Vulcan Software | Code Like It's 198x

Vulcan Software began with two people, an Amiga 500 and a little boy who talked. Paul Carrington and Lisa Tunnah had met studying film. In 1994 they set up their own company in Portsmouth to publish Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity, a top-down puzzle adventure whose hero looked up out of the screen and spoke to the player. Amiga Power gave it 19%. It sold anyway, and Vulcan kept going after Commodore collapsed and most publishers left the Amiga. By the middle of 1997 an American magazine counted ten Vulcan games on sale and called it the most prolific Amiga games publisher.

Fast facts

Founded: incorporated as Vulcan Software Limited on 5 January 1994, with Carrington and Tunnah as directors.
Base: Vulcan House, 72 Queens Road, Buckland, Portsmouth.
Founders: Paul Carrington (programming, and many of the voices) and Lisa Tunnah (design).
First game: Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity (1994), £29.99, for the A500, A600 and A1200.
Known for: the Valhalla series, the low-priced mail-order “MiniSeries”, Hillsea Lido, Timekeepers, Jet Pilot, Burnout and Genetic Species.
Later: CD-only Amiga releases from mid-1997; it stopped writing its own Amiga games in 1998 and kept publishing other developers’ work.
Company: Vulcan Software Limited is still on the register at Companies House, with Carrington as a director.

Two film students and a talking prince

The One interviewed the pair in August 1994 and found a team of exactly two. Carrington had learned BASIC on a ZX Spectrum, written five small games and paid a printer a fortune for their cover artwork, then given up on games for film school, where he took a degree in film production and met Tunnah. After three months of “sitting around in the house doing nothing”, they started writing games. A zombie game, in which rescued characters said “My hero”, was where the speech came in. A Greek-myth adventure called Orpheus proved too big for floppy disks.

Valhalla was written in AMOS. Carrington said he had felt “really insecure” about that, thinking the rest of the industry would laugh, “Then I realised that it doesn’t matter what the game’s written in, as long as it’s good.” They had started on an Amiga with a 20MB hard drive that was full before the game was finished, and by the interview they had an A1200 with 80MB. Tunnah described how the two-person team worked: she rewrote one level four times because Carrington did not like it, and because she did not know the machine’s limits she kept designing things he said could not be done, until he gave them another go. They had studied other adventures, and decided that where those spent their disks on graphics, they would spend theirs on speech.

Amiga Computing reported in June 1994 that the game had been in production for almost a year and was billed as “the world’s first speech adventure”. Amiga Format counted seven disks, five of them filled with speech. The hero was a young prince returning from exile to claim the throne the Lord of Infinity had seized, by working his way through a tower of puzzles and traps, and he told the player about everything he saw and touched.

Reviewed badly, sold anyway

The reviews split. Amiga Power’s Cam Winstanley gave Valhalla 19% in July 1994. He found it “barren” and “empty”, met no other living thing, and wrote that after twenty minutes “you’ll only be aware of one thing, which is the number of times you die”, because a wrong floor tile killed the prince instantly. Amiga Format gave it 23%. CU Amiga called it “a groundbreaking piece of software”, and The One gave it 81%.

The buyers took The One’s side. Valhalla reached Amiga Format’s sales chart, and a sequel followed quickly: Valhalla: Before the War (1995), a budget prequel, then Valhalla and the Fortress of Eve (1996) at £17.99. Vulcan sold mainly by mail order, through coupons in magazine advertisements, and offered games to readers through The One and Amiga Computing. In September 1995 its advertisements announced “an expanding mail order exclusive range of Amiga games at incredibly low prices”, a range it called the MiniSeries.

The range grew fast. Timekeepers (1995), a puzzle game built on a variation of the Valhalla engine, had players lay down markers to steer a squad of blank-faced characters through time zones. Hillsea Lido (1996) was a seaside management game set in Portsmouth. Tiny Troops, a strategy game first developed for Mindscape, found a home at Vulcan when Mindscape stopped releasing Amiga games. Jet Pilot was a flight simulator with about 80 missions and 27 European airfields.

The most prolific Amiga publisher

In August 1997 Peter Olafson looked back at Vulcan’s run in his “Games on the Amiga” column for the American magazine Amazing Computing:

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.

