30 Sep
2007
30 Sep
'07
8:21 p.m.
On Sep 30, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Random mutterings...
I was just thinking earlier how huge the UK computer game market
was in the 80s - and yet most of the titles were produced by UK
people for the UK market, and presumably never exported elsewhere.
Other countries presumably followed the same pattern - and there
must be games which were huge in one country and relatively unheard
of anywhere else.
Your assumption that the games did not make their way stateside is,
in fact, incorrect.
I worked for a guy in Orange, California who's entire business was
importing Atari and Commodore (and, later, Atari ST and Amiga) games
to the US, and reselling them to Atari and Commodore dealers around
the country (as well as having his own brisk mail-order business).
Patching the games to work on NTSC machines? Heh. Well, let's just
say that the cracking groups came in REAL HANDY for figuring that out.
Great Brit-ware games certainly made their way to the US, even though
only a fraction were picked up by US publishers and officially
distributed here.
I still cherish my copy of Trip-A-Tron for the Atari ST.