Bubble Bus Software
87 High Street, Tonbridge
A Kent publisher whose fortunes rested on one programmer, Stephen Crow, and one game — Starquake, a 500-room exploration platformer that was still being called an 8-bit classic years after the machines it ran on were obsolete.
Bubble Bus Software operated from a High Street address in Tonbridge, Kent, and is remembered for one game. Starquake (1985) was written by Stephen Crow, and it is the kind of game that outlives its publisher: a huge, interconnected map explored under time pressure, still being referred to years later as an 8-bit classic without needing introduction.
Fast facts
- Address, as advertised: 87 High Street, Tonbridge, Kent TN9 1RX. Telephone 0732 355962.
- Key programmer: Stephen Crow — Wizard’s Lair, then Starquake.
- Other titles: Hyperforce, Skaterock.
- Formats advertised: an unusually wide spread — Spectrum, C64/128, Amstrad CPC and PCW, BBC, Atari, and the Sinclair QL.
- BBC/Electron Starquake, 1987: £9.95 cassette, £11.95 disc.
Starquake
Amtix! named Crow as the author in July 1986 and placed the game in sequence after his earlier Wizard’s Lair. The premise is small and the execution is not: you are Blob — a Bio-Logically Operated Being — and the planet’s core needs rebuilding before it collapses.
What made it work was scale under constraint. Blob can carry only so much power and ammunition at a time, replenished by collecting objects as you go, so the map is not just large but has to be managed. Acorn User put the size at “over 500 rooms” when the BBC conversion arrived.
The Acorn conversion, and what it meant
Bubble Bus reached the BBC Micro late, and Acorn User’s reaction in 1987 says more about Acorn owners than about Bubble Bus. Its news page introduced the company as “a software house new to the BBC micro market”, and the review by Robert Miller opened with something close to relief — that at last other software houses were taking an interest in the machine.
Miller’s verdict was warm but not uncritical: the theme was not especially original, the £9.95 asking price “may be a little high”, but the game was varied and big enough to keep you engrossed, and he recommended it to anyone who liked exploring and shooting in the same sitting.
⚠ That is worth reading against the Acornsoft and Superior Software entries. The BBC’s software problem was not quality — it was supply, and a Kent publisher porting a two-year-old Spectrum hit counted as news.
Stephen Crow left
The pattern this Vault records repeatedly. Having written Bubble Bus’s two best-known games, Crow moved on: by January 1987 Amstrad Action was reviewing Firelord — his latest — for Hewson, the label that made a policy of putting authors’ names on the box.
Bubble Bus’s catalogue after that is thin, and the company does not have a second act. A publisher whose value was one programmer keeps that value exactly as long as the programmer stays — which is the argument the Graftgold and Hewson entries make from the other end, where losing two authors took the top off a company.
Why it mattered
Starquake survived its publisher by decades. An Amiga review years later could refer in passing to “the old 8-bit Bubble Bus classic” and expect readers to know what was meant — which is a better measure of a game’s standing than any score.
Bubble Bus itself is the one-game publisher: a real business, in a real High Street, whose entire place in this Vault rests on having published the right programmer once.
See also
- Hewson Consultants — where Stephen Crow went next.
- Beau Jolly — who packaged Starquake and Skaterock into compilations.
- Acornsoft, Superior Software — the BBC supply problem.
- ZX Spectrum