1991. The home computer industry was moving fast — CD-ROMs were looming on the horizon, console gaming was muscling in on the market, and the golden age of the text adventure was flickering like a candle in a storm.
I was running a small software company called Entertainment Software out of Australia — a scrappy mail-order operation backed by a handful of independent computer stores willing to carry my products on their shelves. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was mine, and every sale felt like a victory.
I wanted to grow it. And I had an idea.
A Letter Across the World
On the other side of the planet, in the UK, a man named Jack Lockerby was doing something I deeply respected: writing and publishing text adventure games for the Commodore 64 under a small label called River Software.
Text adventures were a passion of mine. They always had been. And Jack’s games had a quality to them — a craft — that stood out in a crowded and often mediocre market. These weren’t rushed cash-ins. They were proper adventures, built with care.
So I did what any ambitious young software entrepreneur in 1991 did: I picked up a pen and wrote him a letter.
The pitch was simple. Australia was an underserved market. Commodore users here were hungry for quality titles and starved of choice. River Software deserved an audience beyond the UK — and I was the person to build it.
The Deal
Jack said yes.
Suddenly, Entertainment Software was the Australian home of River Software adventures. We moved them through mail order and small advertisements placed in local Commodore computer magazines — the lifeblood of the Australian home computing community in that era. There was something genuinely thrilling about it: a two-person operation on opposite sides of the globe, connected by post and a shared love of interactive fiction, putting quality games into the hands of Australian Commodore owners who might never have discovered them otherwise.
The sales were modest. Honest, but modest. The market was telling us something we didn’t especially want to hear: the text adventure era was drawing to a close. Gamers were chasing colour, sound, and action. The patient, imaginative world of the parser adventure — where reading was the experience — was losing ground fast.
Closing the Chapter
By late 1994, we made the call. The River Software adventure line was retired. It was the right decision, even if it stung a little. You can’t fight a cultural tide — you can only recognise it, respect it, and pivot.
And pivot we did. Out of the ashes of that era came a new venture: Southern Star Computers — but that’s a story for another post.
What I carry from the River Software chapter isn’t regret. It’s pride. We connected an independent British developer with an audience he’d never have reached on his own. We backed quality when quality wasn’t the easiest sell. And we did it with nothing more than a good idea, a few magazine ads, and a letter sent halfway around the world.
In 1991, that’s how you built something.