Publishers
Publisher Information and Releases
Bad Taste Software
UK
Bizarre. "Seal Cull" is completely made up. Bad Taste Software produced two games. Di's Baby, followed by Santa's Grotty Christmas. How do I know? Because I was Bad Taste Software & wrote both these games. Seal Cull I'd not heard of until 15 minutes ago. If someone did plan this, it was someone else, not me.
There is no secret of who produced these games. The press release was sent to most (all?) the national dailies - so we got a reasonable amount of free publicity (AFAIR the Mirror and the Star did good write ups). The local (Plymouth) TV did a bit on it (sadly my copy got overrecorded by accident years ago). I was also interviewed by an Australian channel for their "funny bit at the end of the news".
Despite the publicity, sales were small. The game was not so much "banned" as some of the major distributers had the sale or return stock returned. I forget the name of the company now, but they supplied large chains like Boots, who returned them after a small number of customer complaints. It's a long time ago now, but as I recollect I made less than £1500 from both games.
The collapse of the home computer game market in 1984, and the need to get a "proper job" (so I started getting some money again) is why it stopped. Bizzarly I still have the same job today - 26 years later.
It was the very poor start to 1984 that caused an emergency meeting late Summer that year. The only notable success that year was Manic Miner - why? Well we reasoned because it latched onto a news story (the miner's strike). So we had to choose a subject for game that would be topical once the game had been competed. What news story will there be in the next few weeks/months? The only thing we could predict was Di's Baby. "That's in bad taste" someone said - so we had the name of the label. I also had just 6 weeks. We also decided not to announce it until after the baby was confirmed born healthy (and would have scrapped the game had there been problems).
It's nice to know people are still talking about it.
Sadly I lost the source to Di's Baby in one of my house moves. I still have (some) of the source for Santa's Grotty Christmas (all the graphics sources, at least). I found them on an old archive disk this afternoon, which prompted to me to google Bad Taste Software - and hence my finding this post.
Keith Wood.
There is no secret of who produced these games. The press release was sent to most (all?) the national dailies - so we got a reasonable amount of free publicity (AFAIR the Mirror and the Star did good write ups). The local (Plymouth) TV did a bit on it (sadly my copy got overrecorded by accident years ago). I was also interviewed by an Australian channel for their "funny bit at the end of the news".
Despite the publicity, sales were small. The game was not so much "banned" as some of the major distributers had the sale or return stock returned. I forget the name of the company now, but they supplied large chains like Boots, who returned them after a small number of customer complaints. It's a long time ago now, but as I recollect I made less than £1500 from both games.
The collapse of the home computer game market in 1984, and the need to get a "proper job" (so I started getting some money again) is why it stopped. Bizzarly I still have the same job today - 26 years later.
It was the very poor start to 1984 that caused an emergency meeting late Summer that year. The only notable success that year was Manic Miner - why? Well we reasoned because it latched onto a news story (the miner's strike). So we had to choose a subject for game that would be topical once the game had been competed. What news story will there be in the next few weeks/months? The only thing we could predict was Di's Baby. "That's in bad taste" someone said - so we had the name of the label. I also had just 6 weeks. We also decided not to announce it until after the baby was confirmed born healthy (and would have scrapped the game had there been problems).
It's nice to know people are still talking about it.
Sadly I lost the source to Di's Baby in one of my house moves. I still have (some) of the source for Santa's Grotty Christmas (all the graphics sources, at least). I found them on an old archive disk this afternoon, which prompted to me to google Bad Taste Software - and hence my finding this post.
Keith Wood.