U.S. Gold
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| Industry | Computer and video games |
|---|---|
| Fate | Merged into Eidos Interactive |
| Headquarters | Birmingham, United Kingdom |
| Products | Computer games, console games |
U.S. Gold was a British video game publisher and developer from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, producing numerous titles on a variety of 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit platforms.
They also published various reissues using the Kixx budget label.
U.S. Gold was founded in Birmingham in spring 1984 by Geoff and Anne Brown as the publishing division of their software-distribution company Centresoft. Its primary purpose was to republish popular American computer games—which, the company claimed, usually had larger budgets and longer production time than British games—in the UK and Europe. Brown sold them for £9.99, much lower prices than in the United States, and purchased full-colour advertisements in computer magazines. By 1985 the company claimed to expect $6 million in annual sales. It planned to release 150 games that year from 24 American software companies, including up to 80 for the Commodore 64.
When the popular computers in the UK became the ZX Spectrum and later the Amstrad CPC, Brown was faced with the problem of converting the US games he was licensing to UK formats, since the company didn't have a development capability. US Gold teamed up with a UK publisher, Ocean Software, based in Manchester, who were also very prolific at the time and they were responsible for the first US Gold conversions to UK formats. This arrangement proved difficult to continue as Ocean became more and more involved with their own development for their own games. Brown then decided to farm out his US Gold Development to independent UK developers and also founded his own development studios. This business plan proved to be an instant success, prompting U.S. Gold to expand by acquiring smaller developers and seeking out licences that they could commercialise. At the same time Centresoft became the largest UK games distributor with key High Street retail accounts such as Boots and John Menzies as well as most of the independent computer retailers. Various popular video games were ported by the company to IBM PC including Street Fighter II, Beach Head, Zaxxon, Impossible Mission, and many sports games including World Cup Italia '90 and World Cup USA '94.
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