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SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: BO JANGEBORG & FAIRLIGHT (1,2,3)

There is false information floating around the Internet about Fairlight, some of it apparently having its source with Bo himself. EDGE wishes to set the record straight. First, we have the highest regard for Bo who is a great guy and quite brilliant. There is a very good relatively recent interview with Bo about Fairlight, which is generally really informative. But it does contain some errors of fact - why Bo mis-states the facts is unclear to us.

Bo first came to our attention when he submitted his fantastic program "The Artist" to us and we naturally readily agreed to publish it. He told us, as he explains in the video, that he felt he could use the graphics techniques in The Artist to create a 3D game language he wanted to call "Grax" to make a game that would easily rival Ultimate's "Knightlore." He noticed we were working on other similar games (eventually we released such games as "Warlock" and "Inside Outing" using the same kind of orthogonal 3D). But he was sure he could do better. He proved that with Fairlight.

He wrote Fairlight I for us and it was released to great success. One of the most successful Sinclair ZX Spectrum games of all time. Bo then signed a contract with us to program two sequels, "Fairlight II" and "Fairlight III." Development of Fairlight II went very slowly, far slower than he committed to, and we hit a point where Bo should have delivered Fairlight III to us but he still hadn't completed Fairlight II. We recall he reported feeling tired of coding games (and we note he never did code another game to this day).

When we started to ramp up our complaints to him that Fairlight II was so late (quite understandably since WH Smith were impatient to stock it), Bo withheld the Fairlight II code from us (and he admits this at about 40:00 in the interview). He demanded to be let out of the contract that also obligated him to code Fairlight III and we settled with our buying Bo out of the contract and we purchased the rights to Fairlight I and II outright for a lump sum. Bo confirms this at 34:00.

Having settled the disagreement, Bo handed over the Fairlight II code and we launched the game. He did not give us a beta version that we released knowing it had bugs in it - it is unclear to us why he said that. The code he gave us was supposed to be complete and error free. Edge would never knowingly have launched a beta version with known bugs, that would have been commercial suicide that we would never have contemplated.

As complaints of of bugs started to come in, we engaged with Bo again and got him to correct the code and deliver a custom 128K Spectrum version. We released the corrected Fairlight 48k version along with the 128K version and the conversion to the Amstrad (he confirms he supplied correct code at around 40:00). We asked Bo that he not entirely close the door in Fairlight III and the compromise we reached was that at the end of Fairlight II he put on the screen "THE END?" -- to this day we still have interest in producing Fairlight III.

PC Conversion: On a related note there is a false report circulating that we put a stop to a PC conversion of Fairlight I that Richard Jordan was working on. That is not true, it was Richard's decision to cease work on that conversion. We approached Richard in about 2003 suggesting we could buy the conversion off him when it's complete so that we could distribute it. One idea was that we would make the PC Fairlight available free of charge to promote our range of EDGE brand games. We tried to explain that copyright in Fairlight (I and II) is owned by us and thus it would be illegal for him to create a version and sell or distirbute it himself. He replied that he didn't want Edge to distribute the PC version and he stopped work on it. We later heard he thought we were saying Edge owns his code for PC Fairlight, but we never suggested that. We own Fairlight. not his PC code. We still hope to find someone interested in not only developing Fairlight for PC, but also PC Fairlight II. We are also actively pursuing development of Fairlight III, aiming to do a version of it on as many platforms as possible including iOS, Android, PC, Switch, and Steam.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT:
On Bo Jangeborg and Fairlight, on Mobigame, on EA, on miscelaneous fake news