The Story Of: Special Reserve

ITS ADVERTS WERE UBIQUITOUS ACROSS 1990S GAMING MAGAZINES, BUT WHERE DID SPECIAL RESERVE COME FROM? AND WHY IS THERE A PICTURE OF GROTBAGS IN THIS FEATURE?

Discover the origins of all those old adverts you used to see in your favourite game mags

Dave Carlos decided to quit teaching in 1984. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was determined to shake up the education system, and as a union rep, Dave had led his school out on strike in protest at the changes. But ultimately, he decided he couldn’t continue in his chosen vocation under the political regime of the time. “I felt that I couldn’t be the kind of teacher I wanted to be,” he says. “And I didn’t want to be the kind of teacher that turned up every day, took his pay, and went home with no further thought.”

He decided to switch careers completely, focusing instead on his growing love for home computers. Back in 1980, Dave had been asked by a parent whether he could teach their child to program their newly purchased Sinclair ZX81. Despite having no background in computing, Dave rose to the task – and quickly became hooked, soon buying a ZX81 for himself and later upgrading to a BBC Micro. He became so addicted to home computing that he ended up taking a Saturday job in a Leeds computer shop in addition to his Monday to Friday teaching career. By this point, he had also begun writing articles for computing journals, as well as creating several type-in programs for magazines.

At around the time he decided to leave teaching, Dave heard that the editor position at the magazine Home Computing Weekly was about to open up. “So I made a play for it,” he says, and after some intense lobbying, “eventually they said, ‘OK, you can have the job’.” The role meant moving his family all the way down south to Essex, but ultimately it was shortlived. After a frenzied ten-month period of weekly deadlines, including a hair-raising moment when

Dave was called by the printers two hours before the presses were due to roll to be told that five pages of the magazine were missing, he felt it was time for another change. This time, it was a move into the nascent world of videogame PR.

During his 1985 stint at Home Computing Weekly, Dave felt that “the kind of PR that was coming at me was not the quality of PR that I would want to put out” – and he became convinced he could do a better job. He began by forming the company Solutions PR with a colleague, but the partnership quickly dissolved, and instead he set up on his own as Inter

Mediates Ltd, the firm that would go on to form the backbone of Special Reserve.

Domark was one of Dave’s earliest clients, and the first game he promoted was Friday The 13th, which he found a challenge. “I didn’t like that one very much,” he says. “My Christian beliefs didn’t sit terribly easily with that. It was quite a baptism of fire to be straight in with a project that you didn’t actually terribly much like, but you have to be professional about these things.” Despite Dave’s misgivings, Domark was pleased enough with his work that they gave him several campaigns to handle over the next few years, and Inter-mediates steadily grew.

Then one day, Dave had an encounter at the offices of the publisher Telecomsoft that would end up changing the trajectory of Inter-mediates completely. “They’d just started Silverbird,” he says, “and in a box in the office, there was a whole pile of tear-off cards from cassette inlays.” These were applications to join the Silver Club. For £1.99, members would receive a free Silverbird game as well as regular newsletters. Intrigued, Dave asked what the publisher planned to do with the applications – and then made a spontaneous pitch to run the club on behalf of Silverbird. Citing his magazine editor background, he argued he’d be the perfect candidate to create a regular newsletter, and

he would also handle the membership applications and the distribution of free games. The publisher agreed to pay Inter-mediates £2.50 per club member, and a deal was struck.

Over the coming months, the number of Silver

Club members swelled to around 14,000. Importantly, the newsletter doubled as a Silverbird catalogue that sold games via mail order, all of which were sent out by Inter-mediates on behalf of Telecomsoft. “We effectively became a mail-order fulfilment house alongside a PR company,” says Dave.

