Bug-Byte

Bug-Byte was founded in May 1980 by Tony Baden and Tony Milner, two students reading chemistry at Liverpool University. Big K — which ran a company history in July 1984, when the principals were still speaking to journalists — records that in the first year the pair had no duplicating equipment at all, so that “each mail order requirement meant a SAVE”: every tape sold was recorded by hand, one at a time.

The company’s earliest advertisements give a Coventry address, 251 Henley Road; by October 1981 it was trading from 98-100 The Albany, Old Hall Street, Liverpool. That move is the point at which Bug-Byte becomes the Liverpool company of the histories, and it arrived early enough that both of the Merseyside companies that followed — Imagine and Software Projects — were founded by people walking out of its offices.

Bug-Byte’s biggest commercial moment was Manic Miner (November 1983), a Matthew Smith original that topped the Spectrum charts. It was also the moment the company began coming apart.

Two machines at once, not one

The usual summary — a ZX81 house that moved to the Spectrum — is half the story. Through 1981 and 1982 Bug-Byte published for the Acorn Atom and the ZX81 side by side, and the Atom line was the more visible of the two in the general press. Your Computer carried full-page Bug-Byte Atom advertisements from mid-1981: Fruit Machine (£5.00), Chess, Invaders, Golf (£5.00), an Atom disassembler (£4.00), and a 747 flight simulation “written for Bug-Byte by a 747 pilot”. Your Computer’s November 1981 review round-up rated the Atom Fruit Machine and Invaders alongside Acornsoft’s own output.

The ZX81 catalogue ran in parallel: The Damsel and the Beast (£6.50), Dictator — a small-state political simulation in which the player manages the secret police and the economy while avoiding assassination — House of Gnomes, Star Trek, and a numbered series of Program Packs at £3.50-£5.00.

The Spectrum catalogue that followed is the one usually listed:

• Manic Miner (1983) — Matthew Smith’s platformer, and the defining release.
• Styx (1983) — Smith’s first game for Bug-Byte, which by the company’s own account “bombed out”.
• Birds and the Bees (1983) — 83% in CRASH issue 2.
• Aquaplane (1983).
• Twin Kingdom Valley (1983) — text adventure, £9.50, still charting in CRASH’s adventure top 30 in March 1985 and simultaneously in Acorn User’s BBC chart.
• Antics (1984) — written by the 17-year-old Adrian Sherwin. 90% in CRASH issue 6.

⚠ Two titles are commonly misattributed to Bug-Byte. Hunchback was Ocean’s — CRASH’s index records it as an Ocean title, and HMV’s 1984 stock listings price it as one. Alchemist was Imagine’s, by Ian Weatherburn, whom Your Computer photographed at Imagine in March 1984 working on Bandersnatch.

Bug-Byte also kept publishing for Acorn machines well into 1984 — Twin Kingdom Valley, Oblivion and Galaxy War were all in Acorn User’s BBC top twenty in March 1984, at £9.50 each. The two-machine habit outlasted the ZX81.

Manic Miner was big enough to change how Bug-Byte reached shops. Personal Computer Games reported in 1983 that “Bug-Byte Software, the company that brought us Manic Miner… has signed a major distribution deal with CBS, the record and video company”, giving CBS exclusive rights to market all Bug-Byte software in the UK — a record label distributing computer games, which in 1983 was novel enough to be news.

The machine-code tools

The part of the catalogue that matters most here is the part nobody remembers. In 1981 Bug-Byte shipped ZXAS, a machine-code assembler for the 16K ZX81, and ZXDB, a companion disassembler and debugger. ZXAS occupied 5K, reset RAMTOP and loaded itself above it so that source could be saved separately, and took its source as Z80 mnemonics typed into REM statements — semicolons separating multiple instructions on a line, up to 256 labels in the form :L0 to :L255, comments after a *, and full stops instead of commas, so LD A,H was typed LD A.H.

