When the Record Companies Sold Software

In February 1984 Sinclair User reported that Shakin’ Stevens fans who bought his album The Bop Won’t Stop on cassette would find a bonus on the tape: a game for the 48K Spectrum in which you drove a car into “Shaky’s ’ole house” while dodging vampire bats. The record company, CBS, said it had chosen the Spectrum because it was the most popular home computer in Britain. That autumn The Stranglers went further, putting an adventure game, Aural Quest, at the end of the cassette of Aural Sculpture. For a few years the British record industry treated home computer software as part of its business, and several of its companies set up software labels of their own.

Record sales down, software up

Your Computer explained the attraction in June 1983. “In the palaces of the pop industry,” its editorial began, “even the razzmatazz cannot hide the fact that sales of records have been in decline since peaking in the late seventies.” Meanwhile one estimate put the British market for Spectrum software alone at £1 million a month:

Given these two contrasting tales of gloom and boom you need not be an industry pundit to grasp why major record companies such as Virgin and K-tel are moving into the lucrative business of selling software. Virgin Records has launched Virgin Games, and K-tel attended the Midland Computer Fair with £1 million in its pocket to negotiate deals with the software makers.

The magazine then guessed what might follow: “can we expect to see national software charts — and the hyping that goes with them — computer programmers as stars”. It expected the first effect to be duller. Most software was then sold by mail order, and “the music companies have the distribution networks to put software in the shops”. That, it warned, could spell the end of the mail-order business and raise the price of entry for small publishers.

A year later the Sinclair User Annual counted the newcomers in passing: “Other companies from the record and publishing world — Thorn-EMI, CBS, Virgin — attracted by the large potential market, have also joined the contest.”

Who came in

Label	Record-industry parent	In the British press
Virgin Games	Virgin Group (Virgin Records)	From spring 1983; stayed, and became Virgin Interactive Entertainment in 1993
K-tel	K-tel International (TV-advertised compilation albums)	From 1983; “Doublesider” tapes in 1984
Thorn EMI Video, then Creative Sparks	Thorn EMI	Thorn EMI games from 1983; Creative Sparks from spring 1984; its successor was in receivership by 1987
CBS Software	CBS	Novelty tapes from early 1984; a range for the Commodore 64 from the winter of 1984–85
Ariolasoft	Ariola, owned by Bertelsmann	Formed September 1984; launched at the end of 1984; the British arm faded after Electronic Arts left in 1987

Virgin

Virgin Games was started in 1983 by Nick Alexander, who had worked for EMI and HMV and then in Thorn EMI’s home computer software division, with Richard Branson’s backing. Its first tapes were sold like records. According to Alexander, each came with a photograph and biography of its young author on the inlay and music by Steve Hillage or another Virgin act on the other side of the cassette. From 1985 Virgin sold compilations called Now Games, named after the Now That’s What I Call Music albums. See Virgin Games.

K-tel

K-tel, “renowned for its TV-advertised compilation albums”, arrived with money and vans. Your Computer reported in June 1983 that its first deal was a £150,000 order for software from DK’tronics, and that its software manager, Adrian Moulds, preferred partnership deals to buying copyrights. The programmers kept the rights; K-tel distributed the tapes “through the vans that service the 5,000 outlets for its record business”. Its own games came as “Doublesiders”, advertised in Computer and Video Games in January 1984 at £6.95: “When you’ve finished playing one side simply flip it over (just like a music cassette) and move off on a second totally different, equally gripping game.” By March the range had six tapes, among them It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and Dracula’s Tomb.

Thorn EMI and Creative Sparks

Thorn EMI, the electronics and entertainment group that owned EMI, was publishing games as Thorn EMI Video in 1983, when Personal Computer News reviewed its Orc Attack cartridge for the Atari. In spring 1984 the games took a new name. “Creative Sparks is a new software company in name at least,” CRASH wrote in May 1984, “in fact it’s really Thorn EMI with a new front.” Its games included Orc Attack on the Spectrum, which CRASH made a Smash, and a run of Danger Mouse games. A separate business, Thorn EMI Computer Software Distributors, handled American labels such as HesWare. The label did not last. By the spring of 1986 Mastertronic was reissuing games “bought from Creative Sparks” at budget prices, and in October 1987 CRASH summed up its “roller-coaster existence”: it had ended as Creative Sparks Distribution, “which recently went into receivership”.

CBS

CBS was already in the trade by early 1984, when Your Computer reported that Bug-Byte’s British distribution had moved to CBS Records in London. After the Shakin’ Stevens tape came The Stranglers’ Aural Quest, a 48K Spectrum adventure written with The Quill by Mike Turner of Star Dreams, from a plot by the band’s keyboard player Dave Greenfield. Computer and Video Games asked why Stranglers fans got an adventure rather than an arcade game. “For Shakin’ Stevens fans, an arcade game was right,” Turner said. “Stranglers’ fans are thinking people.” In the winter of 1984–85 CBS Software began selling Commodore 64 games under its own name, starting, Your Commodore said, “rather modestly”, with a few titles such as Epyx’s Breakdance. Its Brian Hyams admitted that Epyx’s Summer Games had gone to Quicksilva instead because CBS Software “was not ready at the time”.

Ariolasoft

Ariolasoft came out of CBS. Its managing director Ashley Grey and its marketing man Frank Brunger had worked on “the embryonic CBS software, with such memorable exploits as a Shakin’ Stevens computer game”, Your Computer reported in 1986, before Bertelsmann, whose interests ran “from Ariola records to Luxembourg Radio and magazine publishing”, approached them. Ariolasoft was formed in September 1984. It launched at the Hippodrome in London’s West End with twelve American games from Electronic Arts and Broderbund, and Your Commodore reported the arrival of CBS and Ariolasoft under the headline “Off the record”. When Electronic Arts set up on its own in Britain in 1987, Ariolasoft’s British business went into decline. See Ariolasoft.

