From The Archives: Nexus Productions Ltd
Nexus Productions Ltd had a limited life span, from early 1986 to December 1987. In that time, it published nine computer games, but there is much more to this publisher’s story than meets the eye
The story behind the ambitious developer that released nine games in a few short years
After gaining their engineering degrees in 1983, Paul Voysey and Tayo Olowu learned to program in machine code and wrote a sci-fi strategy game for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 called Psytron, released by Emap-owned publisher Beyond to much acclaim in 1984.
Buoyed by that debut success, the co-authors produced a second game for Beyond called Psi-warrior, a more action-oriented effort for the Commodore 64. They then began working on their next game, again for the Commodore. However, decisions made elsewhere within EMAP meant that Beyond was soon sold to British Telecom, which had its own successful software labels. BT paid a cool £1,000,000 in September 1985 for Beyond, but that decision came like a bolt out of the blue to Bill Delaney, who was running Beyond at the time.
Paul and Tayo were not at all happy with the situation, having concerns over the implications of the sale. They did not have to switch allegiance to BT, and so they chose to continue developing their new game called NEXUS independently and find a publisher later on.
Much like his fellow colleagues at Beyond, Bill was equally unhappy at the prospect of moving over to BT and so he and Clive Bailey concluded that working for BT was not what they wanted. “I always had a vision of becoming a publisher,” says Bill. “Getting involved with Beyond and eventually running the company was a fast-track to that goal.”
With the connections he had within the games industry, Bill began to view the situation thrust upon him in a different light and saw it as an opportunity to start his own business, realising that he could help Paul and Tayo to publish NEXUS. “I approached Paul and Tayo once it was clear they were not going to deal with BT, and I asked if I could help market their new game. I had a fair amount of leverage in sorting advanced orders, which ended up funding everything during the game’s development period,” says Bill. He also intended to use a North American agent to license US games for marketing in the UK and Europe. That initial idea quickly evolved into
Bill, Clive, Paul and Tayo forming a new publishing company called Nexus Productions Ltd.
With Paul and Tayo’s programming skills and
Bill and Clive’s marketing and sales experience, they felt they had the proper skills to make the proposition work, but what about the company
name? Paul and Tayo were already calling themselves Nexus long before Bill and Clive left Beyond. “It wasn’t a given that the company would be called Nexus Productions, but it just felt like the right name,” says Bill. “I don’t recall any massive discussions about alternatives.”
Bill and Clive left Beyond just weeks after the company was sold to BT, and Bill’s first task was to seek funding and source an office. He found rented offices in nearby Beckenham and set to work. “I got together my own funding from people I knew, and I was also talking to people regarding game licences, so there were plenty of opportunities,” he tells us.
Nexus received backing from UK distributor Centresoft, which did not have any equity in the company, but had first rights on anything produced, with Bill pre-selling most of Nexus’ early products. He also began engaging with other developers, and a series of coincidences lead to the formation of Paranoid Software as Nexus Productions’ in-house development team, as Darren Melbourne reveals. “I had somehow managed to get Computer Trade Weekly delivered to my home,” he tells us. “I read it religiously with a strong desire to get into the videogame industry. This particular weekend I’d read in CTW about Nexus. On the Sunday I went to pick up the Sunday papers for my dad, and on my way back I walked past a guy cleaning a white Jaguar XJS. I said hello and he looked up and it was Bill Delaney, who I recognised from the article in CTW. It transpired that he lived less than 200 metres from my home in Kent.”
Seizing the opportunity, Darren thought quickly and introduced himself whilst Bill continued washing his car. “I said, ‘My name’s Darren Melbourne and I’m going to make a games company. Can I talk to you?,’ and that was it. I met Bill three or four times after that. I literally wrote down on the back of an envelope what I thought our team would need to build a range of games, and he agreed to let us work out of his offices and fund us.”
Three months after that chance encounter,
Darren, along with teenage friends Mark
Greenshields and Ned Langman, turned up in the Beckenham office and began working on Paranoid Software’s debut game, an arcade shooter called Hades Nebula. “It was the classic scenario of turning up to the office in the morning and clearing out all the Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes,” recalls Bill Delaney, laughing at the memory of having a group of teenagers encamped in the office. “Great days, and fun times.”
“We were effectively taken on as their internal dev studio,” adds Darren. “So, as well as writing Hades Nebula, we were working on a whole batch of other things as well.” In the early days of the company, Darren was expecting Paul Voysey and Tayo to be overseeing their work, whilst Bill and Clive concentrated on the sales and marketing side. “I was really impressed with Paul and Tayo,” says Darren. “We were a bunch of scatty 18-year-old kids really who didn’t have a clue, and Paul and
Tayo would turn up in a sports car, dressed like they were going to a country club. They were who I was aspiring to be, whilst I was dressed all in black like a teenage goth!”
However, any expected mentoring from Paul and Tayo failed to materialise, as Darren explains. “Looking back, I don’t think they really wanted to be games programmers. They didn’t seem to know what was going on in the company they part owned. To us, it felt like Clive and Bill were really running things, and Paul and Tayo were along for the ride. I only saw Paul and Tayo maybe half-a-dozen times in those first three months and they never worked from the office. They would literally turn up for 20 minutes and then go. Our interaction with them was miniscule.”