While other publishers postponed and abandoned their Amiga releases, he wrote, “being at 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 (where racks can be found) and at least a dozen in the hopper.” He credited it with “cute characters, rational hard-disk installation routines, tidy little manuals, reasonable prices, and economical packaging”.

He also saw a cost. “As it has grown prolific, it has lost some of its keen edge.” He liked Hillsea Lido, Jet Pilot, Timekeepers and Tiny Troops, but found the demolition-derby game Burnout dull, and thought the third Valhalla had lost the original’s appeal.

CD only, then cutbacks

In June 1997 Carrington told Amiga Format that after a few last floppy releases, Vulcan’s new games would come only on CD. Disk swapping, he said, limited the graphics, speech and music a game could carry, and he wanted to publish demanding titles, for an ’030 processor, 8 to 16MB of memory and a CD-ROM drive, that could compete with PC CD-ROM games. By then he was signing outside developers from around the world; Amiga Format reported in its Christmas 1997 issue that Vulcan had signed its fourteenth software team. The Final Odyssey, Genetic Species and Uropa 2 came from those deals.

The revival did not come. In April 1998 Carrington explained in The Amiga Informer that Vulcan had invested heavily in 1997, expecting Gateway’s purchase of the Amiga to restart the market, but sales had “plummeted to all time lows”. Vulcan cancelled Hell Pigs, Valhalla IV, a 3D games creator and a Jet Pilot expansion, and began developing for the PC and PlayStation. In November 1998 the Danish Amiga Advis reported that Vulcan would no longer develop Amiga games itself, but would go on publishing games written by others, such as Wasted Dreams and Explorer 2260. The same autumn it collected the ten MiniSeries games of its first three years on a limited CD, Vulcanology, of 500 copies.

Vulcan Software Limited is still a registered company. Carrington is a director, and Tunnah resigned as a director in 2007. Public sources say little about its later work.

Sources

Companies House, Vulcan Software Limited, company 02884900 (consulted October 2026; web, public record): incorporation on 5 January 1994, directors and their appointment and resignation dates, active status. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02884900
The One issue 71, August 1994, pp. 22–23: Andy Nuttall’s interview with Paul Carrington and Lisa Tunnah (the Spectrum, film school, the zombie game and Orpheus, AMOS, their hard drives, how they worked).
Amiga Computing issue 74, June 1994, p. 131: Vulcan as a new software house; Valhalla almost a year in production, “the world’s first speech adventure”, Tunnah and Carrington as “two graduates”.
Amiga Format issue 60, June 1994, p. 45: “ex-students”; seven disks, five of speech; Vulcan’s own publishing company.
Amiga Power issue 39, July 1994, p. 66: Cam Winstanley’s review (£29.99; A500, A600, A1200; authors Lisa Tunnah and Paul Carrington). Issue 44, December 1994, p. 21: the 19% score and the budget prequel.
CU Amiga, July 1994, p. 47: preview and verdict (“a groundbreaking piece of software”).
Amiga Format issue 63, September 1994, p. 81, and issue 64, October 1994, p. 42: the 23% score; Valhalla in the sales chart.
The One issue 82, July 1995, p. 30: The One’s 81% for the original Valhalla.
Amiga Format issue 80, January 1996, p. 42: Hillsea Lido and Vulcan’s “mini-series”. The One issue 88, 1996, p. 8: Hillsea Lido set in Portsmouth.
Amiga Power issue 52, August 1995, p. 26: Timekeepers (Lisa Tunnah, design; Paul Hale Carrington, code). Issue 53, September 1995, p. 16: Vulcan’s mail-order advertisement.
CU Amiga, August 1996, p. 38: Valhalla and the Fortress of Eve, £17.99.
Amazing Computing vol. 12 no. 8, August 1997, pp. 42–43: Peter Olafson, “Games on the Amiga”.
Amiga Format issue 98, June 1997, p. 22: Carrington on going CD-only. Christmas 1997 issue, p. 8: Vulcan signs its fourteenth software team.
The Amiga Informer issue 13, April 1998, p. 10: Carrington on the cutbacks, the cancellations and development for the PC and PlayStation.
Amiga Advis (Denmark), November 1998, p. 35: Vulcan stops developing its own Amiga games but continues to publish.
The Games Machine (Italy), November 1998, p. 106: Vulcanology, 500 copies, the ten MiniSeries games.