Zenobi Software | Code Like It's 198x

Zenobi Software was one man, a Spectrum, a tape recorder and an address in Rochdale. John Wilson named it after his cat. From 1987 he sold text adventures by post, first his own and then those of more than fifty other authors. Your Sinclair explained in 1988 how the business worked. The tapes were copied one at a time from a master, the inlays were plain card cut up by hand, and each £1.99 game made 76p before Wilson counted his own time. In 1993 Zenobi was still selling the same Spectrum adventures to Amiga owners, with a Spectrum emulator on the disk to run them.

Fast facts

Run by: John Wilson, known in Your Sinclair as the Rochdale Balrog.
Address: 26 Spotland Tops, Cutgate, Rochdale, Lancashire. Cheques were payable to Zenobi Software.
The name: “Because it’s the name of my cat,” Wilson told Your Sinclair in 1987.
Prices: £1.99 by mail order in 1987 and 1988; £2.49 in the early 1990s.
Formats: ZX Spectrum tape, and some games on +D disk; Atari ST; Amiga “licenceware” from 1993, running Spectrum versions under emulation.
Tools: most of the games were written with Gilsoft’s The Quill or its successor, the Professional Adventure Writer.
New releases ended: 1997.

From reader to publisher

Wilson became famous as a player before he was known as a writer. In May 1986 Your Sinclair’s adventure columnist, Mike Gerrard, named him the reader who sent in completed solutions first and declared him “the Rochdale Balrog”. Two months later Gerrard interviewed him. Wilson told him his first adventure had been Hewson’s The Quest; years later he wrote that the first he ever played was Carnell’s Black Crystal on the ZX81, and that the game was where he got the name Zenobi. He wrote step-by-step guides for other players, contributed to a fanzine and a helpline, and once posted 32 letters in a week. He had also written a game of his own with The Quill, The Secret of Little Hodcome. “I tried one or two software houses but didn’t get very far,” he said. Gerrard thought it far too good to gather dust and had it added to the magazine’s DigiTape.

Wilson published the next games himself, first under his own name and then, by August 1987, as Zenobi. Your Sinclair reviewed Bulbo and the Lizard King that month at £1.99, mail order only: “the name Zenobi Software hides YS’s very own ‘El Supremo’ John Wilson”.

How a £1.99 adventure was made

In October 1988 Gerrard asked Wilson to explain the business for readers who wanted to publish their own games, and Wilson set it all out.

Every game was play-tested first by his young son, whose job was to try everything and make sure the program always responded sensibly, and then by a couple of experienced adventurers. Duplicating was “the most critical and the most troublesome” stage. He used a 128K Spectrum, a Bush tape recorder and a “copy-tape” made by a man in Bury, and cleaned the tape head and checked its alignment before each session. A printer had quoted £500 just for the plates for a full-colour inlay, so he bought sheets of coloured card from an art shop, cut them to size by hand and stamped the game’s name on them. A photocopied leaflet replaced the usual inlay text.

He had never placed a proper advertisement in a magazine. He relied on mail-shots, fanzines and reviews, and above all on special offers in the magazines’ adventure pages: it was better, he reasoned, “to sell 100 games at £1.49 than 50 at £1.99”. Then he gave the sums for a £1.99 game: about 35p for the blank tape, 10p for the inlay and label, 17p for a padded envelope, 26p first-class postage, 10p of leaflets and about 25p of advertising. That came to £1.23, “leaving you 76p profit on each game”. His last game, he added, had taken over three months, “working 12 hours a day, seven days a week”.

The Balrog’s own games

Wilson’s own adventures were short and comic. Behind Closed Doors came free on the back of his science-fiction game From Out of a Dark Night Sky in early 1989. It has one location: “the poor old Balrog is locked in the lavatory”, with only a stub of pencil and a copy of The Goblin’s Gazette to help him escape. Gerrard preferred it to the main game and asked for more of the same. When Behind Closed Doors became a series, CRASH called it “irreverent”.

Other people’s adventures

Wilson told Retro Gamer in 2007 that his own games did not bring in enough money, because there was too long a gap between releases. So he read the reviews of other independent adventures and approached their authors. The first result was Scott Johnston’s Lightmare: Village of Delvhorn. Authors were first paid an advance covering the first 500 copies sold, and later a fixed rate of 30p to 70p a copy, paid monthly under a signed contract.

The adventure columns sent authors his way. In April 1990 Gerrard explained that Garry Cappuccini had sent him a game called Snap!. Gerrard returned it, telling him it was too good to sell himself and that he should find a publisher. Zenobi took it and renamed it Crack City, at £2.49. By 1992 Your Sinclair counted Zenobi as one of the three companies most interested in new adventures, and Wilson was also selling blank C15 cassettes, at 35p each, to people duplicating their own.

Not every Zenobi game pleased the reviewers. CRASH gave Gerrard’s own One of Our Wombats Is Missing 61% in August 1991 at £2.49:

I found the majority of the adventure was just a mapping exercise, with too little to do in many places.

