The company started out as "Spectrum Games" in 1983, selling arcade clones for various home computers including the ZX81, ZX Spectrum and VIC 20. Although not named after the ZX Spectrum, the name became confusing and was changed to Ocean Software leading to some of their games being re-released with different titles so the Berzerk clone Frenzy was reissued as the Robotics and Missile Attack became Armageddon. Their early releases were developed in-house, but later in 1984 Ocean Software acquired its former Liverpool rival, the defunct software developer Imagine, and focus shifted from development to publication of games. Also in 1984, Ocean struck a deal with Konami to publish their arcade games for home computers. In 1985, Ocean Software managed to secure the first movie licences, such as Rambo, Short Circuit and Cobra, as well as the TV show Miami Vice and RoboCop which spent about a year on the top of the charts. In 1986, a deal was signed with Taito and Data East for home versions of their arcade games such as Arkanoid, Renegade, Operation Wolf and The NewZealand Story. Also in 1986, Ocean Software created with Marc DJAN Ocean Software France. This studio would create most of the 16-bit arcade conversions between 1986 and 1991, which then became the French marketing and sales subsidiary of Ocean Software Ltd. In 1987, Ocean Software published original games again, after a marginal season filled with licences, resulting in Head over Heels, Match Day II and Wizball. Ocean was voted Best 8-bit Software House of the Year at the 1989 Golden Joystick Awards, along with awards for their 8-bit and 16-bit conversions of Operation Wolf. In 1996, Ocean Software announced a merge with French publisherInfogrames for £100 million. After the merger Infogrames kept Ocean as a separate division publishing their own games until 1998, when they were rebranded to Infogrames United Kingdom Limited and Ocean's last titles would end up being published by Infogrames' European subsidiary, Infogrames Multimedia SA. The company is now named Bandai Namco Entertainment UK Limited after Bandai Namco's purchase of Atari, SA's European assets in 2009.
Tape loaders
One of the most recognisable features of Ocean games on the Commodore 64 was the Ocean Loader. Since cassettes were the most popular storage medium used in Europe for 8-bit computers, loading a game could take up to 30 minutes. Ocean used a special loading system that displayed a picture based on the game and played music while the game was loading. Five versions of the tune exist; 1 and 2 were composed by Martin Galway, 3 by Peter Clarke, 4 and 5 by Jonathan Dunn. The Ocean Loader was first used in the game Hyper Sports. Up to 1987 the Ocean Loader was written by the in-house Ocean programmer Bill Barna, from 1987 to the end of the Commodore 64's commercial life the loader was replaced by "Freeload" written by in house programmer Paul Hughes. Freeload also featured a copyright protection mechanism. On the ZX Spectrum, games after 1984 generally used the Speedlock protection system, which eventually included a countdown timer showing the time left to load a game. In 2004, Paul Hughes released the 6502source code of some of Ocean's development tools, among them Freeload, into the public domain.
Gameography
Licensed games
Ocean was famous for often buying the rights to make video games from different arcade, film and televisionfranchises. Many license games combined several styles for example featuring platform action and car driving. These include RoboCop, Batman The Movie and RoboCop 3, which featured 3D graphics in 16-bit versions. The adventure game Hook also received positive reviews. The 1986 game Batman got a rating of 93% in Crash magazine. Among Ocean's licensed games are:
Ocean also acquired several licenses to develop and publish conversions of arcade games for home computers. The year next to each game corresponds to the year of first release of a computer conversion.
