Gremlin Graphics / Gremlin Interactive

The story of Gremlin Graphics begins in Sheffield, England, in the mid-1980s, a time when the British video game scene was powered by equal parts creativity, caffeine, and computers that made curious buzzing noises whenever you asked too much of them. The company was founded by Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn, who started with a simple goal: publish interesting games and see what happened next. In those early years, the answer was usually “another game,” often arriving faster than anyone expected.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gremlin Graphics became a familiar name for players of home computers such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga. The studio released a wide variety of titles, including the chaotic run-and-gun adventure Monty Python's Flying Circus and the imaginative platformer Zool, which featured a ninja from the “Ninja Dimension,” a concept that sounds exactly like something invented late at night during a design meeting involving too much soda. Zool briefly became something of a mascot for the company, although mascots in the early ’90s tended to appear and disappear with the speed of a caffeinated hedgehog.

Later, the studio found major success with the futuristic racing game Actua Soccer and eventually rebranded itself as Gremlin Interactive. By the late 1990s the company was acquired by Infogrames, closing a long chapter in British game development. Still, Gremlin Graphics left behind a legacy of inventive projects and a catalogue that perfectly captures the lively unpredictability of the early home computer era.