The Story and Games of U.S. Gold: 100% All-American Software - Kim Justice 

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Many years ago, I worked at a place called VDO in the Holford industrial park in Birmingham. US Gold were also based there, and I remember seeing the sign for the first time and being really surprised. I guess I had always just assumed that they were an American company. I was also surprised that they were still around, because it was around 1996 or 1997, and I always associated them with the 8-bit era. I've just realized that this was a very boring story without a satisfying conclusion. My apologies if you read this far.

Kim you are a rockstar. It always blows me away how well researched and informative these videos are. Fantastic work as usual. Cheers.

This is one of the most enjoyable video games-related series on RU-vid. Thanks for all the hard work!

I wouldn't normally click on an hour+ video on YT, let alone watch it from start to finish, however... ...I enjoyed this!!

These are the best videos for an early 80's born kid (and anyone else!). All the right games and names, loads of research and backstory. Ace.

Man, that 'Muscles' story!! Damn. Great video as always and as always, I'm late to the game on this one. Great that Geoff Brown commented as well! You do a great job of covering these stories, having lived it all as a kid through teenage years, you always nail it.

Fantastic documentary as always Kim. Personally I can't hate on US Gold, considering they gave me so much pleasure as a kid with Bruce Lee, Zaxxon, Impossible Mission,Spy Hunter, Dropzone, The Epyx games series (especially Winter Games), Beach Head 2, Raid Over Moscow, Gauntlet, World Class Leaderboard, Dambusters. These were some fantastic games in the day, and US Gold seemed to have a far better output of good to bad games than Imagine or Ocean in my opinion.

Thanks Kim for yet another amazing video. I'm constantly blown away by how much research and detail is put into these videos. I love coming on RU-vid and seeing a new Kimble Justice video in my subs it's an instant watch no matter what time of the day it is because you and your videos are that good. keep up the amazing work and I can't wait for your next video.

I can't say enough how top notch these documentaries are. I can't believe he only has 44k subs. 2018. Still watching this catalog.

Discovered your channel yesterday, with the 'wise of the wobots' review. Then sensible soccer. So much content, such dedication, so many hours of hard work. Limitless love from Greece. Ps. Listening now to your bass cover of outrun. Niiiiiiiiiiice :)

youre the best retro content creator on youtube Kim - mucho ghusto! your documentaries are absolute gold! thanks!

in alien breed, the cheat code "us gold" sets your score to zero hahaha.

Thanks Kim. Fantastic video and so well researched. I still remember playing Beach head for the first time and been blown away. US Gold is a massive name for any 80's British videogamer - but even my old self learnt quite a few things about then in this video.

Usually it is highly irritating when somebody much younger like Kim, attempts to talk about the past with authority and yet Kim manages to do this very accurately. I'm 45 and lived through the late 1970s and on through the 80s and 90s etc. It all pretty much matches up with what Kim says in all the videos, and sometimes I even learn a thing or two. Excellent stuff!

I gotta say, I really like your content Kim. You're very well researched, and are good at keeping me interested through your retrospectives. Well worth the sub. Thanks for all the content!

only part the way through this but this is fascinating. so much hard work put into this, Kim. You're a youtube gem!

From the very beginning of the video, I was thinking to myself, weren't they the publisher that released Flashback, one of my favorite games? I could have sworn I remembered their logo at the beginning of the game. Glad to see I was right. If nothing else, I thank them for that. Also, Tomb Raider.

The thing I love about this channel is the fact that it covers the European micro computer scene, which I find far more interesting than anything happening in America at the time. And most Americans on RU-vid talk about American gaming history like it's the be all and end all. Like how AVGN has a go at Ocean over and over, without knowing the full story of the company.

I stumbled upon this video last night and found it fascinating, thanks so much for putting it together. Not only was I part of the ZX Spectrum generation, but my first ever job was working at the marketing agency you referred to at 24.12, CAMEL. An acronym for Creative Advertising and Marketing Expertise Ltd, if I remember rightly. I worked here from around 1992 and remember the directors referring to Geoff Brown as ‘god’ as it was the main account. CAMEL also worked with Gremlin Graphics, also based in Sheffield and newly changed to Gremlin Interactive when I was there, you’ve now pieced together the association between the publishers. We also looked after TENGEN, and I remember the marketing campaign to reveal their change to Time Warner Interactive. I wasn’t at CAMEL for too long, but enjoyed it. Circa 1994, it got somewhat sad as the bank was called in and staff were laid off, I was lucky as I had resigned and was working my notice. A few months later there was an article in the local paper, The Sheffield Star, saying that CAMEL had gone under. Anyway, a great video that took me back half a lifetime ago - thanks.

Bloody heck Forbidden Forest brought back some memories playing it on my friends c64. Remembered the artwork more than the name. 😉 Hear the music being played in this video.

I remember the World Cup Carnival fiasco.. I remember taking it back to the shop and the seller was not too happy with me. International Football by Commodore was an incredible title for the time.

Kim, I just want to leave a little comment as I nothing major to wax on about, but these documentaries are of such incredible quality I needed to say thank you. Truly, the detail in these is incredible. Thank you.

