Firebird History
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James Leavey employed design company Simonson Finnegan to create the Firebird logo, having used them for other BT projects in the past. Only one version of the logo was ever designed, with Creative Director Terry Finnegan nailing it at the first attempt. Despite a few tweaks here and there, the logo survived relatively untouched for the whole eight years that the Firebird label published computer games.
Apart from the initial advert published in the UK magazines, Telecomsoft also became involved in the first ever advert to be transmitted via satellite over Europe. The advert showed a static picture of the newly designed Firebird logo, complete with details about what Telecomsoft was looking for and who to send the games to. This advert resulted in hopeful progammers sending games in from all over Europe, instead of just the UK.
After employing a Marketing Analyst (Theresa Jackson) to examine the games software-publishing arena, it was decided that Firebird would have two price points. £2.50 was set for the 'Firebird Silver' range, whilst ‘Firebird Gold’ titles were initially sold at £5.95. The same Market Analysts chose pink as the main background colour for the Silver range cassette inlays, but this idea was (thankfully) ditched by James Leavey at the last moment in favour of white, for aesthetic and printing cost reasons.
The official press release from BT went to great lengths to emphasise that the packaging for the Silver range would have screenshots of the games on the cover, rather than potentially misleading artwork. Richard Hooper was quoted as saying "You can now judge a game by its cover. In a market where quality and prices tend to be variable and complaints of misrepresentation frequent, Firebird is setting new standards". He went on to comment on the pricing issue: "Despite the pocket money price, Firebird games will offer the same quality as some products costing twice as much. Firebird is committed to the home computer market and will deal only through established distributors".
Seeing is believing became Firebird's first marketing motto, appearing on the adverts that heralded Firebird's publishing debut in the run-in to Christmas 1984, with the marketing push officially began on October 23rd.
Snake Bite (for the unexpanded Commodore Vic 20) was the first official Telecomsoft release. The remaining Firebird games were Mickey the Bricky, Bird Strike, Gold Digger, Duck!, Run Baby Run (written by Tony Rainbird), Exodus, Viking Raiders, Terra Force and Menace. These first releases covered a wide range of formats, including the Commodore Vic 20, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair Spectrum.
All of the initial Firebird releases were arcade ‘shoot ‘em ups’ of one type or another, with the exception of Viking Raiders, which was a turn-based war game for the Spectrum. James Leavey and Tony Rainbird wrote the copy for the first 30 or 40 cassette inlays during several late-night stints in the office, and they also came up with most of the early game titles.
This first wave of Firebird releases went down well with the public, selling over 250,000 copies within the first three months of hitting the shelves. The second batch followed soon after, and included Byte Bitten, The Wild Bunch, Acid Drops, Mr Freeze, Booty, Crazy Caverns, Estra, The Hacker, Headache, Zulu and GoGo the Ghost. Booty became the first game in the UK to sell over 100,000 copies. To mark this milestone, Home Computing Weekly's Dave Carlos presented James Leavey with a special joke award - a 'home made' Gold Tape.
Again, most of the second wave of releases were arcade games with the exception of The Wild Bunch, which was an adventure game with some arcade elements thrown in for good measure. By then, Amstrad CPC conversions of some of the games were also being released as that machine’s popularity began to increase. At the same time, the BBC and Vic 20 were on the decline and both would ultimately be removed from Telecomsoft’s portfolio.
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