Gary Mays
PSS, Coventry
Co-founder of PSS, the Coventry publisher that made wargames a commercial proposition on British home computers — and who cheerfully described the company's own name as its first and biggest mistake.
Gary Mays co-founded PSS in Coventry with Richard Cockayne. Amstrad Action visited them in March 1986 and identified Mays as co-founder and partner in the company.
The name
The best thing Mays said to Amstrad Action was about his own company. Asked about the name PSS, the magazine records him looking pained, sighing, and calling it the company’s first and biggest mistake — offering in mitigation that they had done their own early publicity.
That is an unusually candid thing for a founder to say to a magazine, and it is a fair description of the problem. A house selling wargames and strategy titles had given itself a set of initials that told a browsing customer nothing at all.
What he thought of the competition
The same interview asks Mays what had impressed him lately, and his answer points across this Vault: he named Gargoyle’s work as the most impressive thing he had seen recently.
Two Midlands houses, both making games for adults rather than the teenage market, one publicly admiring the other. It is a small piece of evidence that the British industry of 1986 was small enough for its principals to be each other’s audience.
See also
- PSS — the company.
- Richard Cockayne — his co-founder.
- Gargoyle Games — the house he admired.