From The Archive: Kingsoft Gmbh
Far from wanting to be a burger king, Fritz Schäfer tells Retro Gamer how he progressed from working at Mcdonald’s to founding one of Germany’s best known computer game publishers from the comfort of his family’s home
Fritz Schäfer charts the highs and lows of his company, which became a powerhouse publisher in Germany
Fritz Schäfer may not be well known to many gamers outside of Germany, but in his native country he became something of a games king. From humble beginnings running a fledgling publisher from his family’s home, Fritz not only grew his company, Kingsoft, into one of Europe’s biggest and earliest videogame companies, he helped to establish the games industry in what was then West Germany.
His journey to the top began at the end of the Seventies when Fritz was studying electrical engineering at Rheinisch-westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, a technical university in North Rhinewestphalia. He learned to program in Fortran and later used some of the money he earned in a part-time job at Mcdonald’s to buy a relatively inexpensive, second-hand Commodore PET 2001 from a cash-strapped seller.
At the time, the young coder was interested in artificial intelligence. “It fascinated me,” Fritz tells us, “especially when it was used in thinking and strategy games.” He considered writing a chess game for the PET 2001 in BASIC, having dabbled with the language in the early months of owning the computer. “But it was not a serious option because the speed was too slow, so I studied 6502 assembler,” he says. This gave
him the necessary tools to create a slick chess game with a fellow PET owner.
What emerged was a title called Boss. “It represented the figures on the screen within the limited graphic potential of the computer,” Fritz explains. When Commodore released the VIC-20 in 1981, however, Fritz noted it had the same MOS 6502 CPU and 5KB of static RAM as the PET but with a general-purpose colour video chip. As the VIC-20 flew off the shelves, Fritz had a brainwave. “There were no chess games for the computer at the time, and I thought there was an opportunity to offer Boss to other people.” Founding Kingsoft Gmbh in 1982 for the sole purpose of selling the game, he placed a small advertisement in Chip magazine offering the game as a mail-order title.
“With these first ads everything started rolling,” he says. “The program was in demand and we delivered it to the customers on a cassette or a floppy disk.”
His mum manned the phone from their home, and a shoe cabinet was used as the basis of an ordering
and processing system. Not long afterwards, Fritz had another stroke of luck.
The programmer’s expertise with computers had led him to work with a software company called
Vobis, for which he would translate computer manuals and assist on the firm’s stand at computer fairs. It was during one of these events that Fritz built up the courage to approach the German chess grandmaster Theo Schuster who was competing against multiple computers in a human versus machine stunt.
“On the advice of Theo Lieven [one of the Vobis bosses], I shyly asked if I could participate with my Commodore computer and Boss and I was kindly allowed to do that,” Fritz tells us. “The chess master took the chess computers seriously and defeated them effortlessly but, he wanted to move very fast on my program and he forgot about his powerful attack. My program survived the threat and afterwards had much better figures on the board. Then the master gave up”. Fritz certainly wasn’t shy in spotting the potential marketing opportunity of this situation.
Boss ended up being released for the
Commodore 16 and Commoroe Plus/4, as well as the Commodore 64. “We renamed it Grand
Master when we sold it in the UK in partnership with Audiogenic,” Fritz says. Kingsoft then began to grow. “Through my ads, other hobby programmers became aware of me and sent me their work which I judged subjectively, dismissing many,” Fritz continues.
The next release, therefore, became Galaxy, a game by Henrik Wening which was a derivative of Galaga, an arcade title Henrik had previously cloned for the Commodore PET. Launched in 1983, it was joined by Fire Galaxy and Space Pilot in a fledgling line-up, the latter another game by Henrik but this time based on the Konami arcade title Time Pilot.
As well as Henrik, Udo Gertz also became an early star. He worked on Tom and Bongo for the Commodore computers in 1984 while Henrik created the Zaxxonesque Zaga Mission in the same year. Udo continued his run with Ghost Town alongside Peter Hartmann in 1985 and Henrik created Space Pilot II. Meanwhile, Jörg Dierks created Karate King and Bridgehead while Alexander Graf Von Der Schulenburg caught Kingsoft’s attention with the graphic adventure game Legende In Eis in 1986.
The market in general grew so fast,” says Fritz. “But we had good early success. Space Pilot became a number one game in Britain and the Olympics games did very well.” Indeed, they did. Winter Olympiade (or Winter Events, as it was known in the UK) and Sommer-olympiade (Summer
Events) were developed by Udo and soon became Commodore classics.
Kingsoft was unusual in that it catered heavily for the Commodore 16 market when the computer was introduced in 1985. But here it proved lucky once again. In Germany, Aldi snapped up lots of excess C16 stock and Kingsoft just happened to be a publisher with its hand in the C16 market. As C16 sales experienced a boom in Germany, sales of Kingsoft’s titles soared. “The special deal with Aldi was an important moment,” Fritz Schäfer tells us.
