Quicksilva

Quicksilva was a British games software publisher active during the early 1980s.

They were founded by Nick Lambert in 1980, with the name Quicksilva inspired by a particular guitar solo in a track on the album Happy Trails by Quicksilver Messenger Service. Quicksilva mainly released games for the ZX81, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, but also did conversions and some original games for the VIC-20, Dragon 32/64, Oric-1/Atmos, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron home computers.

One of their earliest titles was QS Defenda (originally QS Defender), a clone of the Defender arcade game for the ZX80 and ZX81 home computers. Greater success followed with later releases, including a Star Raiders-style game entitled Time-Gate which reached the top of the ZX Spectrum charts in December 1982. Amongst the company's other successes were Jeff Minter's Gridrunner (1983), Bugaboo (1983, a.k.a. La Pulga) and Fred (1983, titled "Roland on the Ropes" on the Amstrad CPC), the latter two titles licensed from Indescomp S.A., a Spanish software house. They were also responsible for the hugely innovative Ant Attack (1983), written by Sandy White for the ZX Spectrum which featured revolutionary 3-D graphics (which a patent application was made for).

In early 1984, they published their first licensed title, an adaptation of the 1978 book The Snowman by Raymond Briggs, although Software Manager Paul Cooper ruled out an adaption of Briggs' When The Wind Blows stating "nuclear war can upset a lot of people".