Adventure Soft

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Adventure Soft Publishing
legal form Limited
founding 1983
Seat Sutton Coldfield (United Kingdom)
management Mike Woodroffe
Branch Software development
Website www.adventuresoft.com

Adventure Soft is a former computer game - Developers from the UK with headquarters in Sutton Coldfield , who is still working as a sales company today.

Company history

The company was founded in 1983 by Mike Woodroffe under the name Adventure International UK to act in the United Kingdom as the publisher for the games by Scott Adams and his American company Adventure International . At that time also worked Alan Cox there. The import business was not very profitable because in the United Kingdom, with home computers such as the ZX Spectrum , the Dragon 32 or the BBC Micro, different, smaller computers were popular than in the USA, where Adams primarily played his games for Atari 8-bit computers , Apple II and Commodore PET developed. Through his brother Gerald, who was keyboardist at Black Sabbath , Woodroffe made the acquaintance of Brian Howarth , a programmer who henceforth was responsible for porting Adventure International games as well as for in-house developments of Adventure Soft based on those developed by Scott Adams Engine was responsible. The first adventure programmed by Howarth, The Golden Baton , was so financially successful that it grew into an eleven-part series of computer games between 1981 and 1983, the Mysterious Adventures :

year title genre
1981 The Golden Baton Fantasy
1981 Arrow of Death Part I Fantasy
1981 The Time Machine Time travel
1982 Circus Slice of Life
1982 Escape from Pulsar 7 Science fiction
1982 Arrow of Death Part II Fantasy
1982 Feasibility experiment Science fiction
1983 Waxworks Mystery
1983 Ten Little Indians Mystery
1983 Perseus & Andromeda Greek mythology
1983 The Wizard of Akyrz Fantasy

From 1984 Adventure International acquired film and comic licenses that were processed into financially successful text adventures, such as licenses from Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox . The demand for these games was greater than the capacity of the US company, so Woodroffes British offshoot copied the business model and acquired licenses for Gremlins and Robin Hood, King of the Vagrants from Warner Bros. Entertainment . In particular Gremlins was a great commercial success. The US company Adventure International went bankrupt in 1986 because it missed the trend towards more powerful home computers. The license for the name of Woodroffe's company fell away, so he renamed it Adventure Soft. A little later, Adventure Soft signed a contract with the playbook authors Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone for the implementation of several games workshop titles as computer adventures. At the end of the 1980s, Adventure Soft also ported successful computer games from other manufacturers, for example the company developed the ZX-Spectrum version of Heroes of the Lance for US Gold . US Gold also published in-house developments by Adventure Soft, as did the British publisher Tynesoft .

At the end of the 1980s, text adventures had dropped so much in popularity that they no longer paid off for Adventure Soft. Starting in 1989, the company produced several games under the label Horror Soft, which differed significantly from the subsequent games in terms of their plot and visual implementation. Great importance was attached to an atmosphere reminiscent of horror films , which was created with appropriately bloody images and suitable music. These games included Elvira: Mistress of the Dark , Elvira II: The Jaws of the Cerberus and Waxworks , none of which were adventure games, but role-playing games . Adventure Soft acted as a sales label. Several family members of Mike Woodroffe were involved in the games during this phase, for example his brother Jezz contributed the music to the games, while his son Simon wrote the script for Waxworks and contributed to the scripts for the two Elvira titles. The Elvira Games were financially successful, and Mike Woodroffe wanted to produce a third part, but could not motivate his authors to do so, so the plan was not pursued further.

The adventure game series Simon the Sorcerer was Adventure Soft's greatest success and gained a lot of fans, especially in Germany. The successor Simon the Sorceror II also sold well. With PC game sales falling in favor of console games in the late 1990s , Adventure Soft got into trouble with its focus on PC adventures. In 1998 the Woodruffes restructured the company and founded a new studio called Headfirst Productions. This began work on Simon the Sorcerer 3D on, which was originally designed as a 2D game, was due to financial considerations but pulped and (in content) designed as a 3D game new. The game took five years to develop. The result was torn apart by critics and was a financial failure. The studio said goodbye to the adventure genre and in 2005 produced the survival horror game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth , which was published by Bethesda Softworks but did not raise enough financially to save the studio: Headfirst Productions left in 2006 in bankruptcy. Due to the previous separation of studio (Headfirst Productions) and publisher (Adventure Soft), Adventure Soft retained the trademark rights to the Simon titles and was able to further market them (and Floyd ).

Products

Horror soft

Adventure Soft

Headfirst Productions

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 36.
  2. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 35.
  3. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 37.
  4. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 38.
  5. ↑ Point & Click Adventures . In: Retro Gamer . 2015, No. 3, June 2015, p. 39.