The first employee was James Leavey, seconded from elsewhere in BT, who, along with Tony Rainbird, became the driving force behind the company in the early days.

Despite a turnover of over £6 million in 1987/88,[1] British Telecom sold the three labels to MicroProse in 1989 in a deal reported to be worth around £2,000,000[2] after a failed management buyout.

British Telecom brought in Tony Rainbird, owner of budget software publisher Micro-Gold, to help set up the first Telecomsoft label, Firebird.

[4] The first titles to be published on the Firebird Silver label in November 1984 were The Wild Bunch for the ZX Spectrum, Booty for the Commodore 64 and Bird Strike for the BBC Micro.

[8] A further label called Firebird Super Silver was a short-lived mid-price range which published titles such as Chimera and the Amstrad CPC version of Booty at £3.99.

[3] The 16-bit home computer market, largely represented by the Atari ST and Amiga, was just beginning to take off in 1986 and the Rainbird label was an ideal opportunity to capitalise on it.

Rainbird also published Level 9's Silicon Dreams trilogy: Snowball was followed by Return to Eden and The Worm in Paradise.

After being acquired by Telecomsoft in late 1985[13] for a six figure sum, Beyond continued to operate as a unique label, mostly releasing games that had already been in development for some time,[14] as well as a number of conversions of existing titles.