Recognise this man? Neither do we, though he reckons he's one of the biggest journalists in the business and also happens to have the dubious accolade of being an ex-editor of a not so well known games publication. Meet Graeme Kidd...
As the Barcardi ('lots of Coke, no ice'), was set down before Tony Rainbird, he told me that he had decided to give up kart racing. After 12 years tearing around kart tracks at 70mph (and getting quite good at it), he turned a kart over last year. "Breaking your collarbone at 34 is not sensible," he explains. So now he spends weekends tuning his younger brother's kart. It's a finicky business, getting the most out of a 100cc kart... karts don't have gears, you see, so sprocket ratios and tyre pressures are critical, before you start looking at the engine or frame. It's clear Tony enjoys competition, and competes to win.
"Breaking your collarbone at 34 is not sensible!" But down to business. If we were going to thoroughly enjoy the peppered fillet steak that is the specialty of The Granary - a fine restaurant by a river in Sawbridgeworth, Essex - then the serious talking had to start, and start soon... One question would reveal a lot about this man and set the tone for the lunch.
"So how come you used your own name when you set up a new label for Telecomsoft? Was it the ultimate ego-trip, making sure your name would appear on hundreds of thousands of boxes!" (We were either going to get on, or this lunch was about to become a disaster)
You can't phase Tony Rainbird with a direct question. All you get is an honest answer, delivered with good humour, "I had a fixation about blue boxes, had decided to have the logo in ice and wanted to use 'Bluebird' as the name. We couldn't register it, and my name - the bird bit, anyway - tied in with the Firebird/Bluebird idea... and Rainbird wasn't registered."
We were going to get on. It was time to start the meal. The steak was... but you're not interested in that. Nor was I after a while: the conversation was far more absorbing than the excellent food. Tony has a fund of interesting tales to tell. Like how the 48K Spectrum that got him into home computing in the first place was bought a bit sneakily, on a Boots in-store credit deal, "because my wife wouldn't hear of spending such a large sum on a useless toy." That was during 1983 and within a few years Tony Rainbird had played a major role in setting up British Telecom's Firebird software operation.
So why a Spectrum? "I wanted the thing through interest. The manual, the old orange one, was the best thing about the 48K Spectrum. I piddled around in Basic for a while and then got Melbourne House's Machine Code for Absolute Beginners." And absolute beginner he was, to the world of computing at least. Working nights as a supervisor in a cold store Tony wrote code in quiet moments writing it on paper and then scurrying home to type it into the computer. Soon a couple of programs took shape...
Before long, the night-shift programmer's work bore fruit in the form of a utility, and two games - Race Ace and Run Baby Run. Tony set up Micro Gold, a back-bedroom operation, to sell his programs. "They weren't rip-offs, they weren't diabolical and I was selling them for £2.75 which in the days before budget games wasn't bad value." (Trainspotters can decide for themselves - the Firebird compilation Don't Buy This features Race Ace, a game with, erm, idiosyncratic controls...)
Realising that about 100 other one-man, back-bedroom operations were out there writing and trying to sell games by mail, Tony took the initiative, and wrote to them all, He offered to publish other people's games, selling direct to retailers, Things got moving, a two-page profile in Personal Computer World helped business, and Micro Gold looked set to expand - but not everyone was convinced. "The bank manager turned me down for a £2,000 loan," Tony chuckles. He was receptive when Ed Williams of British Telecom came looking for someone to help start a software publishing operation from scratch.
Tony joined James Leavey at BT, and their task was to put the plans for a software house together and get the product out. Launching with a range of 20 budget games, Firebird stayed with budgets for the first eight months or so. Then Elite on the C64 heralded a move into higher price software.
"That was a successful part of Firebird history - it funded expansion which involved the purchase of Beyond and set up an American subsidiary, Firebird Licences Inc," Tony recalls. There's a hint, however, that he didn't quite agree with one move. "The day Beyond was bought by BT I reverted to a quieter position in an administrative post." (At the time rumours circulated that Beyond changed hands for vast sums of money - as time passed, precious little in the way of games came out of it.)
Voluntarily away from the frontline activity of games publishing, Tony started turning ideas into plans. "I've always looked forwards, and I started looking to the new breed of 68000 machines. I thought they'd be ideal for deeper software, more suited to the adult market utilities, simulations and adventures."
The philosophy behind a new label came together, a label that would concentrate on quality, publishing programs that would stand above the crowd of releases. (At the time, up to 300 games were launched in a single week.) The basic idea was to spend money on programmers and packaging rather than marketing. Due credit was to be given to programming teams, helping to build a relationship between publisher and author.
Licences for Art Studio and Music System were available within Telecomsoft. Tony had just seen Jeremy San demonstrate "a dot on the screen" which became Starglider and an enthusiastic Anita Sinclair bounced in to show him an English language interpreter In a game called The Pawn. A launch portfolio was in place.
Rainbird leapt into being with very little money spent on its launch. Its products got noticed because they were good, not because they were advertised heavily. The rest, as they say is history!
Having set up Rainbird Software and seen it established, he resigned and left BT. Why? "For about 60 different reasons, really, but they added up to a lack of respect for the senior people in the British Telecom hierarchy. BT bureaucracy, to some extent, didn't agree with me. I had recruited a very good team that were well able to take over, so I knew Rainbird wouldn't suffer by my leaving, but it would have suffered if I had remained and continued to react against senior management decisions. So I resigned, worked my notice and left.
"I piddled around in Basic for a while..." What then? "I retreated. I moved in to Magnetic Scrolls as a management accountant/company secretary and took on consultancy work with other companies. Then I bought a company, and set off on the road again... I've spent eighteen months learning the skills of running a company as opposed to being in the cushion of a large corporation.
"I got really involved in adventures, working in the Magnetic Scrolls offices and felt it was a good thing to start an adventure club as a commercial enterprise. So I'm still going down the software industry road, but I'm not going into publishing."
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