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WHEN IT WAS COOL TO WEAR A BLUE HAT RED JUMPER YELLOW TROUSERS... AND BE NAMED ROLAND... With a penchant for a blue hat red jumpers and yellow trousers, he looked like an American tourist at best and a cast-off clown at worst. But Roland was one of the greatest hits for Amsoft, a software firm set up by Amstrad to coincide with the launch of theCPC464. Amsoft was given the hard task of creating 50 head-turning games to be released when the CPC hit the shelves across Britain. David Crookes looks at the impact Amsoft had on the CPC market and why Roland, despite starring in some terrible games, was vital to the company's success From the gleaming spires of a futuristic city to bucaneering adventures upon a pirate ship, a little ill-dressed chap called Roland was getting stuck in. It seemed quite odd that this strange fellow would get himself involved in such daring missions. But he just got on with things, his expressionless face never frowning or even raising a smile - all the more surprising since one of his modes of transport was a red, time-travelling phone box similar to Doctor Who's Tardis. And if you can't smile with a cool contraption like that at your disposal, then there's something seriously wrong.
But for Amstrad, Roland was a godsend. He starred in numérous games, helping to boost the CPC's catalogue at a time when it needed it the most. For when Amstrad was gearing up to launch its new computer, the CPC464, it had no games, and that was understandably a major problem.
Amstrad began working on its new machine in August 1983. Boss Alan Sugar was keen to press on, so much so that he had set 11 April 1984 as the date to unveil the computer to an expectant press. With time at a premium, it was vital to make maximum impact, and without games Amstrad sensibly felt that any waves would surely be reduced to ripples if the computer was not launched with a catalogue of titles - particularly so in the face of competition from the likes of Sinclair and Commodore. The solution to this problem was to launch a software company to coincide with the CPC's unveiling and so Amsoft was born at the beginning of 1984. The boffins behind the new software publisher were given the task of creating 50 games for the CPC. But there was not enough time for Amsoft to start from scratch and interview and hire its own programmers. So almost immediately, the team decided it would approach third party companies and ask them if they wanted to write and sell their games via the Amsoft brand. It would, they surmised, be the best way of enabling Amsoft to build up a sizeable catalogue of games in time for launch. The advantages for the software companies were obvious: they only had to write the games and Amstrad would sort out the manufacturing and distribution; slapping on the Amsoft branding so that it was easy to spot a CPC game in the shops. Amsoft's team went ahead and put out their feelers, approaching many small publishers such as Gem Software, Alligata Software and Indescomp. Eventually the likes of Tasket, Insight, Computersmith, and Postern were also on board and things were beginning to look bright for Amsoft. Cliff Lawson, who worked on the Amstrad launch and also playtested many of the games, explains: "As has been proven many times since with consoles like the GameCube and N64, a computer, however technically brilliant, lives and dies according to whether there's actually any decent software available.
"When the Amstrad sales people went to large retailers like Dixons to try and sell the CPC as an item worth stocking, they wanted to be able to say, 'oh and here's 30-40 games you might like to stock'. Some of the programmers merely ported existing Spectrum and Commodore 64 titles whereas others wrote new games. Amsoft then acted as the publisher for these games, printing packaging, manuals and duplicating the tapes in order to help them become widely available. Each game, which had a loading screen stating "Amsoft presents...", would be sold for £8.95 on cassette. Among these goodies emerged a game which starred the aforementioned character, Roland, but it came almost by accident. Programmer Paco Suarez had created a game for Spanish publisher Indescomp in which a character landed on an alien planet at some point in the future and somehow managed to mutate his human form into that of a flea. As the character explored the planet Ivorus, he fell down a pothole into a cave - the task for the player was to get him out while avoiding flesh-eating plants and a menacing pterodactyl.
