Hewson
History
Hewson Consultants first successful release was Pilot, a flight simulator for the ZX81 by Mike Male, an air traffic controller at Heathrow Airport. Moving to the newly-released ZX Spectrum, he produced Hewson's first two chart hits, Nightflite (an upgraded version of Pilot) and Heathrow Air Traffic Control. Mike Male and fellow air traffic controller Bob Hillyer later created the train simulators Southern Belle and Evening Star, both of which also reached the top 10.
Graftgold, who produced many of Hewson's biggest hits, moved to Telecomsoft in 1987 seeking a more stable base. This sparked a legal dispute between the publishers over two games already advertised for release by Hewson. With no contract between Hewson and Graftgold, Magnetron and Morpheus were eventually published on the Firebird and Rainbird labels.
Amid falling sales in 1987, Hewson created the budget labels Rack-It and Rebound, which were administered by Mastertronic. They also outsourced the rest of their distribution and marketing to Gremlin, which led to some Hewson games appearing on Gremlin compilation titles and on US Gold's Kixx label. These arrangements were short-lived; in 1988 the Rack-It label was re-launched and a new distributor for all their software was found.
Hewson went into administration in 1991 when their German distributors were unable to pay their invoices.
Note
The figures for Months in the Top 10 and Months at No. 1 are based on the All Format and Multi Format chart only.
Columns are sortable, sorting by the cover column will sort by chart appearance date.
Title | Top 10 | No. 1 | Rank | |
---|---|---|---|---|
![]() | Uridium | 2 | 1 | 161 |
![]() | Exolon | 3 | 1 | 198 |
![]() | Technician Ted | 2 | 0 | 354 |
![]() | Avalon | 2 | 0 | 388 |
![]() | Zynaps | 0 | 0 | 621 |
![]() | Battle Valley HEWSON / RACK-IT | 0 | 0 | 662 |
![]() | Dragontorc | < 1 | < 1 | 775 |
![]() | Cybernoid | 0 | 0 | 789 |
![]() | Heathrow Air Traffic Control | < 1 | 0 | 901 |
![]() | Quazatron | 0 | 0 | 918 |
![]() | Alleykat | < 1 | 0 | 928 |
![]() | Nightflite | 0 | 0 | 984 |
![]() | Southern Belle | 0 | 0 | 1031 |
![]() | Paradroid | 0 | 0 | 1159 |
![]() | Dragonfly II | 0 | 0 | 1312 |
![]() | Draughts Genius HEWSON / RACK-IT | 0 | 0 | 1475 |
![]() | Evening Star | 0 | 0 | 1599 |
![]() | Fantasia Diamond | 0 | 0 | 1754 |
![]() | Dragonfly | 0 | 0 | 2139 |
![]() | 3D Lunattack | 0 | 0 | 2386 |
![]() | Iridis Alpha | 0 | 0 | 2502 |
![]() | Ranarama | 0 | 0 | 2550 |
![]() | Nebulus | 0 | 0 | 2591 |
![]() | 5th Gear HEWSON / RACK-IT | 0 | 0 | 2647 |
![]() | Zamzara HEWSON / RACK-IT | 0 | 0 | 2666 |