Firebird British Telecom brought in Tony Rainbird, owner of budget software publisher Micro-Gold, to help set up the first Telecomsoft label, Firebird. Originally named Firefly Software, the label had to be renamed when it was discovered that the name had already been registered by another company. The first titles to be published on the Firebird Silver label in November 1984 were
The Wild Bunch for the
ZX Spectrum,
Booty for the
Commodore 64 and
Bird Strike for the
BBC Micro. Although there were doubts as to whether or not the market could afford to sustain a range of budget titles, the Firebird Silver releases were successful. In February 1985,
Booty was the third best selling video game in the UK, behind only
Ghostbusters and ''
Daley Thompson's Decathlon''. While Firebird Silver would release budget titles priced at £2.50, Firebird Gold would release more prestigious titles at a higher price. Firebird Gold established itself just as well as its budget counterpart. The label became synonymous with many classic 8-bit titles such as
Elite,
Revs, and
The Sentinel. In October 1985, the budget range was relaunched as the lower priced Firebird Silver 199 Range and a full price label, Firebird Hot, was created to publish titles such as
Costa Capers, the sequel to
Technician Ted. Rather than simply republish their existing range of budget software,
Silverbird published a range of titles that hadn't previously been released at a budget price point. This included many original new titles as well older full-price titles acquired from other publishers. Following MicroProse's acquisition of Telecomsoft, the US publisher sold off the
Silverbird label to a Tudor Enterprises, a British publisher. They published a compilation pack of old
Silverbird titles and a small number of original titles before closing down their software publishing operations.
Rainbird The Rainbird label was established in November 1985 by Tony Rainbird. For legal reasons, the label's original name, Bluebird, had to be changed, although it still retained Tony Rainbird's original idea of releasing all its games in striking blue packaging. Rainbird formed partnerships with a number of developers who would produce their next range of games.
Magnetic Scrolls and
Argonaut Software were amongst the first developers to benefit from a publishing deal with the label.
Realtime Games, a successful ZX Spectrum developer who specialised in fast 3D action games, converted
Starglider to the ZX Spectrum and developed
Carrier Command. The company republished enhanced versions of adventure games by
Level 9 Computing, beginning with their
Middle-earth trilogy:
Colossal Adventure (itself an enhanced conversion of
Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods),
Adventure Quest and
Dungeon Adventure, these last two featuring the Demon Lord
Agaliarept. Rainbird published this sequence as
Jewels of Darkness and references to
Middle-earth were expunged. Rainbird also published Level 9's
Silicon Dreams trilogy:
Snowball was followed by
Return to Eden and
The Worm in Paradise. MicroProse continued to use the Rainbird label for a number of years, after its acquisition of Telecomsoft.
Acquisitions Beyond Software One of Telecomsoft's earliest acquisitions was Beyond Software. Originally set up by the
EMAP publishing group in 1983, Beyond published numerous titles on the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and
Amstrad CPC, but met with very little success until the release of
Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight in 1984. The
Tolkien-esque strategy game, and allowed Beyond to establish a distribution deal with American developers
First Star, as well as a publishing deal with developer
Denton Designs. After being acquired by Telecomsoft in late 1985 for a six figure sum, Beyond continued to operate as a unique label, mostly releasing games that had already been in development for some time, as well as a number of conversions of existing titles. Telecomsoft did very little with the Beyond label beyond these releases. A number of other titles, such as
Star Trek: The Rebel Universe, were released on the Firebird label.
Odin Computer Graphics ==References==