The Guild

From IFWiki

Also known as The Guild Adventure Software, The Guild was a homegrown software label set up by Anthony Collins in 1991, who ran the venture until the autumn of 1993.

Adventure author Tony Collins had self-published games such as Nythyel, Theseus and the Minotaur and Miami Mice for Spectrum & Amstrad CPC in the mid-1980s. He also ran another short-lived software label called 50/50 Club Software.

After working on some projects with Mark Eltringham’s Recreation Re-Creation Software, Tony returned to the scene and launched The Guild Adventure Software in the autumn of 1991, initially concentrating on converting games from other 8-bit formats to the Spectrum & Commodore 64 machines.

Tony, often working as Pegasus Software, produced lots of quick, no-thrills ports of Amstrad titles to the Spectrum & Commodore 64. Initially Philip Reynolds produced conversions to the Amstrad format for him, before Philip went on to set up his own company The Adventure Workshop.

When Recreation Re-Creation went out of business Tony took on a lot of their Amstrad titles, with The Guild initially publishing the disk versions and P.K. Graphics selling the tape editions. Most of The Guild's Amstrad games were passed on to The Adventure Workshop in 1992, when Tony began focusing on the C64 and potential future 16-bit conversions.

The Guild also ran an extensive Public Domain library of C64, Amiga and Spectrum adventures.

The Guild suddenly closed up shop in the autumn of 1993 with the titles in its catalogue being scattered to other homegrown publishing labels. Some were taken on by Adventure Probe Software. An agreement was made with Jason Mackenzie of Binary Zone PD to sell The Guild's C64 titles under license and use the label's name for their catalogue of PD adventures. Other games, previously distributed by The Guild, ended up being republished by The Adventure Workshop.

Note: Many of the adventures listed on archive sites, as being published by The Guild were actually originally published elsewhere by their authors or were distributed as Public Domain/Shareware. It wasn't until later, post-1991, that they formed part of The Guild's main catalogue and/or their Public Domain library. In general, any game listed with a pre-1992 date was probably published elsewhere first.

Games

(Note: This is not currently an accurate or complete list of The Guild's games)

Links