Emerald Software Ltd
| Industry | Video games |
|---|---|
| Fate | Bankruptcy |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Defunct | 1991 |
| Headquarters | Waterford, Ireland |
|
Key people
|
David Martin, Mike Dixon |
| Products | The Running Man, Michael Jackson's Moonwalker |
|
Number of employees
|
17 programmers, 5 graphic artists, 2 administration |
Emerald Software was a video game publisher founded in 1988 by two UK entertainment executives - David Martin of Martech, and Mike Dixon who previously worked with EMI and worked as the company CEO.
The company was headquartered in a three-storey Georgian house ("Washington Lodge") in Wilkin Street, Waterford, Ireland.
The company had varying fortunes and failed in 1991, with the few remaining staff having worked without pay for the final few months in an attempt to keep the company going.
The company was mostly populated by graduates or placement students from the then-named Waterford Regional Technical College - with some from University College Dublin and others with no formal computer training.
At its peak, Emerald Software employed 17 programmers and 5 graphic artists. These people were spread across 5 departments, loosely split to cover each of the supported development platforms and graphic art - with two additional personnel in Administration and Human Resources.
The developers were:
The artists were:
The company authored games for the Commodore Amiga, IBM PC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC systems.
Development for Amiga and Atari ST games was carried out using Manx C, and Motorola 68000 Assembly language. As both Amiga and ST were 68000 based machines, games were typically authored on the Amiga and then ported using an in-house authored porting / remote-debug / development environment; this allowed the code to be edited on the more capable Amiga, then transmitted to the ST and remotely executed/debugged from the Amiga. The development system was written by Brian Kelly and was based on Lattice C. Graphics and sound routines required re-authoring, but in many cases this was straightforward.
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