Gary Mays co-founded PSS in Coventry with Richard Cockayne and was its managing director and main public voice. He wrote to magazines when he thought a review was wrong, and he defended the company’s most controversial game. Theatre Europe let the player order a nuclear strike on a European city, and when CND accused PSS of bad taste, Mays argued that the game was a simulation meant to make people think. He had begun, Amstrad Action reported, “as a staunch supporter of CND”. By 1986 he was no longer sure: “I can see both sides of the argument.”
A company without programmers
In November 1981 Mays and Cockayne, recent Management Studies graduates from Warwick University, saw the mail-order game adverts in the computer magazines at W.H. Smith’s in Coventry. Neither of them, Amstrad Action said, “could tell a bit from a byte”. They advertised for programmers and started selling. Mays later put PSS’s survival down to exactly that: “we weren’t programmers. We were more business-oriented, and we knew what to do.”
He was less proud of the name. Asked about it, he would “look rather pained, heave a sigh and explain that the name ‘was our first and biggest mistake’”. In mitigation, he said, “we Letraseted our first publicity ourselves. We just seemed to have more Ps and Ss than anything else.”
The managing director in print
Mays was quick to answer critics. When Your Computer reviewed Battle for Midway in November 1984 and called it “fatally flawed”, he wrote back as managing director of PSS. The reviewer had asked why he lost after sinking four Japanese carriers; Mays explained that the Japanese had five carriers across three fleets, and that their bombers could already be in the air. That, he pointed out, was how the real battle had gone: in its final stage American aircraft were attacking the last Japanese carrier while Japanese aircraft were attacking the USS Yorktown. “A quick telephone call to PSS,” he wrote, would have shown that the program was not “fatally flawed”.
In April 1986 he answered a CRASH reader who had accused software houses of advertising games too early “to make a quick kill”. Since Swords and Sorcery, which had been advertised long before it was ready, PSS had not advertised a game until it was finished, he wrote, and it would “NEVER cash a cheque or process a credit card” until the game had shipped. It had been “very tempting to cash all those lovely cheques to ease cash flow, but not once did we do it.”
He took a stand on piracy, too. In August 1984 CRASH reported that PSS and six other houses were threatening to stop advertising in magazines that carried adverts for tape copiers. “There shouldn’t be the need for such devices,” Mays said. “We offer a replacement tape or disc should either fail to load, and I would have thought this was sufficient.”
Watching the market
In January 1984 Your Computer asked Mays about MSX, the new Japanese standard for home computers. PSS was already writing and converting games for it, but he was not certain buyers would follow. At around £300 the machines were too expensive for a Spectrum or ZX81 owner looking to upgrade. What he liked was that a software house only had to write one program for a whole range of machines. The Japanese, he said, had been “the first people to accept what software houses have been saying all along… that no matter how good a machine is, it ain’t going to sell without software”.
He also thought the industry had not answered a basic question: “what do people want to do with computers?” Software houses, he said, did not help by churning out one arcade game after another.
Two years later Amstrad Action asked about his own tastes. His all-time favourites were Fort Apocalypse and Lunar Jetman. “I suppose the Gargoyle stuff has impressed me most recently,” he said, “but most games at the moment don’t really impress me at all. The trend is very graphics-oriented. People forget gameplay. But you can go so far and no further with graphics.”
Theatre Europe and CND
Theatre Europe (1985) simulated the first thirty days of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Mays told Your Computer in June 1986 that he stood by it, and by Falklands ’82:
CND accused us of bad taste with Theatre Europe but did not look at the product. It is a simulation. We fed in the figures and the scenario, which we think is plausible, and the horrifying results speak for themselves.
The figures, he said, came from NATO, the Soviet Embassy and Jane’s books on military forces. Before a player could order a nuclear strike, they had to ring a PSS answerphone for the code word, and the message also explained what such a decision would mean in real life. Falklands ’82 had been attacked because the Argentine side could win. “But it could have happened,” he said. “It is papers like The Sun which trivialised the war, not us.”
He told Amstrad Action much the same. “Some people will always think they’re distasteful, but personally I don’t understand why a TV series or a comic or a film is acceptable when a game dealing with a conflict is not.” He found “the concept of a game like Rambo much more distasteful than what we do”. Theatre Europe, he said, “was an attempt to make people think a bit more”. The magazine added that making it had made a few people at PSS think as well. Mays himself had begun as a staunch supporter of CND, “but now, he says, ‘I’m not sure any more. I can see both sides of the argument.’”
He did not want the wargames to stay a specialist taste. PSS put joystick-controlled action sequences into them, and of Bismarck, due in 1986, Mays promised that “it will be difficult to tell arcade from strategy – it will take over where Beach Head left off”.
Mirrorsoft and Image Works
In early 1987 Mirrorsoft took an 80% holding in PSS. CRASH found Mays, by then joint managing director, “happy about the move - it’ll give his company guaranteed distribution and financial security for new projects”.
In 1988 Mirrorsoft launched a new label, Image Works, at the Savoy Hotel in London. Reporting the launch in September, ST Action named Gary Mays as its operations manager. With the development manager, John Cook, he was to direct programming and control software development. “The fact that we actually have software immediately ready for the launch of the label is quite unique,” he said, “and we intend to publish a minimum of eighteen games in the first year of trading.”
Public sources say little about his career after Image Works’s launch.
Sources
- Pete Connor, “PSS”, Amstrad Action issue 6, March 1986, pp. 97–98: the founding, the name, the favourite games and Gargoyle, Theatre Europe, CND, Rambo, Bismarck.
- Your Computer MSX supplement, January 1984, pp. 12–13: “PSS and MSX”, interview with Mays.
- CRASH issue 7, August 1984, p. 34: “Anti-copycat Cartel”.
- Your Computer, December 1984, p. 49: “Midway error”, letter from Gary Mays, managing director of PSS.
- CRASH issue 27, April 1986, p. 46: “Replying to ‘Mr Angry’”, letter from Gary Mays, managing director of PSS.
- Your Computer, June 1986, pp. 84–85: PSS company profile; Mays on Theatre Europe, CND, Falklands ’82 and The Sun.
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 10: “Merger mania”; Mays as joint managing director.
- C16 & Plus/4 Handbook issue 9, April 1987: “Mirrorsoft Takeover” (80% of PSS); see Mirrorsoft.
- ST Action issue 5, September 1988, p. 12: the launch of Image Works; Mays as operations manager.