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Quicksilva
Quicksilva was one of the first games software houses. Founded by Nick Lambert in 1980, Mark was it's second full time member of staff in 1981, joining John Hollis, who was designing hardware and programming for Quicksilva in his spare time. Caroline Hayon (now Caroline Eyles) joined soon after to run the office. Mark was the Creative Director at Quicksilva.
Quicksilva started in the back room of the house Nick was renting in Maybush, Southampton, but grew incredibly rapidly and within a couple of years had its own offices in America and distributed its games throughout the world. Rod Cousens (now COO at Acclaim) joined Quicksilva to sort out overseas sales and was soon made Managing Director.
Quicksilva was sold in 1984 to Argus Press, a division of British Electric Traction plc. Mark was Creative Director at the time of the sale and left shortly afterwards to work as a freelance game designer and make holograms.
Quicksilva is famous for publishing Ant Attack, Time Gate, Meteor Storm, Defenda and many other titles. It published games on the Sinclair ZX 80, Sinclair ZX 81, Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, MSX and a graphics program on the Atari 400/800. It produced add on hardware for the ZX 80 and ZX 81, including a hi-resolution graphics board for the ZX 81.
Quicksilva was one of the first companies to licence characters for games. Mark licenced 2000 AD's Strontium Dog, possibly the first time (in the UK) that a game had been produced featuring a licenced character. Quicksilva also produced games based on: Raymond Briggs' The Snowman, Rupert the Bear, The Thompson Twins and the film Fantastic Voyage.
Early on Mark started writing stories on game covers, trying to add depth to games that were often fairly abstract looking, given the graphics capabilities of the ZX 80 and ZX 81. This is said to be the first time this happened and was one of the things that made Quicksilva stand out from other 'golden age' companies.
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