Find out why the companies and game designers that have shaped the video game world that we know today were based around a Manchester-based video game company.
From the mid-1980s up until the turn of the millennium, one of the great cities that sparked a revolution in computer games and inspired many children to turn their hobby into a profession through accredited qualifications was Manchester. Specifically, the formation of Ocean Software in 1983 by David Ward and Jon Woods would galvanise a burgeoning video game industry based around a wave of new, innovative rising talent, many of whom turned their hobby into a lifelong career. In 1984, as rather famously depicted in the BBC documentary series Commercial Breaks, Ocean were at the top of a competitive and highly popular sector alongside Liverpool-based Imagine Software. However, whilst Imagine burned twice as bright and lasted half as long, Ocean managed to not only become the biggest games company in the UK, but one of the biggest games publishers in the world, making Manchester as much a beacon of the gaming world as Tokyo or California.
Part of this was due to working with innovative, creative and highly talented young programmers, artists and musicians. Jon Ritman, Tim and Geoff Follin, Martin Galway, Jonathan “Joffa” Smith, Denton Designs, Sensible Software and countless other smaller developers worked with Ocean at one point.
The other part of this was its fairly excellent foresight when it came to choosing licenses and intellectual properties that might be successful. They bet on the success of decathlete Daley Thompson and were rewarded with a game that sold over a million copies.
Famously, Ocean bought the rights to produce computer games based on the film Robocop for a particularly tiny sum, only for the film and the game to become a massive success. Their games based on the 1989 Tim Burton film Batman were even more successful.
However, by the 1990s, Ocean lost its touch somewhat, struggling to adapt to the rapidly developing world of games consoles and computers. They were bought by Infogrames (now Atari SA), moved out of Manchester and ultimately folded.
Ocean, along with Psygnosis in Liverpool and U.S. Gold in Birmingham, is arguably amongst the three most important British games companies ever, and their legacy has shaped gaming ever since.