They've been chased over Wimbledon Common by Darth Vader, worn boaters and blazers to the PCW show while promoting Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, slipped into Victorian frock coats for Trivial Pursuit, donned DJs for their Bond games and even wielded butcher's cleavers at one another in the cause of Friday 13th, the computer game. Not exactly faceless men behind a mega-corporation are, Dominic Wheatley and Mark Strachan.
In daily life this pair are fans of the stripy shirt and bow tie approach to sartorial elegance - which tells you a little about their backgrounds. Dominic, the grandson of bestselling author Dennis Wheatley (every book he wrote, from the first to the last, was an international bestseller) and Mark, with rather good connections with Whitbread Brewery, are together DOMARK - the aristocrats of the software industry.
So it's clown to Bertie's winebar in Wimbledon for a couple of bottles of Soave, and the house speciality - charcoal-grilled beefburgers.
There was a time when it looked if the tumbrel was about to roll over for these aristos. After a reasonable start with Eureka! Domark began to get a bit of a name for producing poor games, well-hyped. Then there was the appalling Friday 13th, A while ago, it looked as if Domark couldn't spot a hit computer game, let alone publish one.
"Then came Friday 13th. That was even worse..." Then out of the blue came Splitting Images, which met with acclaim wherever it was reviewed - Domark's first hit game. Pausing only to rename it Split Personalities after Fluck and Law took umbrage, Dominic and Mark went on to secure the licence for Trivial Pursuit. An award-winning game resulted which has sold around 400,000 copies so far.
"It's taken us four years to really get on the road," Mark offers, pouring wine convivially, "and it has been an expensive learning process. But we're pleased to be able to prove an independent company can do well at the bottom of Division One, offering people a choice."
It all began in a small advertising agency in Clerkenwell Green, where Mark and Dominic met - Dominic joined the company from the Guards, (they're both active members of the Territorial Army) and Mark, a marketing graduate, was fresh from a major brewery. Part of their work as Junior Account Executives involved finding new business for the ad agency, and they looked at the home software market together. So it all began...
"It was Dominic's idea. In 1983 we spotted that software was poorly marketed, and we were crazy enough - rightly as it turned out - to leave our jobs and set up our own software business." Dominic bought Heroes Of Karn on the C64 for his son, and showed it to Mark. "It was like magic... I was amazed that you could interact with a computer in that way... yes, it was like Paul Daniels - I was stunned."
More wine, and Dominic takes up the tale. "We had no programming experience, so rather than compete on the programming side we decided to attack from the marketing angle." Working in Clerkenwell Green's Karl Marx Library at lunchtimes, Mark and Dominic put together a business plan ("every time we left 50p in the electricity donation box, it seemed only fair").
"Based on the Kit Williams Golden Hare theory, we decided to put up a prize of £25,000 for the first person to complete the game, and our unique strategy was to run national advertising for a computer game - the advertising was the most expensive element," Dominic explains. "We went round and saw a lot of banks with our proposal, but the sum of money we were asking for didn't run into the millions, so they weren't terribly interested on a corporate level - but a lot of bank managers did seem interested in investing a smaller sum."
"So we hired a cottage in Gloucester for the weekend and re-wrote our business plan, proposing a company with a number of shareholders. On Sunday evening I looked at Dominic and said 'Are we going to do it, and hand in our resignations tomorrow or are we going to go back to work, having had a good weekend and forget it all?'" "We resigned the next day," Dominic chips in.
The dynamic duo found about 23 people who were interested in their venture. "We got all the money up front," Mark explains, "the prize was already lodged with a solicitor before we started selling the game, and we paid for the programming upfront too. We didn't know anybody in the software industry, but had been introduced to Andromeda, so paid them to produce a game to a design prepared by Dave Bishop." They set up their first office and began work in earnest.
Then a letter arrived in the post addressed to 'The Company Secretary, Domark.' As Company Secretary, Mark opened the envelope. It contained a letter from the company's bank manager, and he regretted to inform them - a creditor's check had bounced, "due to insufficient funds." Potentially disastrous for the fledgling enterprise? Not really, it was a cheque for £19.00 from... Mark Strachan. They framed it, and Mark paid cash.
Getting to grips with the software industry was an expensive learning process - they paid £50,000 up front for the programming which took place in Hungary. "I went to Hungary to see how things were going," Dominic remembers, "and I ended up going to dinner with some of the programmers - four or five were working on the project and it took them about five months to complete. I asked them what sort of money programmers were paid, and they told me about £50 a month was par for the course. Even with a generous allowance for expenses, wages and overheads, it can't have cost Andromeda more than £5,000 to program our game - and we'd paid £50,000 up front..."
"People took us seriously, quite quickly..." In October 1984. Eureka was launched to the public at large - with adverts in the national papers, including The Sunday Times and a PCW Show slogan of 'The computer game is dead. Long live Eureka!' "The advantage of placing a £15,000 advert in The Times is that, as newcomers, it certainly gets you known by the trade buyers, even if you don't get in touch with that many consumers," Mark observes wryly, "people took us quite seriously, quite quickly as a result."
In the end, Eureka balanced the books. "We weren't prepared for that," Dominic explains.
"When we started we didn't know whether we'd go bust or make a million - we expected success or failure and hadn't worked on a second title to launch after Eureka." Rights to A View To A Kill were secured and a mediocre program published. Then came Friday 13th "that was even worse," Dominic offers, "we were on a downward spiral."
They had learnt a lesson - the quality of software is crucial: publishing software takes more than excellent marketing. "With Trivial Pursuit we went to the programmers once a week with a crate of Fosters, and programming stopped for an hour. We followed the development of the game in great detail, and had control throughout." Other people had turned down the TP licence as they couldn't see how to translate the board game to computer successfully. "David Pringle and his guys at ODE did a great job," Dominic says.
Success brings its own problems. Over coffee, Mark completes a speeding summons - nowadays the Domarks run a matching brace of black BMW's, a far cry from the beat-up Panda Mark used to pootle round in. "Why don't you just tell the truth Mark!" Dominic pipes up after we are treated to an account of the involved train of circumstance that led to Mark being apprehended for travelling at 88 miles an hour, "tell them you've got a BMW and that you were surprised it was only 88..!"
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