Home computer era In the early years, two of Beam's programs were milestones in their respective genres.
The Hobbit, a 1982 text adventure by Philip Mitchell and
Veronika Megler, sold more than 500,000 copies. It employed an advanced parser by Stuart Richie and had real-time elements. Even if the player didn't enter commands, the story would move on. In 1985 Greg Barnett's two-player
martial arts game
The Way of the Exploding Fist helped define the genre of one-on-one fighting games on the home computer. In 1987 Beam's UK publishing arm, Melbourne House, was sold to
Mastertronic for £850,000. Beam chairman Alfred Milgrom recounted, "...around 1987 a lot of our U.K. people went on to other companies and at around the same time the industry was moving from 8-bit to 16-bit. It was pretty chaotic. We didn't have the management depth at that time to run both the publishing and development sides of things, so we ended up selling off the whole Melbourne House publishing side to Mastertronic." In 1992 it released the original title
Nightshade, a dark superhero comedy game. The game was meant to be the first part in a series, but no sequels were ever made; however, it served as the basis for
Shadowrun. Released in 1993,
Shadowrun also used an innovative dialogue system using the acquisition of keywords which could be used in subsequent conversations to initiate new branches in the
dialogue tree. Also in 1993 it released
Baby T-Rex, a
Game Boy platform game that the developer actively sought to adapt the game to a number of different licensed properties in different countries around the world including the animated film ''
We're Back!'' in North America and the puppet character
Agro in its home country of Australia. In 1997, Beam relaunched the Melbourne House brand, under which it published the PC titles ''
Krush Kill 'n' Destroy (KKND), and the sequels KKND Xtreme
and KKND2: Krossfire. Also in 1998, the studio developed racing games DethKarz'' In 2004 the studio released
Transformers for the
PlayStation 2 games console based on the then current
Transformers Armada franchise by
Hasbro. The game reached the top of the UK
PlayStation 2 games charts, making it Melbourne House's most successful recent title. The studio then completed work on
PlayStation 2 and
PlayStation Portable ports of Eden's next-generation
Xbox 360 title
Test Drive: Unlimited. In December 2005, Atari decided to shift away from internal development, seeking to sell its studios, including Melbourne House. In November 2006,
Krome Studios acquired Melbourne House from
Atari and was renamed to Krome Studios Melbourne. It was closed on 15 October 2010, along with the main Brisbane office. Next to the game development, Beam Software also had the division Smarty Pants Publishing Pty Ltd., that created software titles for kids, as well as the proprietary video compression technology VideoBeam, and Famous Faces, a facial motion capture hardware and software solution. == Games ==