Ocean Software

Ocean was founded in Manchester in 1983 by David Ward and Jon Woods and became one of Britain's biggest game publishers during the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 years. The recipe was licences: RoboCop, Batman, Platoon and nearly every action film whose rights could be bought. Quality varied wildly, and Bob Wakelin's painted cover art was often the best thing in the box.

There were plenty of exceptions, though, and in-house musician Martin Galway wrote SID tunes people still listen to. Once 16-bit machines and then consoles took over, development got expensive, and in 1996 Ocean was bought by France's Infogrames, which dropped the name a couple of years later.