There was a time when one of Australia's pioneering and most historically important games company had a website. Beam Software closed their company website sometime after mid-1999 after they were acquired by Infogrames, and it was unfortunate because the Beam site had a wealth of information on themselves which had simply disappeared from the internet for good. Sadly, none of the pages from Beam's site managed to get archived at places such as The Wayback Machine before 1999.
Beam Software were truly pioneers of the games industry. Starting off modestly in the lounge room of co-founder, Alfred Migrom, Beam went on to accomplish incredible things during the early days of games development. For a more complete story on Beam, please head on over to our wiki page here. Additionally, you can also look at our Developer Origins chart to see how many developers and companies can trace their roots right back to Beam (32 companies so far, including Tantalus, Torus, Blue Tongue, The Firemonkeys, and a whole lot more).
Luckily, I had a keen interest on the Australian games industry even as far back as in 1999 and managed to save a few of the more important pages from the Beam website before it went down. Unfortunately, I didn't get everything. The pages that I got were about Beam's Directors, Beam's History, the Key Management at Beam, The People at Beam, as well as a small handful of press releases that Beam released over the years, but that was it. It was a miracle that even after many series of hard disk formats, computer migrations, and operating system upgrades, that I managed to still have those files years later when they were rediscovered in 2006 and placed up on Sumea.
Now, I have some great news.
A short while ago I was contacted by an ex-employee of Beam Software who saw our paltry small archive of the old Beam Site and wanted to help out. Richard Crane was a Games Programmer / Network Programmer for Beam from '94 and was part of the key team responsible for their first systems and websites going onto the internet. This meant that the Richard had the entire Beam website archived somewhere. As an added bonus, he also had the Melbourne House website too. Thankfully, he had these files locked and archived for safe keeping and was able to dig them up after over a decade to pass them on to us. We are now storing the COMPLETE Beam software and Melbourne House website on tsumea for anyone to browse and store themselves if they so wish.
A huge thanks to Richard for making this possible, and we hope you enjoy checking the sites out!
(We also have the old Ratbag games website as well!)
Blast from the past
Nice work Souri! The Cricket 97 page even contains a link to my fan page, which is how I got started in this industry back in high school. Of course, the link is long dead. Although I bet I have a local copy of that somewhere around too :)
link
Ah, I had to check to see that link :) Great stuff. If I had the time, I'd love to make a Melbourne House fan page too. They were hugely influential in my interests in games development and the local games industry. It was a major surprise back in the 80's during the 8-bit computer era to know that one of my most favourite games ever (The Way of the Exploding Fist) was developed right here in Australia.