U.S. Gold

U.S. Gold was a British video game publisher and developer, who was active from the mid 1980s until the mid- 1990s in the gaming market for 8- bit, 16 -bit and 32- bit computers.

History

U.S. Gold was founded in Birmingham in 1984 by Geoff Brown as a publishing division of Soft Centre, a computer game distribution company. The main objective of U.S. Gold was to publish popular American Atari and Commodore 64 games in the UK and Europe. This proved to be a milestone for the UK games publishing scene in which up to this time, few American games were released.

Brown decided to not only increase the price of U.S. Gold games at £ 9.99, but the games with full-color ads in the then popular computer magazines to advertise. After the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC had become the most popular home computer later in the UK, Brown had the games for the British television format can be reprogrammed, as there was no corresponding adjustment for these computers, ie he had to set up a development department for U.S. Gold in England.

Brown teamed up with a British publishing house, Ocean Software, in Manchester, who were responsible for the conversion of the first U.S. gold games in the UK format. This cooperation was difficult but with time, since Ocean was more and more concerned with developing their own games. Brown therefore decided to set up his company as an independent UK developer with in-house development studios. U.S. Gold had two development studios, who worked for the company: Silicon Dreams and Core Design. Silicon Dreams was founded by U.S. Gold for Core Design had been shopped. This plan was an instant success, prompting U.S. gold was smaller developers and other licenses for games to very successful sales of game software by the obligation. At the same time soft Centre became the largest UK games distributor. Various popular video games were ported by U.S. Gold on the IBM PC, such as Street Fighter II, Beach Head, Zaxxon, Impossible Mission, and many sports games like World Cup Italia '90 and World Cup USA '94.

The last retail game that the U.S. gold logo should bear was in Olympic Games: Atlanta was that published in 1996 in June 1996 for Sega Saturn, PlayStation, PC and 3DO. In April 1996, U.S. Gold was acquired by Eidos Interactive.

Labels

For the distribution of games in Europe used U.S. Gold numerous labels. The most famous of these is probably Synsoft what today is often mistakenly equated with Synapse software. Under Synsoft but hides nothing more than a label under which only matches the company Synapse software have been sold in Europe.

Among the well-known U.S. gold labels include:

• Synsoft
• Go!
• All American Adventures
• Americana software
• Kixx!

Capcom

U.S. Gold released ports of various computer Arcardespielen the Japanese company Capcom, such as Street Fighter, Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Ghouls' n Ghosts, Mercs and Forgotten Worlds. Furthermore ported U.S. Gold and the Capcom game Strider, also U.S. gold also own independent sequel Strider II developed itself. U.S. Gold also published the original Game Gear version of the game Mega Man.