Andrew Hewson
Put the programmer's name on the cassette, and wrote the Z80 column himself
Founded Hewson Consultants, published Paradroid, Uridium and Cybernoid, credited his authors when the industry did not, argued in print against budget software — and wrote Sinclair User's monthly technical column while doing it.
Andrew Hewson ran Hewson Consultants, the British publisher with the strongest claim to having treated programmers as authors — their names went on the cassette inlay when most publishers kept them anonymous. The roster it attracted is the argument for the policy: Steve Turner, Andrew Braybrook, Raffaele Cecco.
He appears on 178 pages of the Spectrum press held here, and the company on 232 — but the number that says most about him is a different one.
Hewson’s Helpline
For years he wrote a monthly technical column in Sinclair User under his own name. Not a marketing page: Hewson’s Helpline answers reader questions about the machine, and the answers are specific. February 1986 is about the printer buffer, and gives the addresses — RAM from 23296 to 23551 inclusive. March 1986 is about using the Spectrum’s internal clock.
A publisher’s managing director writing memory maps for readers every month is not a normal arrangement, and it explains a good deal about why programmers took his calls.
Against budget software
He was one of the few people in the industry willing to argue publicly against the £1.99 model. Sinclair User asked him in August 1985 and printed the answer:
We’re not interested in the budget range because of the aura associated with it.
His position was that a good game deserved a reasonable price. Set against the same feature’s costing — a full-price £6.95 game returning the author 40p — the argument reads less like snobbery and more like someone defending what his programmers earned. See budget games for the figures he was arguing about.
Technician Ted, and being in the room
CRASH interviewed him with Steve Marsden in February 1985 about Technician Ted, written by Marsden and Dave Cooke and a CRASH Smash that month. He also turns up in CRASH’s playing-tips pages supplying solutions — the magazine credits “Andrew Hewson of Hewson Consultants, who supplied the entire solution” for one game. A publisher who both wrote the technical column and sent in the hints.
After 1991, and again after 2013
Hewson Consultants closed in 1991. Andrew Hewson and the management team founded 21st Century Entertainment, which published Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies with Digital Illusions — later DICE.
In 2013 he reformed Hewson Consultants Ltd to write and publish Hints & Tips for Videogame Pioneers, an account of the era co-written with his son Rob Hewson and funded on Kickstarter. Its contributors include more than twenty people from the period — Steve Turner, Raffaele Cecco, Jon Hare, the founders of EA DICE — which makes it an unusual document: a publisher’s memoir annotated by the people he published.
The campaign’s success brought the games division back with it.
⚠ The last section is from present-day sources rather than the period archive held here.