That was a blast from the past, I use to use Centresoft when i ran an indie game store in the mid 90s through to the early 2000's.

Kim, thank you for the videos. You are covering topics that few other people did and I wished had been covered. :)

That was an awesome production, thanks so much for your effort, you've given me a lot of new respect for US Gold, a brand I never really thought too much of in the past.

I’m glad for Jeff. His continued love of music, more than anything, makes me believe he got out with his soul unscathed. 💕

Amazing video, so much time and effort. I grew up in the 80's and this was a brilliant trip down memory lane. Thank You so much :)

You know what Kim, your journalism chops and thoroughness of research puts a lot of professionals to shame. Cheers!

The best song by Muscles - that I've heard - is by far "I'm Gonna Synthesise You". It's hilarious but pretty cool at the same time. I love your videos Kim, I'm glad you are here.

OMG, you realy excel at bringing my high-school years back! And all this stuff from all these companies i knew so well yet had no idea about what you talk about. Keep it coming. Top notch.

Thoroughly entertaining. Really glad I stumbled upon your videos, Kim. Keep them coming!

Kim Justice, you've narrated so well on your videos..I'd wish a television gaming channel, if there's one in the UK, would put your videos on their list of videos.

What a great story Kim, and you told it so well! I spent far too much of my youth playing Indiana Jones, Gauntlet and Impossible Mission!

Great review! Thank you so much for putting time and effort into these Kim!

been through a few your videos now and all are very well maintained, very well researched etc reminds me of my childhood keep it up man

27 years of buried memories are currently flooding my brain. I really need to get my hands on a C64!

I can't stop listening to, "If You Relaxes Your Mind". Thanks Kim.

For some reason you always keep coming up with the stuff I want to see. Keep 'em coming, Kim.

Yay, a new Kim video! =D I mostly remember US Gold for their hilarious DOS version of Street Fighter II; everything else I know about them is what I've learned from your channel.

Great stuff Kim. Been a a subscriber for years and these histories are the best thing I have seen. Well done and thanks.

Madam, you're one of the best UK based video gaming historians! I hope you're able to keep up the good work and offer us many awesome videos! p.s. a video about Automata UK and Deus Ex MAchina would be super cool to see :)

I used to work in the US GOLD building in Holford Way Birmingham UK. They were a distributors. They are called Centresoft these days. I worked there as a UK official distributor for Sony Playstation.

Superb video as usual Kim. Thank you and keep up the brilliant work.

omg the memories playing these games on my c64 when I was little. Especially beach-head, beach-head 2, zorro and dam bsuters. :)

Wow Kim, i've never seen such a in depth and good video about a games publicer. Thanks.

Bonus points for showing Smashey and Nicey for Radio 1 ;)

Wonderful Story, very insightful and full of information. I watched from beginning to end and was pleased to say the least!

Kim, you're one of the best reviewers out there. Keep up the good work, man.

Fantastic video Kim! The Elvis connection alone deserves a thumbs up.

Excellent documentary, so much stuff I didn't know till now. Thanks Kim, so brilliant!

Always such great content on this channel. Well done, Kim.

Superb as ever Kim, thanks!

I love the music on this Kim. Killled by deaaath. The flashback music. Very cool.

Awesome video, that hour flew by, great stuff Kim!

fantastic work thanks and great work in retro gamer magazine. thanks again.

Thankyou Kim. Look forward to the next instalment.

Wasn't sure I"d be interested in this, but this video got me hooked. Great job!

Great doc. 48:32 master system had a long life in Brazil too, more than in Europe.

A bloody good insight into a company that I thought just turned out crap. Brilliant work as always sir.

I was one of the 15% of UK C64 gamers that had a 1541 hard drive. I loved U.S. Gold therefore, as instead of paying £45 for Ghostbusters on import, I was now paying £12.95 or £14.95 for great U.S. disk games like Little Computer People and Gunship, etc. Part of U.S. Gold's negative reaction was that gamers got angry with multi-load tape version, blaming U.S. Gold, rather than themselves, for not having a floppy drive!

FINALLY, "Bubbler" was a game that I was in an abusive relationship with it. It was hard, it wasn't forgiving but I kept trying again and again. I wonder what my 10 year old me (1986) found so fascinating about it.

Great video. Very interesting and as good as all your other documentaries :)

39:44 not picking up that 1up really cheesed me off for some reason!

I've just seen you're on the Retro Hour podcast this week! I look forward to listening.

God watching all the games & stuff, i'm in a trance.... my childhood is here !!!!!!!!!!

that was kinda really sad. I never liked them as a company because I wasted too much childhood money on games that looked nothing like what they did on the box. Tiger Road.. that was the one that made me swear off US GOLD. Fantastic video. This is the sort of history that needs to be archived.

Fwee Bywan. Thanks for this video. I owned a few U.S. Gold releases as a kid. This was strange, as I live in Canada, and only discovered they were pirated copies years later! Your vid was informative and entertaining, thank you.

This is the 2nd time I watched this and you really did a very nice job here. Thank you.

