, March 1988, pp. 26–32 (interview recorded 17 December 1987), and CRASH issue 51, April 1988, pp. 35–38; see Ultimate Play the Game.
Companies House, company 01673860 (public record): incorporated 26 October 1982 as Bamville Limited; renamed CentreSoft Limited, 28 April 1983. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01673860