Black Legend (company)

Black Legend was a British

Mülheim an der Ruhr

later that year.

History

Black Legend was founded in 1992 by Richard M. Holmes, at the time 20 years old and residing in Switzerland. The company targeted the games market for Amiga systems, which was largely neglected at the time, while also working on some games for personal computers. Black Legend worked with external developers, mostly small studios with just a handful of people and teams based in ex-Soviet Union countries. Not long into the company's lifetime, Holmes came in contact with Steven Bailey of the British game distribution company Kompart. Bailey visited the Black Legend offices and the two companies subsequently struck a partnership. By August 1993, Black Legend had become a part of Kompart, with Holmes, Bailey and Duncan Lowthian (Bailey's business partner) acting as both companies' joint directors. Through this move, Black Legend became co-located with Kompart in St Albans, England. With Kompart serving distribution, marketing, and public relations, Black Legend could focus solely on the publishing aspect.^[1]

By the

holiday season of 1993, Black Legend had published four games: Fatman: The Caped Consumer, developed by Hungarian studio I/O Product for Amiga and MS-DOS; Moscow Nights, a collection of Russian-based games for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows; Hyperion, a low-budget Amiga game developed by Norwegian team Offence Software; and Hungary for Fun, a compilation of games including Kid Pool, Logic, and Zarcan.^[1]

In 1994, Black Legend relocated from St Albans to

Five-A-Side Soccer in 1996 before closing in July of that year.^[1]^[2] Attempts to sell Five-A-Side Soccer and Evil's Doom to distributors like Schatztruhe failed.^[2] Holmes subsequently became the European product manager for Eidos Interactive before founding several other video game companies, such as IncaGold, Play Sunshine, and Lolly.^[1]

Games published

Year	Title	Platform(s)
1993	Fatman: The Caped Consumer	Amiga, MS-DOS
	Moscow Nights	Amiga, Microsoft Windows, MS-DOS
	Hyperion	Amiga
	Hungary for Fun	Amiga
1994	Football Glory	Amiga, MS-DOS
	Mega Motion	Amiga
	Exploration	MS-DOS
	Crystal Dragon	Amiga
	Statix	Amiga
	Tactical Manager	Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS
	Tactical Manager Italia	Amiga
	Embryo	Amiga
1995	Tower of Souls	Amiga, MS-DOS
	Behind the Iron Gate	Amiga
	Tactical Manager 2	Amiga
	Wheelspin	Amiga
	Inordinate Desire	MS-DOS
	Demo Maniac	Amiga
	Turbo Trax	Amiga
	Citadel	Amiga
1996	Colony Wars 2492	MS-DOS
1996	Five-A-Side Soccer	Amiga

Cancelled

Evil's Doom

References

^

Future Publishing

. pp. 50–53.

^ ^a ^b "Legendäre Pleite" [Legendary Bankruptcy]. Amiga Joker (in German). No. 8/9'96. Joker-Verlag. August–September 1996. p. 8. Retrieved 16 November 2023 – via Internet Archive.

[Retro_Gamer_197-1] 
Future Publishing
. pp. 50–53.

[1]

[2]