This is where Tony Rainbird enters the picture. Dave had met Tony when he helped to promote the launch of the Rainbird label at Telecomsoft, but Tony left the company in late 1986, and Dave asked him to join Inter-mediates. “He’s a finance guy,” explains Dave. “And I’m the opposite of a finance guy. I’m a creative guy. I am useless with business finance, and I needed somebody who was going to be doing management accounts. Tony was able to provide that kind of skill.” Then, after working at Inter-mediates for a while, Dave recalls that Tony made him a proposition. “He just said to me, if ever you get to the stage where you want a partner or you’re about to sell some of the business, I’m interested.”

Dave eventually took Tony up on the offer. Towards the end of the Eighties, Inter-mediates was thriving, but it needed more capital to expand, and Dave was worried about overextending. “Long story short, my wife and I didn’t really want to put more guarantees into the business,” he says. “And so I went to Tony and said, ‘Right, well, you said you were interested in buying a bit of it, how about buying all of it?.’”

Tony raised some of the cash through a silent partner, and he told Dave his plans for Inter-mediates. “He said to me, the PR business is OK, but the bulk of the profit is coming out of Silverbird, out of that club, and it’s that I’m buying the business for. Not for Silverbird per se, but for the fact that you have already a fully functional newsletter, software sales and fulfilment operation. That’s what I’m buying, and what I’m going to build off of.” After staying on for a few months to help with the handover, Dave left to join a Christian missionary society in Birmingham.

The Silver Club didn’t last long after Tony’s acquisition of Inter-mediates – it was closed by Telecomsoft at around the time the publisher was acquired by Microprose in 1989 – but Tony pressed ahead by setting up two new mail-order operations. The first was an adventuregame club called Official Secrets, which had its own dedicated magazine (see ‘Strictly Confidential’). “Tony likes adventure games and saw a future for them, particularly through a club system, because it’s a niche market,” says Dave. And Tony’s connections through Telecomsoft certainly helped: he scored a coup by securing the 1989 interactive-fiction game Myth by Magnetic Scrolls, a developer he had worked with at the publisher. Myth, which was available on multiple home computers and scored 87% in Amiga Format, was offered as an exclusive to Official Secrets members – and as such it’s exceedingly hard to come by these days.

For around £20 (the price gradually increased over the years), members would receive Myth along with another game, six issues of the bi-monthly magazine Confidential and access to an adventure games helpline, along with all sorts of mail-order offers. Importantly, they would also receive automatic membership to Special Reserve, the second operation set up by Tony.

Special Reserve covered more-general software titles, and for an annual fee of around £6, members could buy discounted games as well as receive the magazine NRG. This was essentially a glorified catalogue, and a far cry from the more anarchic Confidential magazine, but it nevertheless featured reviews of the latest releases. Adverts for Special Reserve quickly became ubiquitous across videogame magazines of the time, and by mid-1990 it had around 25,000 members, with around 5,500 of those also being members of Official Secrets.

But Official Secrets was struggling by this point, two years after its debut. An editorial from ‘the boss upstairs’ in issue 12 of Confidential addressed concerns that membership was too expensive by saying “in the early days the club was heavily subsidised and even now the profits are not high”, before going on to detail a further rise in membership fees from £27.99 to £29.99. Not too long after that, Official Secrets closed.

Yet Special Reserve continued to thrive, and the company even went on to launch a chain of shops (see

‘Shopping Time’). Early on, the Essex-based firm had rented offices in Sawbridgeworth, just over the county border in Hertfordshire, and these gradually expanded as the company gained personnel. The firm also started selling its own custom-built ‘Maxx’ PCS. Joe Hull, who joined the company in 1994, remembers assembling these PCS in a room at the back of the Sawbridgeworth warehouse. “It was a dream job at the time,” he says. “I used to go up to the shop in my lunch hour and play on all the consoles. In the canteen was an old Amiga, and we could always play Sensible Soccer on that, too.”

As the Nineties wore on, however, mailorder ads began to be usurped by the rise of internet shopping, and Special Reserve accordingly moved online. Richard Hull wrote games reviews for the online incarnation in the early Noughties, although, as he notes “it was news and reviews in inverted commas. Because, you know, it wasn’t objective reviews; obviously it was always with the view to selling stuff”. Nevertheless, he has fond memories of working at the Sawbridgeworth offices, “Largely it was an absolute laugh, because there were about 14 under-25 year olds hanging out in an office writing about games, and all the plastic tat that was associated with it as well. There were always tiny remote control cars that we were bombing around the place.”