Fritz felt confident the company could expand. “We moved from my parents’ home in Mulartshütte to a normal office and warehouse space in Aachen,” he says. “We also developed our own distribution division which made us the exclusive distributor for important chains like Toys R Us and Vobis.” It was a case of
upwards and onwards and Kingsoft made the leap into the Amiga market.
As well as the vertically-scrolling shooter Iridon by Jens Meggers and Thomas Sikora in 1987, others titles included Fortress Underground, Soccer King, the platformer Mike: The Magic Dragon and the shooter Typhoon. Pinball Wizard was a particular sales success and Fritz also highlights Emerald Mine as a major release. Even though it was a budget title, this Boulder Dash clone had 100 levels (20 of them two-player) and is widely seen as an Amiga classic.
Fritz also had high hopes for Hägar The Horrible, Kingsoft’s first licence in 1991. Based on an American comic strip by Dik Browne, the game adopted a standard platformer design. There were plans to distribute the game in the UK, too, but it never made it to these shores. “Hägar The Horrible should have been a favourite,” Fritz laments. “Unfortunately there were problems with the programmer so it did not get as good as hoped.”
By this time, Kingsoft had built a reputation as one of the major games publishers in Germany but it was still small. Marc Oberhäuser, who joined that year as the company’s accountant manager, recalls there being just six full-time employees, two sales representatives, one contractor and about three or four part-timers.
Marc, who had wanted to work in games development since the mid-eighties, ended up at Kingsoft just as it was considering its next move in
1991. “The Commodore gold rush was already over but development costs for games were still low in the market that Kingsoft covered,” he tells us. That would start to change, however, as the move towards PC games began. The days when a game would cost between 5,000 and 20,000 Deutschmarks were close to being over, according to Marc.
Even so, wider European sales were helping matters. Emerald Mine, Space Pilot and Bongo had sold well in the UK but sales nevertheless began to falter. Locomotion in 1992 was a lovely title, for instance, and one of Fritz’s favourites, yet it didn’t sell in the numbers Kingsoft expected.
Part of the problem was its past. “Kingsoft was known as a budget games company: it was the German Mastertronic, if you like,” Marc says. “It had an exclusive deal with Toys R Us which was huge and the shops were plastered with Kingsoft games. But with the slow death of the Commodore platforms, sales at Toys R Us declined. Toys R Us had a 100 per cent right of returns, at the end of the day, all the remaining Commodore games were shipped back.”
It meant the last games developed by Kingsoft sold in limited numbers. “EON, Die Prüfung (both on C64), Balance (PC), Locomotion (Atari ST), Paramax and Missiles over Xerion (both on Amiga) – all those games were rated from okay to good but I don’t think they sold more than 500 games of each title,” Marc continues. “In fact, the Atari ST version of Locomotion sold just three copies, if I remember correctly – at the time the game was released, which would have been
1993 or even 1994, the Atari ST games market was completely dead.”
Kingsoft found it hard to keep up. “PC games started to become very expensive to develop and most required larger teams,” Marc says. “In the Commodore days, a flop or two wasn’t nice but it could be compensated whereas tens or hundreds of thousands would not be easy to write off.”
Trouble is, Kingsoft wasn’t as on the ball at this stage in terms of getting fresh talent on board. “On my first day I looked at a desk that had a one-metre high pile of sendings from small private game developers who had send their games demos hoping to find a publisher,” recalls Norbert Beckers, who joined as development director. “Those people did not receive answers for months. My position had been vacant for almost a year and there was in fact no development or publishing. I had to restart this from almost zero.”
Norbert had no experience of such a role, even though he was expected to conceptualise work, project manage, beta test, carry out press work, write manuals, manage print work, do press tours, create ad materials, organise exhibitions and sales tours and manage the production of the final boxes. “I was just a young and curious gamer,” he says. “But they were highly interesting times and I learned a lot in those years.”
Realising gamers would not pay full prices for Kingsoft-labelled games, the company launched a publishing company called Ikarion Software catering for full-price PC and Amiga games. Kingsoft was left to solely focus on distribution.
Shortly after, Electronic Arts swooped and bought Kingsoft. “EA needed the distribution channel,” Marc says. “It wasn’t interested in Kingsoft’s development department and it didn’t sell any game compilation of Kingsoft games or use any of the established brands.”
With that move, the whole of Kingsoft came to an end. A year later, in 1995, Fritz Schäfer left to concentrate on Ikarion full time. By that time, however, his impact on videogaming in Germany was confirmed. “Fritz was motivated enough to turn a one- or two-men kitchen table developer into a major software publisher and distributor for the German speaking market over a period of 1982 to 1995,” says Marc. In that sense, he really was an industry king.
Kingsoft was known as a budget games company: it was the German Mastertronic Marc Oberhäuser