 | |
| Industry | Video games |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Brandesburton, England |
| Products | Computer games |
Artic Computing was a software development company based in Brandesburton, England from 1980 to 1986. The company's first games were for the Sinclair ZX81 home computer, but they expanded and were also responsible for various ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC computer games. The company was set up by Richard Turner and Chris Thornton. Charles Cecil, who later founded Revolution Software, joined the company shortly after it was founded, writing Adventures B through D. Developer Jon Ritman produced a number of ZX81 and Spectrum games for Artic before moving to Ocean Software.
Usually packaging and distributing games themselves, some titles were picked up by Sinclair who repackaged them under the Sinclair brand, and Amstrad who repackaged them under their Amsoft brand.
Adventures A through D were written for the ZX81 but were quickly ported to the ZX Spectrum platform on its release (as well as other systems). By comparison with later Spectrum adventure games such as The Hobbit, they are basic and short. However they are considered by many[who?][citation needed] to be the start of the adventure game genre on the Spectrum in particular and thus were an important step in the growth of adventure games.