Colin Gordon’s career stretches across several distinct eras of video game history. He began when commercial games could still be created by tiny teams working on home computers, moved into management as companies such as Ocean Software expanded during the 16-bit era, crossed the Atlantic to help build Boss Game Studios during the rise of the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and eventually became a publisher trying to find a place for inexpensive and unusual games in an increasingly expensive console market.
In a 2010 interview with Gamasutra, now Game Developer, Gordon remembered becoming involved with games around 1984. He said he started a development company in Northern Ireland that produced games for machines including the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad. From there his career carried him through Ocean, Virgin Interactive, Boss Game Studios, Kemco U.S.A., and finally Valcon Games, placing him inside more than twenty five years of enormous technological and commercial change.
Unlike developers whose reputations are tied to a single famous creation, Gordon’s importance is easier to see by following the companies and games around him. His surviving credits include programming, graphics, production, product development, executive management, and publishing. Together they document someone who learned the business from the level of individual pixels and machine limitations before eventually making decisions about entire catalogs of games.
Choice Software and the 8-Bit Years
The exact founding date of Choice Software is difficult to establish with certainty, but the company was unquestionably operating in Northern Ireland by 1984. One of its earliest surviving releases was Cityfighter for the ZX Spectrum, published that year. The World of Spectrum archive identifies Choice Software as the publisher and lists Colin Gordon, Stephen McCulough, and David Bolton among the authors.
Bolton later remembered Cityfighter as the first computer game that he and Gordon produced at Choice. According to Bolton, Gordon wrote the Spectrum version while he developed a Commodore 64 edition. The Spectrum release survives today, while the Commodore version has apparently been lost despite Bolton’s recollection that it was completed. That small uncertainty is typical of early British computer game history, where games were often produced quickly and company records, source code, and even finished commercial software could disappear within a few years.
Choice soon moved beyond simple arcade-style games. In 1985 Gordon and Bolton were credited on The Bulge, a computer wargame based on the Battle of the Bulge. The Centre for Computing History preserves the ZX Spectrum edition and identifies both men as its authors. Gordon’s later comments about his personal fondness for strategy games make the credit especially interesting, since decades afterward he would still describe complex military strategy as the type of game he personally enjoyed.
Choice increasingly became a conversion house, adapting games to the assortment of incompatible computers that dominated the British market. A successful title might need separate versions for the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Amiga, and Atari ST, with each machine imposing different limits on memory, graphics, sound, and processor speed.
The surviving credits show Gordon working directly on this problem. Choice handled the Amstrad version of Ocean’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, while Gordon and Sean Pearce programmed and adapted graphics for the Amstrad version of HardBall!. On that conversion the team did not simply receive modern development tools and portable source code. Historical notes attached to the credits describe them working from the existing Commodore 64 release, its manual, and a baseball rule book while rebuilding what they could for different hardware.
By the later 1980s Gordon’s credits included projects such as Mario Bros. on the Spectrum, Platoon on the Amiga, Beach Volley, and The New Zealand Story. The Amiga version of Platoon credits Gordon and Sean Pearce as coders, while the Atari ST version of The New Zealand Story identifies Choice Software as developer and Gordon as programmer. On Beach Volley, he was credited not only with programming but also graphics work, evidence of how many jobs could fall to the same person inside a small development company.
Memories from people who visited Choice provide a glimpse inside the company. One contemporary recalled Gordon as the firm’s owner and lead programmer and remembered him looking over demonstrations from young local programmers who hoped to work in games. Choice’s relationship with Ocean became particularly important, with the Northern Irish studio handling conversions while Ocean supplied major licenses and access to a much larger commercial market.
That arrangement could also demonstrate how precarious contract development was. Choice began a Commodore 64 conversion of The New Zealand Story, with Gordon and David Clarke associated with the project, before Ocean moved that particular version in-house. An early build was eventually recovered decades later from an old disk, preserving part of a project that otherwise might have disappeared completely.
From Programmer to Ocean Software Manager
Choice Software eventually closed, and recollections from people around the company say Gordon moved to England to work for Ocean Software. The surviving credits show an obvious change in his responsibilities. Instead of appearing primarily as a programmer, Gordon increasingly appeared as a producer and development manager.
By 1991 and 1992, he was receiving production credits across several Ocean projects. His credits from this period include The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, Elf, Hook, WWF European Rampage Tour, Cool World, and the NES version of The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt. The credits for Cool World, for example, identify Gordon as producer, while Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt names him as the Ocean Software producer overseeing a game developed with Enigma Variations.
