moshboy posted the box art for an Apple II game called Raft-Away River and the logo in the corner, for a company I'd never heard of, caught my eye. Going from mobygames and wikipedia, Jacaranda Software was an Australia-based educational games company who mainly developed for 8-bit microcomputers, eg the Apple II, C64, BBC Micro, and Australia's own MicroBee (2nd best name for an 80s micro ever1).
In the early 90s Jacaranda's catalog was handed over to another tree-named company called Greygum Software, who also had a nice logo, and closed in 2018:
The earliest titles were produced by Jacaranda Software, set up in the early 80s by John Collins of Jacaranda Wiley and run by Rosanne Hood (née Gare). Bruce took over when Rosanne moved to Canberra, and then Greygum was formed in 1992 when Jacaranda's parent company, John Wiley, moved out of primary education. Greygum took over the Jacaranda titles, and went on to produce lots of other educational software over the next thirty years.
I think about what it would have been like to work at an outfit like these - likely pretty different from a typical game dev shop of the 1980s, but that was long enough before I joined the industry that it's all about equally distant. I hope all these people had fun and made a decent living and treated each other well, in the shade of their local trees.
-
the first being the Grundy NewBrain
