Adventure Soft
video game developer
Adventure Soft is a British video game developer and publisher established by Mike Woodroffe, initially as an importer and reseller of Adventure International games as Adventure International (UK), and later using the names Horror Soft, Adventuresoft UK and Headfirst Productions.
The firm operates out of Sutton Coldfield, and is best known for the Simon the Sorcerer series of games.
Adventure International UK
Woodroffe, who owned a music shop in Birmingham, entered the software industry by opening a computer department within the store, Calisto Computers, importing American software which was otherwise unavailable in the UK. The success of many of the titles from Adventure International led to Woodroffe licensing the name from Scott Adams to form Adventure International (UK). The company employed Brian Howarth, the author of the Mysterious Adventures series of text adventures, to convert Adams' titles to run on microcomputers found in the United Kingdom market which were not currently supported.
By 1985, the release of games by Adventure International had slowed and the company began to write other games using the same system. The first and most successful of these was Gremlins – The Adventure (1985), written by Howarth and based on the film Gremlins. Adventure International UK also secured the rights to Howarth's Mysterious Adventures series from Channel 8 Software who had been taken over by Argus Press Software. Several of these games were licensed for release by Tynesoft, who also published Howarth and Woodroofe's Supergran: The Adventure, their first title to be published by a third party.
Further deals were signed, including a game based on the television series Robin of Sherwood, and the licence to produce games based on the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first Fighting Fantasy title released was Seas of Blood by Woodroffe and Howarth with Appointment with F.E.A.R. reported as the next conversion.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adventure Soft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.