Alan Sugar had been looking at the game, eyeing it up for a possible giveaway with his new computer. He thought of Amstrad's group technical manager at the time, Roland Perry - and decided it would be fun to name the game after him. Within a short space of time, Roland became a sort of unofficial mascot for the CPC. Following the game which impressed Sugar, named Roland in The Caves, came a host of other titles: Roland Ahoy, Roland On The Ropes, Roland In Time, Roland Goes Digging, Roland on the Run, Roland In Space and even Roland Goes Square Bashing! And Perry was immortalised forever in pixellated form even though Roland hardly looked the same from one game to the next. Perry laughs: "Being used as the inspiration for the Roland games was a little joke by Sir Alan. I never thought there'd be such a long series after that." But there was far more to Amsoft than Roland. The company wanted to cover all gaming genres so that there was something for everybody. The ideas for games came from the software houses, but Amsoft had an idea of the number of games from each genre needed. It was therefore a simple case of putting more effort into encouraging the ones it wanted the most. Amsoft's approach annoyed some software houses, however, and the firm began to gain a reputation - however unfairly earned or not - of being hard-headed, tough and aggressive- It was accused of being less interested in the quality of games and more about making money - it certainly didn't spend thousands of pounds buying up prestigious titles, instead preferring cheap and cheerful games which Amsoft believed it could market well and subsequently rake in the cash. Peter Roback, Amsoft's software development manager, admitted as much when he told Amstrad Action magazine: There is no way I could go out and spend £50,000 or £75,000 on a product like Elite just because it's prestigious to have a title like that on our machine. It's got to be profit making. That is the extent to which we are hard-headed toward software companies. We won't buy programs off them if they aren't going to make us money." Mike Mordecai, the man in charge of distribution and sales, said the Amsoft team had to source quality software that covered a broad range of interests and highlighted the machines capabilities. But quality was not always apparent, although even this didn't seem to matter to the firm at first. Some CPC buffs even suggested that because the Amstrad was targeted more at business users who wanted to use the machine for word processing, it was only important for users to see that there were lots of games available in case the parents who bought the machine had children who may want to play them. If the quality wasn't great but the games sold regardless, then so be it. That notion seemed to be confirmed by Peter Roback. When asked if Amsoft was happy to push out a game if they thought it would sell quite well, even if the quality wasn't great, he replied: "We're in this to make money. If it will sell enough to make a profit, we'll sell it."
All of this meant that by the time Sugar was ready to unveil his new pride and joy to a salivating press, there were ten Amsoft titles available, with the remaining 40 out in time for the day the CPC was sold in the shops. Some of the games were bundled with the Amstrad for free, including the mediocre Roland On The Ropes, the notable Harrier Attack, the decent shoot-'em-up The Galactic Plague, the dire action arcader Bridge-It the passable Fruit Machine and terrible puzzler Xanagrams. But the games that were sold, sold well - particularly the Roland titles, despite their varying quality. When Amsoft published its October 2004 chart in issue one of Amstrad User magazine, Roland games made up three of the top five games {Caves, Ropes and Digging). As time went on, the quality of the games got better once games programmers discovered the best ways of working with the CPC. After the initial 50 games were released, software developers began to take more time over their games. And whereas, the original line-up of releases were primarily conversions of games created for other computers, with more time, software houses began to write specific Amstrad games from the ground up. "WHEN ASKHED IF AMSOFT WAS HAP PY TO PUSH OUT A GAME IF THEY Shortly after the launch and prior to unleashing the second generation of Amsoft titles, Roback said the firm had no choice but to spend six months asking for games to be knocked out to its specifications. He went on to say: "We've now earned the reputation to allow people like US Gold to launch stuff under the Amsoft label. People like Beyond Software wouldn't give us products like Lords of Midnight to bring out under the Amsoft label if they didn't think they were getting a very good deal and were doing better by bringing it to Amsoft than by doing it themselves." Mordecai added: "Taking it to the extreme, we've proved what we can do with rubbish. Imagine what we can do with good titles." To be fair, this second wave really did produce some classic games. Sorcery was a wonderful example of an adventure game, only bettered by Sorcery Plus which was a disc-only enhanced title of the original released for £13.05 on the Amsoft Gold label. Both were produced by Virgin and released by Amsoft and had a quality unseen in previous Amsoft titles. Later, Doors of Doom, a decent action game was also re-released on disc with enhancements and Amsoft did a deal with top dogs Ocean, releasing games such as Hunchback under the Amsoft brand - many of these were given away with the CPC6128. But as time went on, Amsoft took more of a back seat. Other software companies were coming on to the scene, creating games not just for the CPC but for other machines too. Top coders such as Ocean and US Gold were growing at a phenomenal rate and were churning out polished titles that wiped the floor with much of the competition. With the emphasis now on quality gaming, Amsoft eventually left them to it and the name disappeared into gaming history.
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