Sinclair User ran a survey of ZX81 assemblers by Phil Garrett in July 1982 that put it plainly: ZXAS “is a remarkable program and is excellent value at £5”, and using either it or the rival ACS assembler was “the single biggest step to proficiency in machine code programming”. The same review names a bug — SUB A,n did not work, and had to be replaced with AND A; SBC A,n — the sort of detail that surfaces only when a reviewer has written real code with the thing.

This is the connection worth holding on to. The Liverpool company that published Manic Miner had, two years earlier, published one of the tools that made games like Manic Miner possible to write on a Sinclair machine at all. Bug-Byte was selling the ladder before it sold anything that had climbed it.

Two walkouts

Bug-Byte lost its programming staff twice inside fourteen months, and both departures founded a company larger than the one they left.

January 1983 — Imagine. ACE, looking back at 1983 from January 1990, records that “its head programmer Eugene Evans, and senior staff David Lawson and Mark Butler broke away from the company to form Imagine Software”. Big K’s account has the departures staggered, with Butler following roughly two months after Lawson. Imagine’s first game, Arcadia, went on to be one of the best-selling Spectrum titles of the year.

Early 1984 — Software Projects. Matthew Smith left with Manic Miner, together with Alan and Soo Maton. CRASH’s first issue reports both Matons leaving; Personal Computer Games describes Alan’s rise at Bug-Byte as running “from despatch rider to marketing manager in a matter of months”, which is a correction worth making because the managing-director version of the story is widely repeated.

CRASH’s own retrospective put the consequence bluntly: Bug-Byte was “founding father of the home-computer game and many well-known individuals and several software houses had sprung from the Liverpool company.”

The Manic Miner split, from Bug-Byte’s side

Smith’s account — that he was under-paid relative to what Manic Miner earned — is the one that survived. Bug-Byte’s is on the record too, and it is worth reading beside it.

Interviewed by Big K in July 1984, Tony Baden gave a figure: “they all know what Matthew’s been saying, that he didn’t get enough from Manic Miner… But I can tell you he got £50,000 cash from that one game while we sold it.”

On why the game left with its author rather than staying with its publisher, Baden described a drafting failure — a comma in the wrong place, or a missing one, he could not recall which — that left the contract ambiguous about who owned what. The company chose not to litigate, and the reason is the detail that makes the episode make sense: Smith was still a minor when he signed. Baden’s summary was that against a minor in open court nobody has a chance. Bug-Byte let the game go rather than fight for it.

Software Projects released Jet Set Willy in April 1984 and re-issued Manic Miner under its own label — so that, as Big K noted, the same game had by then been in the charts under two labels, old and new. Bug-Byte was left with the back catalogue.

The split is a frequently-cited example of the early Spectrum industry’s contractual learning curve. What the Bug-Byte side adds is that the learning was not only about money. It was about drafting, and about the legal position of an industry whose best programmers were school-age.

Receivership, and the Argus afterlife

Bug-Byte went into receivership in June 1985. CRASH’s history of the period calls it the biggest failure of that month and concedes the obvious — “the quality of Bug-Byte’s products had dropped” — while recording that it still came as a sad surprise, “causing almost as many fears that the end was nigh as had Imagine’s disintegration”. Quicksilva had already taken the rights to seven Bug-Byte games by May 1985.

Argus Press Software had been negotiating a merger and could not close it before the receivership; it bought the company from the receiver afterwards and ran Bug-Byte as a budget label, at £2.95 and below. Games appeared under the revived name into 1987 — Dogsbody, Cloak of Death, a set of sports titles sold by mail order through Computer Gamer in May 1987 — which is why the Bug-Byte name outlives the Bug-Byte company by two years in the review columns.

See also

• Matthew Smith
• Manic Miner
• Software Projects
• ZXAS — its ZX81 assembler, two years before Manic Miner.
• Imagine Software — the first walkout.
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum, ZX81