Phenomena

Guild of Software Houses

GOSH — the British software industry regulating itself, 1983 to about 1987

Founded in 1983 by Bug-Byte, Quicksilva, Virgin Games and others, GOSH published a Customers' Charter promising delivery times, refunds and — the clause that dates it exactly — an undertaking not to advertise products as available before they were. It also ran a £50,000 fighting fund against piracy, and counted the industry shrinking from 500 companies to 350 in a year.

sinclair-zx-spectrumcommodore-64bbc-microindustrybritishpiracytrade-body19831983–1987

The Guild of Software Houses — GOSH, and the acronym was deliberate — was the British games industry’s first attempt to regulate itself. It was set up in 1983, in Computer & Video Games’ words, “in response to public demand for a little more discipline from the software houses”.

The founding members were the labels that had been in the business longest: Bug-Byte, New Generation, Quicksilva, Salamander, Silversoft, Softek and Virgin Games. By late 1984 it had 34 members.

The Customers’ Charter

The Charter is the document, and it is worth reading as a list of what the industry knew it was doing wrong. Members undertook to:

  1. Publish their terms and conditions of trade on request.
  2. Maintain promised mail-order delivery times.
  3. Replace defective stock, and deal with complaints promptly — normally within five working days.
  4. Avoid advertising products as available before this is in fact the case.
  5. Keep customers informed where genuinely unforeseen difficulties occurred.
  6. Guarantee high standards of business integrity.

A parallel Dealers’ Charter added delivery-date guarantees to shops and a commitment to “a high technical standard of quality”.

Clause 4 is the one that dates the period exactly. In November 1983, the British software industry collectively agreed in print that advertising things that did not yet exist was the practice most in need of stopping. Two months later Sinclair Research announced the QL and took £5 million against 13,000 orders it could not fill, and the Advertising Standards Authority ended up criticising the company. Sinclair was a hardware manufacturer and not a GOSH member, so it broke no code it had signed — but the industry had named the disease in the same season that its most famous case broke out.

Piracy, and a fighting fund

GOSH’s more visible work was against copying, and the numbers its members gave the press are worth recording precisely because they cannot all be right.

Nick Alexander of Virgin Games, who chaired the Guild, told Acorn User in 1984: “For every legitimate tape sold, 10 or 12 copies are made.” Chris Holland of Salamander put it “nearer six”, but added that “between £100m and £150m is lost in this country alone each year”. Alexander also attributed “50 to 60 per cent” of Imagine’s July 1984 collapse to copying, and cited a Salford CID raid that seized 10,000 counterfeit copies of Imagine games at once.

To back that up, GOSH raised a £50,000 fund from its members so that individual companies could take pirates to court — money that went, among other places, to support Artic’s action against an alleged pirate in Hull.

Two more things it did are worth keeping, because they show a trade body behaving like one:

  • It objected to the Ministry of Defence placing a secrecy order on J.L.C. Data’s newly developed software protection system in 1984. The MoD classifying a copy-protection scheme, and the games industry publicly protesting, is not a sentence anyone would predict.
  • It counted the industry. In December 1984 GOSH estimated that “more than 500 companies dotted the software map just one year ago. This year the figure is more like 350, and it’s likely to slip even further in 1985.”

That last figure is the most useful thing GOSH produced. The British software boom is usually described from the inside, by the people who survived it. GOSH was in a position to count the ones who did not, and reckoned a third of them had gone inside twelve months.

The end

GOSH did not survive the 8-bit era it was formed to police. By May 1988 ACE was reporting an industry meeting in a Jersey hotel — Elite, Hewson and Electronic Arts among those present — calling for a new publishers’ association, and explaining why: “since the demise of GOSH there has been no effective representative body” for games companies.

Why it matters here

Self-regulation is one of the few places where an industry writes down its own faults in its own words. The Customers’ Charter is a better primary source on what buying British software in 1983 was like than any retrospective: people were waiting too long for post, receiving tapes that would not load, getting no reply when they complained, and being sold things that had not been finished.

Every one of those is a clause. And the fact that the guild that wrote them was gone within five years, leaving nothing behind it, says something too.

See also

Not yet fact-checked. This entry was drafted by an AI and nobody has verified it. The dates, figures and technical details may be wrong. Use it to find your bearings, then confirm anything that matters against a primary source.