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the retro hour podcast episode number 157 your weekly dose of retro gaming and technology news with me, Dan Wood.

And me, Ravi Abbott.

And welcome to this week's show.

Now, today we're going to be talking about a company that were such a big company back here in the UK in the world of video games and computers.

Back in the early 80s, really, I find it quite hard to find information about, but they're a label that everybody used to buy their games. Today we're going to be talking about Telecom. Yeah, so this was the company that was out of British Telecom, right? Who were the phone company in the country? Yeah, now British Telecom for those outside the UK, they are, I mean now it's privatised, isn't it, British Telecom? But back in the day, it was like a publicly owned service, wasn't it? The telephone company. And Telecom software was a weird one because British Telecom invented this company and also the post office were involved in it as well. But actually it turned out there had a few spin-off labels, including the one we're mainly going to talk about today, which was Firebird

software. Going back to that era, I mean, they started bringing out games back in 1984.

So that was kind of, here in the UK, that was the peak of the microcomputer revolution

when all the kids were going out getting spectrums and Commodore 64s and that kind of thing.

But what was interesting is, obviously having the backing of British Telecom, they probably

had a few more quid in their bank account than rival labels. So they're able to get some pretty good

licenses. Oh, definitely. And we're talking to the owner of Bird Sanctuary as well, which is an

awesome name, which is kind of the Firebirds huge fan site. Yeah, it's a bit more than a fan site,

really. It's really a definitive history website. And because today we're joined by Richard Hewison. Now, Richard actually worked for Firebird back in the day. And we were looking through his biog on Moby Games. He's worked as essentially a quality assurance tester, a video games tester, since the early 80s. And let me name a couple of the games that he's been involved with.

Frontier, Elite 2,

Classic.

Reach for the Skies, Dune 2, Sensible Soccer, Beneath a Steel Sky,

...