Mandarin Software

Europress was a British magazine and software publisher based in Adlington, near Macclesfield, Cheshire. Their magazine publishing business was previously known as Database Publications.

Europress was formed by Derek Meakin in 1965. It began by publishing magazines and newspapers, then during the 1980s as an expansion of its magazine publishing business, it became involved in the rapidly growing software industry.

Under the name Database Software, they released software including the Red Arrows game for the ZX Spectrum and the office suite Mini Office II, as well as games and educational software for children.

During the late 1980s Europress decided to spin off its software publishing division as a separate company: Europress Software, with Christopher Payne as Managing Director and Diane O'Brien as Sales Director. Chris Payne came up with the name Mandarin Software as the brand for all the planned games, graphic designer Heather Sheldrick designed the logo, and Mandarin Software was launched to the press at a Chinese Restaurant in London, where it showed off its first round of planned product launched. Europress Software published a high proportion of educational material, such as the Fun School series.

The publishing business was purchased by IDG and became IDG Media towards the end of 1994. A reorganisation of the titles promptly followed, with the Atari, Amiga and Acorn divisions each losing one or more titles along the way.

Their software publishing business was purchased by Hasbro Interactive in 1999. At first, the studio prospered and expanded. It was able to produce titles using some of the brands owned by Hasbro, even producing two for Hasbro Germany. A little over a year later, Hasbro Interactive was losing money and was sold to Infogrames for a small amount; Infogrames gained ownership of all the Hasbro brands. However, Infogrames were not interested in the educational multimedia, which was Europress's focus, and ignored the company for several months. Ownership was then returned to the Meakin family. They ran the company for little over a year before it went into liquidation. A major factor in this was Granada TV's ignorance of their rights over Countdown. They had encouraged Europress to produce a Countdown CD-ROM, but only weeks before the launch, with large pre-orders, they discovered that they did not have the interactive rights.

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