Mirrorsoft
The newspaper that went into software, and said it would not make games
Launched in November 1983 as one of twenty-five things Mirror Group Newspapers was diversifying into, Mirrorsoft began by publishing Mr Men and multiplication tables and said it was not writing games. Two years later it produced Dynamite Dan. It ended holding the European rights to Tetris when Robert Maxwell's empire collapsed underneath it.
Mirrorsoft was the software division of Mirror Group Newspapers, and therefore of Robert Maxwell. For most of the eighties the ownership was a footnote — it published good games, some of them excellent, and the catalogue mattered more.
Then in 1991 Maxwell died, his empire was found to be built on missing pension funds, and Mirrorsoft went down with it — holding, at the time, the European rights to Tetris.
What is usually left out is the beginning, which is stranger than the end.
Fast facts
- Parent: Mirror Group Newspapers. Launched: November 1983.
- Mail order from: PO Box 50, Bromley, Kent in 1984; Paulton, Bristol by 1986 — the town of Maxwell’s own printing works.
- Retail: “selected branches of W.H. Smith and Boots”.
- Early catalogue: First Steps with the Mr Men, Here & There with the Mr Men, Quick Thinking, Sum Vaders, Robot Tables, Caesar’s Travels.
- Games: Dynamite Dan, Boulder Dash, Sai Combat, Spitfire 40, Strike Force Harrier, Biggles, Andy Capp, Defender of the Crown, and Tetris.
- Subsidiary: Image Works, of Irwin House, 118 Southwark Street, London — its late-eighties label for more ambitious 16-bit titles.
“Not writing any games”
Acorn User covered the launch in December 1983, and the shape of it is not what the company is remembered for.
Mirrorsoft’s first releases were Mr Men. Three packs at the end of November, two for the BBC Micro and Electron. The second release, Quick Thinking, was bought in from Widjeit Software and had “some educational content”. The company’s spokesman, Mackonochie, was explicit that they were not writing any games.
And the reason the newspaper was in software at all is the detail worth keeping: software publishing was “one of 25 projects MGN is expanding into, which include cable, video and satellite TV”. Mirrorsoft was not a games company that happened to be owned by a newspaper. It was a line item in a media conglomerate’s diversification programme, sitting beside satellite television and a lightpen the product division was evaluating.
The Daily Mirror characters were in the plan from the first week. The same report notes that “we could see other Daily Mirror cartoon characters — Andy Capp, even Garth, Fosdyke’s, The Perishers”. Andy Capp eventually arrived as a game in 1988; the intention to mine the paper’s own strip cupboard predated any of it.
Sum Vaders and Robot Tables
The 1984 advertising is educational software of the purest kind, under the slogan “SOFTWARE FOR ALL THE FAMILY”:
- Sum Vaders — arithmetic as an invaders game, with difficulty levels and a two-player handicap option, “for all family members, from 8 years to adult”.
- Robot Tables — multiplication as robot assembly, with a learning mode and a testing mode, “a fun way for early learners… to master an important and often neglected skill”. £6.95, BBC and Electron, also Spectrum 48K and C64.
This is edutainment as a British newspaper understood it in 1984: sold through Boots, priced under a game, and pitched at the parent rather than the child.
The turn, and the two catalogues
CRASH, looking back at 1985 in its own history, marks the moment in one sentence — and puts it directly after the month Bug-Byte went into receivership:
in the midst of death there is life: up came Mirrorsoft. After a short and low-profile history of educational software, Mirrorsoft suddenly produced Dynamite Dan, the ever so attractive Jet Set Willy clone which because of its playability, clever map and fiendish difficulty well deserved the Smash it received.
Dynamite Dan arrived in October 1985 at £8.95 — platforms, lifts and, in Amstrad Action’s summary, a hero foiling Dr Blitzen’s plans for world domination by cracking a safe, stealing the plans and escaping in a blimp. It is the Manic Miner school done well, two years after the school was founded.
What did not happen is the part that distinguishes Mirrorsoft. The educational line did not stop. Its own catalogue advertisement in September 1986 runs three columns side by side — GAMES, EARLY LEARNING, CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT — with Dynamite Dan and Boulder Dash in one and First Steps with the Mr Men and Caesar’s Travels in the others, from the same freepost address on the same page.
Most publishers of the period picked an audience. Mirrorsoft sold to the whole household, because the thing it was really extending was a newspaper’s relationship with a family.
Tetris, and the collapse
Mirrorsoft held European rights to Tetris, and its sister company Spectrum HoloByte held them in America. Those rights had been assembled through a chain of sub-licences from the Soviet Union that turned out, on inspection, not to grant what everyone believed they granted.
The resulting fight — Mirrorsoft, Spectrum HoloByte, Atari Games, Nintendo and the Soviet state agency ELORG all claiming overlapping pieces of the same game — is the Tetris legal battle, and it was still unfolding when Maxwell’s empire failed. The company’s assets, including its games, were sold off in the wreckage.
A footnote that is not a footnote
Maxwell had been circling this industry before he owned much of it. In the summer of 1985 he announced a takeover of Sinclair Research — widely reported at the time as a rescue, and joked about in Acorn User, which noted that Sinclair had simultaneously turned up as a cartoon character in Maxwell’s own Daily Mirror. By that autumn Maxwell’s board had rejected the deal and Sinclair was on his own again; within a year he had sold to Amstrad instead.
Had it gone the other way, the company that made the Spectrum and the company that published Dynamite Dan would have had the same owner — and the same ending in 1991.
Why it mattered
Mirrorsoft is the clearest case in British software of a games publisher whose fate had nothing to do with games. It did not fail because its titles stopped selling or because it missed a platform transition. It failed because its owner was committing fraud several floors up.
That is worth an entry on its own terms, but it also marks a moment: by 1991 software was a large enough business to be worth folding into a media conglomerate — and large enough to be destroyed when one collapsed.