Ocean Software

Ocean Software

Founded	1984
Closed	1998
Headquarters	Manchester, Great Britain
Manager	David Ward, Jon Woods
Employees
Key People (choice)	Bill Barna, Paul Hughes
Turnover
Sector	Computer and video games
Website	facebook.com/OceanSoftwareLtd
Information	merged into Infogrames

Ocean Software (or Ocean Software Ltd., Ocean of America, Inc. or short Ocean) was one of the biggest European video game developers and publisher of numerous games in the '80s and '90s.

History[edit | edit source]

The company was founded by David Ward and Jon Woods at first as Spectrum Games in Manchester in 1982. One year later it was renamed to Ocean Software Ltd.. In 1984 Ocean took over the competitor Imagine from Liverpool and bought the rights from Konami for their arcade games in the same year. Ocean's idea was to publish movie licenses and their own developments under the label Ocean, while the label Imagine was used to release the Konami licensed games. Hyper Sports, Ping Pong, Mikie, Green Beret, World Series Baseball, Yie Ar Kung Fu I and Yie Ar Kung Fu II were only a few of them. Ocean reached a high degree of popularity in the following years from realisations of famous movies and TV series. In 1985 Ocean secured the movie licenses for Miami Vice, The City Cobra, Knight Rider, Highlander, Rambo and V: The Series. These were mostly not well converted and therefore only received mediocre reviews in the tests of the game magazines.

After a series of poorly received games,1986 was a low point for Ocean. Martin Galway had said at the time in an interview, that his music resulted in some additional game sales and that Ocean was grateful for this. The only successful releases this year were an excellent realisation of Green Beret and the game Parallax by Sensible. In the same year Ocean secured further rights by Taito and Data East. With this, games as Chase H.Q., Rainbow Islands, Arkanoid and Operation Wolf would be released in the following years.

In 1992 the last 8 games for the C64 were released, with Ocean's last game on the C64 being Sleepwalker. The game was produced to advertise for Comic Relief (a British charity organisation). All the turnover from the sales of the game went to the aid organisation.

Between 1993 and 1998 games for the Amiga, Windows, Playstation, Game Boy, Nintendo N64, Atari Jaguar, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were developed, with the last game by Ocean being for the Nintendo 64 with the name GT 64: Championship in 1998. It was published on 8th September 1998.

Towards the end of the '90s, when the 16-bit era drew to a close, Ocean experienced problems releasing new software. In 1996 Ocean was bought out by Infogrames for £100,000,000 and renamed Infogrames UK. In 2004 it was again renamed to Atari UK and since 2009 the company carries the name Atari, Inc..

During the full history of Ocean, 178 games were released and 48 games were developed. If you are interested in further details of Ocean's history, you can read the book The History of Ocean which was released in 2013.

Award[edit | edit source]

In 1989 Ocean was awarded the British Golden Joystick Award in the category Software House of the Year.

Ocean Loaders[edit | edit source]

The Ocean Loader (version 2) for the game Rambo II

Due to the long loading times of the widely used datasettes in the '80s, Ocean programmer Paul Hughes developed the Ocean Loader. This was an image with background music, which appeared while the actual game was loading. With this the long loading times could be bridged. The Ocean Loader in its different versions gave the label a high recognition value, which remains in the memory of the users of that time until today.

Paul Hughes specifies the following chronologic overview of all Ocean Loaders on his website:

The first time that an Ocean Loader was officially used was Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge with music by Martin Galway. But this does not count as version 1.
Ocean Loader 1 with music by Martin Galway (SID of Hyper Sports)
- The first famous (version 1) Ocean Loader was published with Hyper Sports.
- HVSC Path: /MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Martin/Ocean_Loader_1.sid
Ocean Loader 2 with music by Martin Galway (SID of Hyper Sports Remix)
- Rambo was the only game that got its own music.
- HVSC Path: /MUSICIANS/G/Galway_Martin/Ocean_Loader_2.sid
Ocean Loader 3 with music by Peter Clarke titled: "Ocean Dries Up"
- HVSC Path: /MUSICIANS/C/Clarke_Peter/Ocean_Loader_3.sid
Ocean Loader 4 with music by Jonathan Dunn
- HVSC Path: /MUSICIANS/D/Dunn_Jonathan/Ocean_Loader_4.sid
Ocean Loader 5 with music by Jonathan Dunn (Remix of Ocean Loader 4)
- HVSC Path: /MUSICIANS/D/Dunn_Jonathan/Ocean_Loader_5.sid