US Gold took on early titles including NEXUS, Assault Machine and Warrior II (the latter two being written by Magnificent 7 Software) to sell in France, Germany and Spain, with those versions supplied in standard double-cassette crystal cases, rather than the distinctive chunky hinged
I HAD A FAIR AMOUNT OF LEVERAGE IN SORTING ADVANCED ORDERS, WHICH ENDED UP FUNDING EVERYTHING DURING THE GAME’S DEVELOPMENT PERIOD BILL DELANEY
plastic boxes used for the UK. Nexus Productions appeared to have a fairly strong line-up, but less than a year later, another business opportunity came before Bill and Clive that they found hard to ignore.
“I was shown a particular type of direct marketing product called Target Action, which was another publishing venture which I then bought into,” says Bill. Darren Melbourne and his friends knew little about what was going on, but Darren remembers sensing a change in focus from Bill and Clive, as Paranoid Software continued to work on Hades Nebula for the Commodore 64. “I saw Bill and Clive in the office a lot in the first three or four months, and then literally nobody turned up. Bill and Clive just stopped coming because they were concentrating entirely on Target Action,” he says.
Bill’s new business became a dominant distraction, with him admitting years later that the new venture rapidly began to take priority. “It started to gain some significant traction and so I approached some venture capitalists, but one of their conditions was that
I had to go full-time. Obviously, that gave me a massive dilemma, as this new opportunity was just too big for me to let go.”
The implications of what happened next were to be huge for Nexus. Bill signed the office lease over to Paul and Tayo, then he and Clive Bailey resigned as directors, leaving the company without any sales or marketing expertise. Bill then spent the next two years in Germany, leaving the games software industry far behind him. Bill believed that Paul and Tayo wanted more control over their own products and so he personally felt comfortable leaving them to take the business forwards.
It was around this time that a new face appeared in the Nexus office, with former CRL Software development manager and creative director, Ian Ellery joining. “After Bill and Clive started on Target Action, our working relationship became exclusively with Ian Ellery,” remembers Darren Melbourne. “Looking back, Ian was basically left to run the ship.”
The in-house developers and recent recruit Ian Ellery soon found themselves in a difficult situation. They continued to turn up at the Beckenham office, but the alarm bells should have been ringing. Unfortunately, Paranoid Software was not living up to its name, remaining idealistically optimistic that everything would turn out fine. “We naïvely expected them to roll on and fund the next project,” remembers Darren. “We ended up working out of that office for another eight months because it was paid for, but nobody else ever turned up.”
Despite the uncertainty, Nexus published a handful of other titles. Firestorm for the ZX Spectrum was followed by Micronaut One from programmer Pete Cooke. That game was an idea
OUR RIGHTS TO THE GAME WERE NON-EXISTENT AND WE HAD NO CHANCE OF GETTING IT BACK TO DO ANYTHING WITH IT DARREN MELBOURNE
that Pete had been thinking about whilst producing his last few games for CRL. His impressive 3D tunnel-racing, parasite-defeating ZX Spectrum game was technically brilliant and immaculately presented.
With Hades Nebula finished, and with nobody else instructing the team what to do otherwise, Paranoid Software continued to write games for the Commodore 64, including another shoot-’emup called Blazer.“blazer was written using the Hades Nebula code,” explains Darren. “That was Ian Ellery’s idea to generate some quick money. He asked us to reuse the code, write a new game, and repackage it. However, we pretty much knew at that point that Nexus was on its way down.”
Ian gave Darren and colleagues his perspective about distribution, pre-sales of the games and why he thought Paranoid were not seeing any royalty payments from Hades Nebula. “He was a little older than us and was a fantastic artist and illustrator but working in that office was a very bizarre experience,” says Darren. That bizarre experience extended to the Paranoid team not receiving any money once Hades Nebula was sent for mastering.
“We were told that the company was on-going, and that we should keep working, so we did until around August or September 1987, when we came in one day and Ian Ellery met us in the hallway and said that the office lease was up,” continues Darren. “We quickly realised that this really was it, so we hired a van and shifted everything out. Ned Langman’s nan had a spare room, so we set up in there for a couple of months while we tried continuing to work on new games Nuker and Enemy, but it never worked out.”
Paranoid Software ended with the downfall of Nexus, officially revealed in December 1987 when Nexus was placed into voluntary liquidation by the two remaining directors, Paul Voysey and Tawo Oluwu. Paul was quoted in Popular Computing Weekly, saying the problems were related to “… historic indebtness” and that the company “… has not had sufficient money to fund a strong product line”.
Earlier that year, Nexus had struck a deal with Electronic Arts, and EA’S director for European distribution, John Forrest, was quoted, saying, “They were very frank with us. They came and said they’d been looking through their books and were in financial difficulty.”
“What we discovered afterwards, when the company went into liquidation was that our game, Hades Nebula, had been ‘exclusively’ sold to several different distribution partners,” says Darren Melbourne, flippantly. “That meant our rights to the game were non-existent and we had no chance of getting it back to do anything with it.”
What started out as an exciting venture ultimately ended in disappointment. Nexus Productions Ltd disappeared without making the impact the founders had wanted, and the departure of two directors and the implications of what happened afterwards left the company with an uphill struggle. One or two titles withstanding, the company’s legacy is probably more about the boxes than the games.