Vulcan Software
The ones who stayed
A Portsmouth house that kept making Amiga games years after the industry had left — publishing directly to a shrinking audience, with reviews that were often unkind and buyers who did not care.
Vulcan published Amiga games after the Amiga had commercially ended. Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity (£29.99, A500 to A1200, by Lisa Tunnah and Paul Carrington) came out in 1994, and Vulcan kept going for years afterwards, selling to a market that everyone else had written off.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: Amiga Power, 1994, at £29.99 — reviewed, and not kindly.
- Known for: the Valhalla isometric adventure series.
- Credited authors: Lisa Tunnah and Paul Carrington.
- Distinctive: Amiga-only, by choice, well past the point where that was a business decision anyone else would have made.
Reviewed badly, sold anyway
Amiga Power was blunt about Valhalla: barren, empty, nothing living on screen, and after twenty minutes the only thing you would notice was how often you died. The magazine had a house style of enthusiastic cruelty, but the verdict was not unusual for Vulcan.
The games sold regardless, and the reason is structural. By 1994 the Amiga press was shrinking, the shops had cleared their Amiga shelves, and a publisher reached buyers directly — mail order, magazine adverts, cover disks, word of mouth in user groups. In that market a review is one voice among several, not the gatekeeper it had been in 1987, and an audience with almost nothing new to buy is a forgiving one.
What a platform’s long tail looks like
Vulcan shows what happens to a computer after its industry leaves, and the shape recurs for every machine in this Vault.
The mass market goes first, then the publishers, then the shops, then the magazines. What remains is a smaller, older, more committed group of owners who have not stopped wanting new software — and a few small companies willing to serve them at a scale that would have been failure a few years earlier.
The economics change completely. A game that would have needed fifty thousand sales in 1990 needs a few thousand in 1996; the budget shrinks to match; the ambition shrinks with it. Games from a platform’s long tail often look thin next to its peak, and comparing them directly misses that they were made for a different market under different arithmetic.
This is also where the line between commercial software and community software blurs. Vulcan’s operation is not far from licenseware and the public domain scene that kept the Amiga alive in parallel.
Why it mattered
Vulcan is loyalty as a business model, and a useful corrective to tidy endings. Histories tend to close a platform with the manufacturer’s bankruptcy — Commodore, 1994 — but the Amiga did not stop then. People kept using them, and a handful of companies kept writing for them, for another decade.
It also puts two names into the record. Lisa Tunnah and Paul Carrington are credited in a magazine header for a game reviewed badly and remembered fondly, and that credit is the only reason either name is recoverable at all.
“Not only still around, but the most prolific Amiga game publisher”
Amazing Computing, August 1997, put the case plainly, from someone watching it happen:
Who would have guessed it? About three and a half years ago, right on the cusp of Commodore’s collapse, England’s tiny Vulcan Software Ltd. released a top-down puzzle/adventure called Valhalla & the Lord of Infinity. It was at once artful, simple and charming — who could resist a character who looked guilelessly up out of the playfield and squeaked at you in the tiniest of voices? — and it quickly won my heart.
Then the part that matters:
All around them, game publishers were postponing and abandoning their planned Amiga releases — wait and see was the word of the day — and Vulcan could surely have been forgiven had it joined in the waiting game. But, it seems, being in the right place at the wrong time isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For, in mid-1997, Vulcan is not only still around, but the most prolific Amiga game publisher, with 10 games on the racks.
Ten games on sale for a dead platform, three and a half years after the manufacturer went under. That is the whole entry, and it was recognised at the time rather than only in hindsight.
The cost of staying
The same piece does not leave it there, and the entry is better for carrying the qualifier:
as it has grown prolific, it has lost some of its keen edge … [Vulcan] made its bones on the Valhallas — the possibility for slips increases.
A publisher that survives by shipping constantly into a shrinking market ends up shipping more than it can make well. The reviewer who “quickly [gave] my heart” to Valhalla in 1994 is, by 1997, saying the volume has cost something — while still buying the games.
⚠ Amazing Computing is an American Amiga magazine; this is a US view of a Portsmouth company, which is itself evidence of how far the late Amiga scene’s distribution reached.