A contemporary Amiga Format feature from early 1993 described Gordon as Ocean’s senior software manager and said he was responsible for overseeing many of the company’s projects. That description helps explain the changing credits. The programmer who had once been personally converting games for home computers was now coordinating development across teams and projects at one of Britain’s best-known software publishers.
His 1993 credits included product development work on Ocean’s DOS adaptation of Jurassic Park, alongside Gary Bracey. Around the same period Gordon also moved through Virgin Interactive Entertainment in the United Kingdom. The manual for The Lion King includes a special thanks credit to Colin Gordon of VIE UK, while Boss Game Studios creative director Seth Mendelsohn later remembered Gordon working with Virgin’s head of development before leaving Britain for the United States.
The Virgin period appears to have been comparatively brief, but it became the bridge to the next major stage of his career.
Building Boss Game Studios in America
Boss Game Studios emerged in 1994 as a game development operation connected to Richard Edlund’s Boss Film Studios. Edlund was already famous in Hollywood visual effects, but the new game division established itself in Redmond, Washington, close to Nintendo of America and the rapidly growing technology industry around Seattle.
Mendelsohn’s contemporary account places Gordon near the beginning of that operation. According to him, Boss president Martin Rae first hired Gordon for the new game company. Gordon then contacted Mendelsohn, whom he knew from Virgin, and recruited him to join the studio. Boss was preparing development for emerging systems including Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s still-unreleased Ultra 64, later renamed the Nintendo 64.
Gordon’s role was now firmly on the executive side of development. The 1996 PlayStation game Spider: The Video Game credits him as executive in charge of production. By the time Boss released Top Gear Rally for Nintendo 64 in 1997, the game’s original manual identified him as Vice President of Development.
The distinction became particularly visible in August 1997 when Boss Film Studios shut down its Hollywood visual effects business. The Los Angeles Times reported that the closure would not affect the separate game operation in Washington, which employed about forty people. Gordon, identified as vice president of product development for Boss Games, was quoted as a company representative during the transition.
Boss continued producing games through the Nintendo 64 generation. World Driver Championship, released in 1999, again credits Gordon as Vice President of Product Development, as does Stunt Racer 64 in 2000. His position placed him above individual programming and art teams, overseeing products during a period when making a console game had become dramatically more complicated and expensive than it had been during the Choice Software years.
Gordon’s comments from this period are valuable because they capture the economic concerns surrounding the Nintendo 64 from the viewpoint of a developer. In a January 2000 interview preserved by Nintendo World Report, he argued that the cost of Nintendo 64 cartridges made publishers reluctant to experiment. A publisher had to consider not only development costs but also the money committed to manufacturing physical cartridge inventory. If a title failed, both investments could become losses.
It was a strikingly different problem from the one Gordon had faced when building Spectrum and Amstrad conversions. The technology was incomparably more powerful, but the financial risk surrounding a commercial release had also become much greater.
Kemco and the Search for New Games
After his years at Boss, Gordon moved to Kemco U.S.A. His responsibilities again combined development knowledge with the business of finding commercially viable games.
A Kemco press release dated March 5, 2003 identified Gordon as the company’s Director of Research and Development. Kemco was attending the Game Developers Conference in San Jose specifically looking for externally developed projects, and Gordon described the company as interested not only in established genres but also in games capable of stretching their boundaries.
The position also reconnected him with a company that had already figured prominently in his career. Kemco had published Top Gear Rally during his time at Boss. At Kemco U.S.A., however, Gordon met the person who would become his next business partner, Glen Halseth.
When Kemco’s American operation changed direction, Gordon and Halseth decided to create a publishing company of their own. Gordon later explained that Halseth brought experience in sales and marketing, while his own background lay more heavily in development and relationships with developers and publishers. The combination became Valcon Games.
Valcon Games and the Budget Publishing Business
The exact starting date of Valcon is slightly unclear. Gordon remembered the company beginning in 2004 when interviewed in 2010, while later company histories commonly date operations to 2005. Rather than forcing those records into a single exact date, it is safest to say that Valcon emerged from the former Kemco team around 2004 and 2005.
Valcon entered a very different business from the companies Gordon had worked for during the 1980s and 1990s. It could not compete with the enormous development and marketing budgets of the largest publishers, so the company concentrated on lower-priced releases, licensed European games, overlooked projects, and titles that could serve smaller audiences.
Gordon’s European connections were particularly useful. He explained that Valcon could find games developed or published in Europe and bring them into the American market, especially on PlayStation 2, where the massive installed base still created opportunities for inexpensive software. Early Valcon releases included Suzuki TT Superbikes, with the company acting as its American publisher, followed by a growing catalog of racing, sports, family, and specialty games.
