Ian Stewart suffered a heart attack at the top of a mountain – and survived.
To make matters even more dramatic it happened in the midst of a snow storm, with only his young daughter for company. With the weather worsening, the 52-year-old technology entrepreneur heroically accompanied his daughter down the slopes to the nearest chair lifts, which would carry them back up to their hotel – and to safety.
Within seconds of completing this Herculian task Stewart collapsed. A few hours later he was having a quadruple bypass, care of the best heart surgeons in Salt Lake City.
“Something just took over,” he explains. “My daughter wasn’t a strong skier and I needed to get her to safety. By the time I realised I was having an attack it was too late. I guess instinct took over. Still, it meant I got my first and only ride on Concorde. It was the quickest way back home once I’d been given the ‘all clear’ to fly.”
What he fails to add is that this was just three weeks after surgery. For many people, having major heart surgery would have led to an early retirement filled with sunshine, sangria (in moderation of course) and more gentle pursuits.
Quick Comeback
But within a year, Stewart was back in business. Nearly five years on, AIM-listed ZOO Digital Publishing Group has become one of the UK’s leading digital entertainment publishing houses. Employing 120 staff, the business boasts a turnover of £11m – and, tantalisingly, he claims a groundbreaking deal for the DVD market is about to be announced.
Stoic practicality is a persistent theme throughout Stewart’s career. Obstacles become opportunities through a combination of strategy, optimism and honesty, as demonstrated by his first – and second career choice.
Splitting his formative years between Surrey and Sussex, Stewart readily admits he was not a natural student. As such he left school at 15 to follow in his father’s footsteps as an engineer. He started a five-year apprenticeship with a tool making firm but was soon drawn to an advert for a trainee sales manager at hi-fi retailer Laskeys.
Twelve months later he was a manager and considered someone who could get things done. “As a result I was offered the opportunity to open a new store in Sheffield, so I jumped at the chance,” he explains, presumably giving him a taste for being an entrepreneur.
Stewart was subseqently headhunted by rival hi-fi retailer Hardman Radio. His defection however became a little complex when Hardman acquired his former employers a few months later. “It was a little unexpected, but Hardman was expanding aggressively. I’d left on good terms – but the whole experience taught me the value of maintaining good relations,” he laughs.
Emerging market
When computers arrived on the shop floor his life changed. Excited by the new technology, games fired his imagination and when the Sinclair Spectrum was launched Stewart began to see a wealth of opportunity. “It was very much focused towards entertainment,” he recalls.
“It was then I started to see just how computer games could take off, especially as at the time there really wasn’t much software available. So I gave up my job, downsized the house and opened a shop entirely devoted to games software.”
Just Micro quickly became an institution among teenage boys – so much so that Stewart was forced to throw them out during school hours. However, with a constant line of equally enthusiastic programmers it didn’t take long for him to realise the potential in designing and publishing the games himself. In 1983 Gremlin Interactive was formed by Stewart and three others, with each taking an equal shareholding.
Titles like Potty Pigeon and Suicide Express proved instant hits, but it was Monty Mole that earned Gremlin nationwide fame. “It was at the time of the miner’s strike,” laughs Stewart. “To play the game you had to collect as many ballot papers as possible for an Arthur Scargill type character. It even made Trevor McDonald’s famous ‘and finally’ slot. It was then I realised the value of using the media to get product exposure.”
Monty’s popularity helped to grow the business at an even greater pace, but things were not rosy in the boardroom and Stewart maintains the management team should have listened to the company’s advisers more. Instead, after a power struggle, a majority shareholder emerged from the four co-founders and Gremlin was relocated to Birmingham. The direction the company was taking made Stewart push for a management buy-out to regain control. Its completion saw the business move back to Sheffield, with the creation of several satellite offices thereafter to meet demand. With the move business continued to boom – as did the level of consumer expectation.
Stewart decided it was time to float the business – but things didn’t quite go to plan. The London Stock Exchange flotation raised £8m instead of the anticipated £12m, leaving Gremlin short of cash after an acquisition of the creators of Grand Theft Auto, Dundee-based DMA. Worse still, the acquisition did not include the rights to the now-internationally renowned Grand Theft Auto, which had already been sold to German-based Bertelsmann. “We didn’t miss out on the rights in negotiations though,” explains Stewart. “We wanted the GTA rights but they’d already sold them. It wasn’t an issue in the acquisition, we wanted to buy DMA anyway.”