Rainbird Software was established in 1985 as the high-end or "premium" publishing label of Telecomsoft, the software division of the UK state-owned telecommunications giant, British Telecom. Conceived under the management of Tony Rainbird, the brand was born with a strategy completely opposed to the budget-focused market of the era: instead of simple, cheap games, Rainbird focused on highly complex, deep projects featuring unprecedented physical presentation, oriented towards squeezing the maximum performance out of contemporary computers, including new 16-bit architectures and advanced 8-bit configurations.
While its sister Telecomsoft labels (such as *Firebird* or *Silverbird*) covered budget and standard commercial releases, Rainbird became the home for more intellectual and sophisticated productions. They became world-famous for their premium "big boxes" (thick rigid cardboard boxes) that included elaborate introductory novella books up to 100 pages long, physical maps, metal badges, and incredibly detailed technical instruction manuals. This literary and collector-oriented approach turned their titles into instant cult items for 1980s computer enthusiasts.
The core of Rainbird's critical success was built on its alliance with cutting-edge developers and studios. They published the legendary interactive text adventures from Magnetic Scrolls, whose natural language parser logic routines far outperformed contemporary text input systems. They also acted as a launchpad for landmarks in real-time mathematical three-dimensional space simulation, such as the legendary Elite or the ambitious technical simulator Starglider by Argonaut Software. For disk-based computer users, Rainbird represented the highest standard of quality and editorial seriousness across the European continent.
In 1989, in a strategic corporate restructuring move, British Telecom decided to completely divest from the computer entertainment market to focus exclusively on its core telephone infrastructure networks. As a result, Telecomsoft and its entire publishing catalog (including Rainbird's valuable portfolio) were sold to the American multinational corporation MicroProse. Although the new owners continued using the blue bird logo during a brief transition period to release projects already in advanced stages of production, the Rainbird label was eventually dissolved and absorbed, closing a unique golden era of technical and literary software publishing.
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