His comments about selling budget games reveal how much his work had changed since the Choice Software years. Gordon believed the front of the package had to communicate almost everything a customer needed to understand. For an inexpensive game sitting on a retail shelf, the title and cover image had to persuade someone to pick up the box before the publisher had any chance of making the sale. Valcon also had to operate with limited overhead because its lower prices left little room for expensive mistakes.
Yet Gordon did not limit Valcon entirely to safe products. His longtime interest in strategy games influenced the company’s decision to bring Dai Senryaku to North America, despite his recognition that a complicated Japanese military strategy series violated many of the rules Valcon normally followed when selecting accessible budget software. He later admitted that the hoped-for audience never developed as strongly as he wanted.
A more visible example was Raiden Fighters Aces. Valcon brought the collection of arcade shooters to the Xbox 360 in North America. Gordon told Siliconera that he had loved the Raiden games during their arcade years and thought the collection would be enjoyable to publish. Valcon already had a relationship with the Japanese company Success, allowing it to secure a title that might otherwise have remained unavailable to American console players.
The game’s surviving credits identify Gordon as Valcon’s Chief Operating Officer, with Halseth as president. Those credits illustrate how far Gordon had traveled professionally from Cityfighter. In 1984 he had personally written code for a Spectrum game issued by his small Northern Irish company. A quarter century later he was running the operating side of an American publisher coordinating developers, localization, platform approval, retail distribution, and relationships with overseas rights holders.
Valcon continued experimenting. Easy Piano for Nintendo DS used a thirteen-key keyboard peripheral inserted into the system’s Game Boy Advance slot and attempted to turn the handheld into both a music game and an introductory teaching device. The company also moved toward downloadable games as console distribution changed, with titles such as Polar Panic and Greed Corp appearing through digital services.
By 2010 Gordon was openly discussing a future built around PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and possibly mobile devices. The physical retail model that had shaped Valcon was already changing beneath the company. Valcon’s documented publishing activity continued into 2011, after which the company largely disappeared from the public game market.
A Career Across Several Video Game Industries
Colin Gordon’s career is significant partly because it refuses to fit neatly into a single period of game history.
At Choice Software he belonged to the generation that learned development by confronting hardware directly. Programmers moved code and graphics from one incompatible computer to another, frequently working with tiny teams and performing several jobs at once. At Ocean he became part of the production machinery that turned movie, television, arcade, and sports properties into releases across an expanding range of systems.
At Boss Game Studios he entered the American console business just as three-dimensional graphics, expensive cartridges, larger staffs, and relationships with companies such as Nintendo transformed the economics of development. At Kemco he searched for outside development talent. At Valcon he faced the problem from the opposite side, deciding which games a small publisher could afford to release and which overlooked foreign titles might find an American audience.
The surviving credits now span around fifty games and an unusually broad collection of roles. They include programming, graphics, production, product development, executive supervision, research and development, and company management. Databases alone cannot explain exactly how much influence any executive had over every individual game, but the pattern is unmistakable. Gordon spent decades working at the points where developers, publishers, hardware companies, retailers, and players met.
That makes his story valuable for understanding more than one developer. From a small software house in Northern Ireland to the shelves of American retailers and the emergence of digital console publishing, Gordon’s career follows the same transformation experienced by the video game industry itself.
The machines grew more powerful. Teams grew larger. Development budgets increased. Distribution moved from cassette tapes and cartridges to discs and eventually downloads. Yet the central question Gordon faced throughout those changes remained surprisingly consistent: how do you take a game somebody has created, adapt it to the realities of the market in front of you, and get it into the hands of someone who wants to play it?
For more than twenty five years, Colin Gordon worked on different answers to that question.
Sources & Further Reading
Sheffield, Brandon. “Interview: Valcon’s Gordon On Why Game Boxes Matter, And ‘Odd’ Japanese Titles.” Gamasutra, now Game Developer, June 29, 2010. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/interview-valcon-s-gordon-on-why-game-boxes-matter-and-odd-japanese-titles. Game Developer
Siliconera Staff. “How Raiden Fighters Aces Flew to North America.” Siliconera, May 15, 2009. https://www.siliconera.com/how-raiden-fighters-aces-flew-to-north-america/. Siliconera
Siliconera Staff. “Would You Buy an Ikki Tousen Game If It Cut Shredded Clothing?” Siliconera, May 19, 2009. https://www.siliconera.com/would-you-buy-an-ikki-tousen-game-if-it-cut-shredded-clothing/.