A really good documentary video I've enjoyed it a lot! Trans Kim Justice and keep up tne great work

Thank you! This refreshed good memories.

I always thought US Gold and Ocean were rivals! You learn something new every day.

Another fantastic video Kim!

These are really important to the history of games.

Completely agree with the summary, and really liked the review. Nice one.

Tim Folin reference. A+video.

another excellent and very in depth games related Doc . . . subscribed !

Excellent video, as always. Well done.

Hey Kim, great Doc as always! (i can't just say it's a "video"). Anyway i came to let you know the great channel ComputerHistory on youtube has just put up an 2h Sinclair presentation and i don't know if you already knew this channel but there is a lot of great stuff there! Cheers

interesting video, very insightful and thoroughly enjoyable.

Thanks Kim! Another great episode!

Wow that was really interesting, great vid and great channel Kim!

Thanks for making sense of my vague childhood memories of this company. I certainly understand and appreciate them more now.

Your research technique is second to none 🔥🔥🔥

*"Imagine if instead of FIFA 17 EA just re-released FIFA 07."* Oh this didn't age well! LOL!. :)

Somewhere in the multiverse, US Gold is still making games, but for the ray tracing enabled Amiga CD512 or just plain Amiga 512 to launch in 2020 with 512 bit memory bus working in parallel to achieve 8192 bits of memory bandwidth for true next gen ray tracing games

Killed Until Dead is a forgotten classic. Not that I'm biased, of course.

Fantastic work as always Kim :)

my BT hub was meant to be delivered yesterday but it wasn't. I certainly don't have enough data for a one hour video...but it's Kim talking about US Gold! what a Dilemma to be in :/

I'd love to see you do one on Matthew Smith: The Syd Barrett of video games!

Great video. A lot of C-64 US Gold games were brought back to the USA thanks to the BBS trading scene.

watching for a second time or maybe third nice documentary on by fav publisher US Gold to this day I dont know why but I always looked at envy at the US Gold titles as I picked up my mastertronic games off the shelf

“The utterly shocking Winter Olympics lillehammer 94” 🤣. Oops, sorry about that! I was one of the artists on the Amiga and PC versions. We were a little hamstrung with the graphics... we had created the majority of graphics all nicely antialiased and looking smooth, then were informed by our project manager from U.S Gold that no antialiasing could be used as it broke the design guidelines from the IOC. Our response was to surround the project managers car with piles of snow.... sorry Stuart! 😂 Did get to spend a fun month in a US Gold office in Brum when the crunch was on before launch, lots of curries, fun nights out and pro-plus fueled all nighters to get to GM

Oh, you had it easy what comes to protests. MikroBitti is one of the big computer hobbyist magazines in Finland (okay, they had a pretty damn big slump into masses-friendly pap in the 2000s, but they refocused themselves to more hardcore audience last year and are pretty decent again). They ran a positive review of Raid over Moscow. The Soviet embassy got wind of this through pro-Soviet leftists, and sent an informal request to the Finnish government to suppress certain anti-Soviet books and films and games. Can't have any media that could jeopardise Finland's foreign relations and breed anti-Soviet sentiment, you know! ...however, aside of starting up the first ever parliamentary debate we've had about video games and being a rather weird pawn in this whole "Finlandisation" nonsense, fortunately, nothing was actually ever done about the game. Oh, and sometime in the late 1980s MikroBitti also ran a very special and very hilarious article about the four worst games they had ever had to touch. World Cup Carnival was one of them. They were surprised that there was even a cassette in the box! I was also not even aware that US Gold was a particularly bad video game publisher. I mostly remember them for their cool game collections they released in early 1990s. The games themselves were at least fairly okay. ...except maybe not so toward the end of Commodore 64's lifespan. I remember looking at Street Fighter II and going "damn, that HAS to be shit, I mean you CAN do good fighting games on C64 (motherfucking Barbarian), but how do you translate a game that needs a stick and 6 buttons to Commodore?"

This is a really great documentary. Personally being a teenager during the height of the C64 and ZX Spectrum years. I do recall US Gold as representing a level of quality/high profile releases. Sure they released some garbage, but let's not forget the market was flooded with budget/unfinished game releases back then.

Kim this is gold, first five minutes are genius!

thanks for NOT USING filters on the games... looks like the original experience back then...

Aztec Challenge was played on Dara Ó Briain's Go 8 Bit a few weeks ago. It was Jon Richardson's favourite game, or so he said.

Once again absolute quality!

I never knew that Ocean and US gold where partners. It looks like they devided and conquered the market. As you mentioned, US gold handled SEGA and Ocean handled others. What I've noticed is that US Gold was with SEGA and Ocean with nintendo. It's almost as if they had setup deviding the market. The Hulk was even released on the master system and seems to be somewhat rare. Was Eidos also behind EDOS? That would an interessting topic for another video, the EDOS system. I feel it was a form of digital distribution avant a lettre. It seems like the EDOS system was a short lived but quite interresting as I have once seen it demonstrated in a store when I bought a game duplicated with that system.