Record-company methods

The newcomers said openly that they were running software like records. “We have attempted to ally quite closely to the record industry, in the packaging, advertising etc., because it very much suits the market,” Brunger told Your Commodore in March 1985. “The days of the cottage industry are passed,” he said, and Grey agreed: “There has to be a new professionalism.” The magazine noted that, “like all good record companies”, Ariolasoft and CBS Software were “not just chasing the hits but building a broadly based catalogue”. A year later Brunger was still saying it. He wanted Ariolasoft to be “a catalogue-based company, like CBS and EMI”: “We don’t budget for big hits. You will never get a number one with a Country and Western record, yet they are still released.” He also called software “the worst, most unprofessional industry I have ever encountered”.

Gallup’s chart

The software chart the trade settled on came from the music business’s own pollster. In the same March 1985 interview, Your Commodore reported that the Ariolasoft men expected one chart to become the standard, and that “the Gallup one which appears in Your Commodore for the first time this month is the one that gets his vote”. Gallup’s software chart was compiled for the trade paper Computer and Software Retailing, and Sinclair User, which printed it too, said in June 1985 that Gallup sampled sales “at 250 retail outlets, including high street chain stores and independent computer shops”. Gallup already compiled the music charts; Your Sinclair was still reminding readers in 1991 that it was “the folk who do the BBC music charts amongst other things”. Before Gallup, Computer and Video Games had commissioned its own games chart from the pollsters NOP, jointly with the Daily Mirror. See Reading the charts.

Most of them left

The market did not reward them for long. At the start of 1984 shops that had over-ordered for Christmas stopped buying, and for a few months that year most of Virgin Games’ staff were lent to Branson’s new airline, Virgin Atlantic. Looking back at the end of 1984, CRASH described big business moving in “with names like Thorn EMI (Creative Sparks) who, like Virgin and K-Tel made a reassessment of what they were doing earlier this year”. K-tel’s name faded from the software press, Creative Sparks ended in receivership, and Ariolasoft’s British arm lost its American catalogue in 1987.

Virgin was the exception. It bought Leisure Genius in 1986, bought 45% of Mastertronic in 1987 and the rest in 1988, and as Virgin Mastertronic took on Sega’s distribution in Britain, France and Germany. It went on to publish Aladdin and Cannon Fodder and to own Westwood Studios, and the Virgin name stayed on games until 2009.

It ran both ways

The traffic was not all from music into games. In April 1987 CRASH, listing how far Mastertronic had spread, counted “all the Mastertronic labels, Bulldog, the new Mastersounds record label and Mastervision videos, and the Arcadia arcade machine specialists”. A year later Virgin, the record company that had gone into games, owned Mastertronic outright.

Sources

Your Computer, June 1983, p. 45: editorial on record companies moving into software; news item “Chartbuster K-tel’s million pound bid” (DK’tronics; Adrian Moulds; the vans and 5,000 outlets).
Personal Computer News, 10 August 1983: Orc Attack review (publisher Thorn EMI Video).
Computer and Video Games issue 27, January 1984: K-tel Doublesiders advertisement. Issue 29, March 1984: K-tel’s six double-sider cassettes.
Sinclair User issue 23, February 1984, news: “Car game on pop cassette” (Shakin’ Stevens, The Bop Won’t Stop, CBS Records, Olympic Software).
Your Computer, March 1984: Bug-Byte’s UK distribution moved to CBS Records.
CRASH issue 4, May 1984: Creative Sparks, “really Thorn EMI with a new front”.
Personal Computer Games issue 6, May 1984, and issue 9, August 1984: Creative Sparks at the Easter show; Thorn EMI Computer Software Distributors.
Sinclair User Annual 1984: “the record and publishing world — Thorn-EMI, CBS, Virgin”.
Computer and Video Games issue 37, November 1984: The Stranglers’ Aural Quest (Dave Greenfield, Mike Turner, The Quill, Star Dreams; CBS Records); the NOP chart with the Daily Mirror.
CRASH issue 12, Christmas 1984: the year’s review (Thorn EMI, Virgin and K-Tel’s “reassessment”).
Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 5, February 1985, p. 9, “Off the record”: CBS and Ariolasoft entering the software market; CBS’s modest start with titles such as Breakdance; the Hippodrome launch.
Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 6, March 1985: feature on Ariolasoft and CBS Software (Brunger and Grey quotes; the record-industry approach; the Gallup chart; Brian Hyams and Summer Games).
Amstrad Computer User issue 7, June 1985: the Gallup software chart compiled for Computer and Software Retailing. Sinclair User issue 39, June 1985: Gallup’s 250 retail outlets.
Computer Gamer issue 13, April 1986: Mastertronic’s range of titles “bought from Creative Sparks”.
Your Computer, May 1986: Ariolasoft profile (formed September 1984; Grey and Brunger at CBS; Bertelsmann; the catalogue quote).
CRASH issue 39, April 1987: Mastertronic’s labels, Mastersounds and Mastervision. Issue 45, October 1987: Creative Sparks Distribution in receivership.
Your Sinclair issue 61, January 1991: Gallup, “the folk who do the BBC music charts”.
Richard Hewison, “From the Archives: Virgin Games”, Retro Gamer Collection vol. 6 (2012), pp. 80–85: Nick Alexander’s background, the inlays and B-side music, Virgin Atlantic, Leisure Genius, Now Games, Mastertronic.