Siliconera Staff. “Shining Dragon Vs. the ESRB: Round Two, Fight!” Siliconera, April 22, 2010. https://www.siliconera.com/SHINING-DRAGON-VS-THE-ESRB-ROUND-TWO-FIGHT/.
Berghammer, Billy. “Boss on Dolphin?” Nintendo World Report, January 28, 2000. Originally published by IGN64. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/4543/boss-on-dolphin.
Kemco U.S.A. “Kemco in Pursuit of Game Acquisitions at GDC.” Press release, March 5, 2003. https://www.ladydragon.com/a-050303kemco.html.
Game Zero. “Interview with Seth Mendelsohn.” Game Zero. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.gamezero.com/team-0/articles/interviews/seth_mendelsohn/index.html.
Huffstutter, P. J. “Special Effects Firm Boss Film Closes Its Doors.” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1997. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-27-fi-26219-story.html.
Boss Game Studios. Top Gear Rally. Nintendo 64 instruction manual. Kemco, 1997. https://www.retrogames.cz/manualy/N64/Top_Gear_Rally_-_Nintendo_64_-_Manual.pdf. RetroGames.cz
Boss Game Studios. World Driver Championship. Nintendo 64 instruction manual. Midway Home Entertainment, 1999. https://nintendo64.pl/wp-content/uploads/World-Driver-Championship-USA.pdf. Nintendo 64
Valcon Games LLC. Raiden Fighters Aces. Xbox 360 manual and credits. 2009. https://epix-ssl.xbox.com/shaXam/0201/89/6f/896f1b9f-e9b1-4f39-a803-5ffb41a810cc.PDF?v=1. Epix
World of Spectrum. “Cityfighter.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://worldofspectrum.net/item/0013416/.
Gasking, Frank. “Cityfighter.” Games That Weren’t 64. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/cityfighter/.
Gasking, Frank. “New Zealand Story V1.” Games That Weren’t 64, June 4, 2015; updated August 21, 2021. https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/new-zealand-story-v1/. Games That Weren’t
C64.COM. “Scene Interview.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.c64.com/scene_display_interview.php?interview=273. C64
C64.COM. “Tank.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.c64.com/games/2501. C64
Centre for Computing History. “The Bulge.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/75687/The%20Bulge/.
Lemon Amiga. “Platoon.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/platoon.
Lemon Amiga. “The New Zealand Story.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/newzealandstory.
Atari Legend. “The New Zealand Story.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.atarilegend.com/games/the-new-zealand-story.
Lemon64. “Beach Volley.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.lemon64.com/game/beach-volley.
MobyGames. “Colin Gordon.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/person/93601/colin-gordon/. The database provides a useful index connecting Gordon with Choice Software, Boss Game Studios, Valcon Games, and numerous individual releases. MobyGames
MobyGames. “HardBall!: Amstrad CPC Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/7061/hardball/credits/cpc/.
MobyGames. “The Bulge: Battle for Antwerp: Commodore 64 Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/38483/the-bulge-battle-for-antwerp/credits/c64/.
MobyGames. “The Addams Family: Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt: NES Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/5646/the-addams-family-pugsleys-scavenger-hunt/credits/nes/.
MobyGames. “Jurassic Park: DOS Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/jurassic-park/credits.
MobyGames. “Spider: The Video Game: PlayStation Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/10149/spider-the-video-game/credits/playstation/.
MobyGames. “Top Gear Rally.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/8919/top-gear-rally/. The preserved credits identify Gordon as Boss Game Studios’ vice president of development. MobyGames
MobyGames. “World Driver Championship.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/4390/world-driver-championship/. The game credits identify Gordon as vice president of product development. MobyGames
MobyGames. “Stunt Racer 64: Nintendo 64 Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/9235/stunt-racer-64/credits/n64/.
MobyGames. “Valcon Games LLC.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/company/7238/valcon-games-llc/.
Amiga Format. “Ocean Software.” Issue 42, January 1993. Archived at AmigaLand. https://amigaland.com/dataz/press_magazine/AMIGA_Format/PDF_TXT/Amiga_Format_Issue_042_%281993-01%29.pdf.
Retro Gamer. “The Story of CJ the Elephant.” Issue 231. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://pocketmags.com/us/retro-gamer-magazine/issue-231/articles/the-story-of-cj-the-elephant.
Nintendo Life. “Easy Piano DS with Keyboard Peripheral Announced.” November 2009. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2009/11/easy_piano_ds_with_keyboard_peripheral_announced.