ZZAP!64 - Issue 2 - June 1985

US Goldmine
Massive! Superb?! Exciting??! Rich!!! Greedy??!!!! All kinds of words are used to
describe US Gold, the people who in the last year have shaken the British software
industry to its core. To get the lowdown on the company, Zzap ed Chris Anderson
trekked to their massive premises in Birmingham and recorded this interview with
US Gold general manager TIM CHANEY.
ZZAP: Everyone knows that US Gold is
big. But how big are you?
CHANEY: Our first year turnover is
expected to be $6m.
So how does that compare in size to
other British software houses?
I suppose our turnover is actually
comparable to our output - and our output
is immense. We do put a lot of products
onto the market. I don't think
there's anything wrong with that.
Basically the UK market in 1985 is big
enough for, say, a maximum of 400 hit
products, a hit product being one which
maybe sells over 10,000. As far as I'm
concerned there's nothing wrong if US
Gold have 1 50 of those products - if that
150 has been advertised OK and gives
the consumer better value for money
than its counterparts.
You expect to release 150 new games
this year?
That figure takes it across all the machines.
On the 64 alone I think we'll probably
be putting out 70 to 80 new titles.
That's a lot of products.
I guess that's quite a bit more than
anyone else?
Well, I would have thought so. But
there again we spend nearly five times
as much on advertising as our nearest
competitor anyway. So maybe it's relative
to our advertising. The fact is
there's a difference between a lot of the
advertising that goes on and US Gold
advertising. With the exception of one
ad that comes to mind as being a little
lacklustre, I think basically the US Gold
ads, because they use very high intensity
colour, they are very jump-off-thepage
ads. They add a lot of colour and
panache to a magazine, and they are
very expensive to produce.
And how many of the year's new US
Gold 64 games would you expect to
see in the charts?
Depends what you mean. If you're talking
about the top 50, I'd expect 80 per
cent would be there. That's a very aggressive
stance to take, but at this moment
in time every US Gold release has
charted in one chart or another. Why
should we break that pattern?
Do you think the average American
game is better than the average British
game?
It depends how you evaluate games. I
think a lot of British software is great. A
lot of it stands out for various attributes.
But I think basically that a lot of
American titles take a lot longer to write
and are a lot more costly to research.
Things like F15 Strike Eagle took nine
months to write, was play tested by
and the president of
three FI 5 pilots,
the company is a combat pilot with
3000 hours, so he knew that the end
product would be as identical as a program
can be to a real simulation. Solo
Flight is used at 20 flying schools in the
States. The same kind of work goes into
the arcade games. Things like Beach
Head 2, it's been about eight months in
the writing. And programmers over
there are paid anything up to £35,000 to
produce decent software.
Which is presumably why software is
so much more expensive in the States.
That's correct.
What is the going rate at present?
Most of it is 29 or 34 dollars a time. But
an ad in the States costs £4,000 (about
five times the UK cost - Ed). And then
you have to pay people like K-mart
£40,000 to do promotion. You are talking
big bucks. We are not there yet.
We're still
at the level where you try to
do a deal here and a deal there.
OK, so the stuff costs 30 quid in the
States, how is it that US Gold can sell it
for ten quid over here?
What Geoff Brown had to initially do
was to convince the Americans, that if
they reduced the retail price and
bought the programs into the UK to be
manufactured under licence then the
extra volume of UK sales would recoup
the States enough money to give them
a decent return on it. The first two companies
that acutally agreed to do it
were Access and Micro Prose, Access
putting out Beach Head and Micro
Prose putting out Solo Flight. When
people saw Beach Head, it changed a
lot of the writing in the UK because it
was just a cut above. Those two products
between them have sold about
190,000 copies, with Beach Head taking
the bulk.
So which way are things going? Are
games going to change?
I don't know how much the arcade
element, the graphics element can be
improved. But I think what is happening
is that people now want more than
four or five hours out of a piece of software.
We've got to produce software
that is longer lasting, as it is in the
States. It needs - what do you call it in
your magazine? - testability. That's
where things are going, towards lastability.
If I paid $8 for a piece of software
and play it for four hours, that's
cost me $2 an hour. That's expensive.
We're now planning to launch a new
brand, not called US Gold, to licence
products that will be played for two or
three hundred hours.
How do you negotiate all these deals?
Does Geoff Brown spend a lot of time
in the States?
No. Basically, we have three people in
the States working for us. Their objectives
are to source American software.
They do source a great deal of what we
get hold of. The thing is, if you're an
American software company, why
should you give your software anywhere
apart from US Gold? Some good
American titles brought to the UK by
other companies have not done well.
What would you say to people who say
US Gold are very slick, very clever, but
are basically marketing people, they're
out there to make a lot of money, but
they don't really care about games?
I'd say that the industry has matured,
right? When an industry's a growing
industry, you get a lot of cottageindustry
type sitations. When an industry
starts to reach maturity, that's when
the marketing people and the professional
people come in. The entry level
46 ZZAP! 64 June 1985
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