The reviewer also disliked the memory spent on “clever” replies to particular inputs. That trick, he wrote, “was fine for John Wilson’s irreverent Behind Closed Doors series”, but in Wombat it was “excessive, irrelevant padding”. Even so, CRASH’s adventure column was confident about the scene Zenobi belonged to. “Anyone who said the Spectrum adventure scene’s dying must have enough egg on their face to make a decent sized omelette,” it began in January 1992, “with adventures being released by the sackload and new adventure labels exploding onto the scene.”

Two Balrogs

The nickname caused one confusion. Amstrad Action’s adventure column was also written by someone calling himself the Balrog. In November 1991 a reader asked him about some 48K Spectrum games he had seen advertised by Zenobi in the fanzine Adventure Probe, written by “a person calling himself ‘The Balrog’. Is this an impostor?” The column replied: “As to the Rochdale Balrog – no he is not an impostor, just a distant relative!”

Atari ST and Amiga

Zenobi’s one move beyond the Spectrum in the 1980s was to the Atari ST. “I only entered the Atari market because it was the next machine I purchased,” Wilson told Retro Gamer. “I never bought a C64 or an Amstrad CPC which I felt was too much like the Speccy.” Jason Taylor’s The Magic Shop became one of Zenobi’s best-selling ST games.

In 1993 Zenobi reached the Amiga in an unusual way. Amiga Force reported in September that Zenobi was converting its Spectrum back catalogue to the Amiga by running the original games under a Spectrum emulator, at £2.49 each, and that RAMSAVE still worked. Reviewing Retarded Creatures and Caverns, released as licenceware, the magazine explained:

The first of Zenobi’s many promised Spectrum ‘conversions’, Retarded Creatures and Caverns is actually a Quilled game operating from the original Speccy code using the emulator supplied on the same disk.

It found that “the game suffers little under emulation”. The Balrog and the Cat, “penned by Zenobi supremo John Wilson”, followed in November.

Later years

According to IFWiki, Zenobi stopped producing new titles in 1997, but Wilson went on supplying its games for use with emulators. Colin Woodcock’s 2012 guide to Spectrum emulation noted that +D disk images of Zenobi adventures were among the few commercial releases for that disk interface, and that the iOS version of the Spectaculator emulator sold two Zenobi Adventure Packs, six games each, through its in-app shop. “I can’t say I disapprove of Zenobi making a little money on their back catalogue,” Woodcock wrote.

Wilson returned to writing in his last years. IFWiki records that after discovering the Adventuron authoring system in 2016 he wrote or co-wrote about twenty new games under the name Pension Productions. He died on 31 May 2021, aged 74.

Sources

Your Sinclair issue 5, May 1986, p. 62: Mike Gerrard names John Wilson the Rochdale Balrog.
Your Sinclair issue 7, July 1986, p. 76: Gerrard’s interview with Wilson (The Quest, the 32 letters, The Secret of Little Hodcome and the DigiTape).
Your Sinclair issue 20, August 1987, p. 86: Bulbo and the Lizard King review (Zenobi Software, £1.99, mail order only; the cat).
Your Sinclair issue 34, October 1988, p. 110: “The Balrog’s Guide to D-I-Y” (play-testing, duplicating, inlays, special offers, the costs of a £1.99 game).
Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989, pp. 97–98: From Out of a Dark Night Sky and Behind Closed Doors; the Zenobi reader offer.
Your Sinclair issue 52, April 1990, p. 58: Crack City and Garry Cappuccini.
Your Sinclair issue 76, April 1992, p. 30: publishing your own adventure (Zenobi among the companies interested in adventures; blank C15s).
CRASH issue 91, August 1991, p. 55: One of Our Wombats Is Missing review (Zenobi, £2.49; 61%).
CRASH issue 95, January 1992, p. 43: Ian Osborne’s adventure column (“released by the sackload”).
Amstrad Action issue 74, November 1991, pp. 44–45: “Balrog’s Postbag” (the “impostor” letter and the reply).
Amiga Force issue 9, September 1993, p. 7 (news: the Spectrum back catalogue under emulation) and p. 56 (Retarded Creatures and Caverns). Amiga Force issue 11, November 1993, p. 54: The Balrog and the Cat.
David Crookes, “Company Profile: Zenobi Software”, Retro Gamer issue 35, 2007, pp. 30–36: interview with John Wilson (other authors’ games and how they were paid; Lightmare; the Atari ST; The Magic Shop).
Colin Woodcock, The ZX Spectrum on Your PC, second edition (2012), pp. 39 and 105–106: Zenobi on +D disk; the Zenobi Adventure Packs in Spectaculator for iOS.
8bitAG.com, “John Wilson - Zenobi Software… In His Own Words” (2021; web, secondary): Wilson’s own account of Black Crystal on the ZX81 as the first adventure he played and the source of the name Zenobi. http://8bitag.com/info/zenobi.html
IFWiki, “John Wilson” (database, web, secondary): more than 50 authors published; new titles ended in 1997; Pension Productions; Wilson’s death on 31 May 2021, aged 74. https://ifwiki.org/John_Wilson
Wikipedia, “Zenobi” (web, secondary): Zenobi’s commercial years, citing Wilson’s own posts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenobi