Earthlight

Pete Cooke is a famous British computer games programmer, best known for his work published in the 1980s for the 8-bit home computers, especially the ZX Spectrum. His software is often instantly-recognisable thanks to his use of his own point and click GUI in many of his games. This is manipulated by keyboard or joystick since it was rare for Spectrum owners to use a mouse. Cooke's games were notable for being extremely innovative and ahead of... their time. Tau Ceti , for example, featured not only a form of solid 3D graphics but was also set on a planet with night and day cycles and shadows. Micronaut One was imaginatively set inside futuristic biocomputers with the player controlling a microscopic craft and attempting to clear the tunnels of the biocomputers of an insect-like life form called Scrim. This game also used fast-moving 3D graphics as well as featuring an enemy that went through a realistic life-cycle, beginning each level as eggs and progressing to larvae and eventually adult skrim which would then lay more eggs.
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Telecomsoft was the computer software division of British telecommunications company British Telecom . It was the owner of the well-known Firebird and Rainbird labels, under which it sold video games at a variety of price-points. Telecomsoft was founded in 1984 when Ederyn Williams, the General... Manager of British Telecom's Information Services division, proposed a forward-thinking software publishing strategy that would take advantage of future developments in the telecommunications industry. Computer games were the fastest growing sector within the computer software market at the time, thus Telecomsoft was set up specifically to publish games on a wide variety of 8-bit and 16-bit platforms. Three publishing labels were initially established within Telecomsoft, each with its own specific marketing strategy, although some of them would later fragment to form a number of sub-labels. The Firebird label would be Telecomsoft's primary identity. Although initially set up to publish a range of budget titles, Firebird later evolved into a full price label. As a consequence the Silverbird label was formed to continue publishing the budget range.
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