Ali Gray was a writer at Special Reserve at around the same time, and he recalls that the tiny size of the company meant that staff were regularly asked to work in roles outside their main one. “For example, all creative staff who worked on the catalogue were routinely called upon to take customer orders over the phone during the busy periods,” he says. “It also wasn’t uncommon for us to have to put shifts in at the store downstairs, or to load trucks.” The Special Reserve catalogue (which eventually dropped the NRG name) also remained defiantly lo-fi, he remembers, “We didn’t make the shift to digital until about 2003. Because we lacked digital typesetting, you’d have to wait two weeks until you could see the finished mag, and even then you might have massive errors on pages, images missing, colour clashes, all sorts of catastrophes in miniature.”

Ali recalls that during this period, Tony was attempting to expand the business by adding new websites with an eclectic range of offerings. “We sold games, PC equipment, DVDS, digital cameras, yo-yos, toys, BB Guns, all sorts of mad stuff,” he says. “The last one I remember him adding to his empire was Ukgardensheds.com.” Ultimately though, Special Reserve couldn’t compete with the rise of other online retail sites, and Inter-mediates closed down operations in 2005. “We didn’t really move with the times,” says Ali. “We catered for people who wanted to order online, but I don’t think we were ever really prepared for the entire business to go digital.”

» “Because of the Confidential thing, the first exhibition we did, Tony came up with the idea that we were all going to dress up as the Blues Brothers,” says Dave. Even Dave’s son got in on the act, as seen here.

» Dave Carlos with Grotbags the witch at a Domark game launch in the Eighties. On the right is Sally Newman, wife of the late Graeme Kidd.

» Richard Hull worked as a writer at Special Reserve between 2002 and 2005, mostly penning game reviews. “We sort of took the tack that we weren’t going to lie, but obviously it was more of a marketing exercise than a reviewing exercise,” he says.

» Ali Gray started work as a staff writer at Special Reserve’s Sawbridgeworth office in 2000. “It could be stressful at times, but I only really have fond memories of the place now,” he says.

» Tony Rainbird bought Intermediates from Dave Carlos and turned the PR firm into a mail-order company. He’s now director of the internet service provider Freeola.

» Special Reserve evolved out of the mail-order operation that Inter-mediates set up to distribute Silverbird games as part of its management of the Silver Club. Image courtesy of Richard Hewison.

» Former Crash editor Graeme Kidd worked on some of the later Silver Club newsletters after leaving Newsfield. Image courtesy of Richard Hewison.

» Dave Carlos (left) hands over a cheque to John Jarratt, winner of a Domark Treasure Hunt. Image courtesy of Dave Carlos.

» This Special Reserve advert appeared in Sega Power issue 75 in 1995. New members can choose a free gift of a Guyver VHS tape or a ‘Supermodel Kelly’ mouse mat.

» Dave Clarke promoted the Friday the 13th game for Domark when he started Inter-mediates – an experience that didn’t sit well with his Christian faith.

» The Special Reserve website circa 2001. Note the plethora of sister websites selling everything from mobile phones to domain names.

» The launch party for CDS Software’s Tank Attack at the National Army Museum, another PR gig for Dave Carlos in his Inter-mediates days (he can be seen on the top row, second from right).

» Dave Carlos (with beard) in his Inter-mediates PR days at the launch of CDS Software’s Brian Clough’s Football Fortunes at Wembley Stadium. The chap holding the cup with him is Giles Hunter, head of CDS.

» A double-page Special Reserve advert from issue two of Amiga Power in 1991.

» Myth from Magnetic Scrolls was an exclusive title for Official Secrets, only available to members of the adventure-game club.

» Dave Carlos at the National Computer Games Championship