Software Projects

Software Projects was a British software publisher founded in early 1984 in Liverpool by Matthew Smith and Alan and Soo Maton, all three out of Bug-Byte.

⚠ Two founders, not one. CRASH’s first issue, February 1984, reports that “Alan and Soo Maton left leading software house Bug-Byte to form Software [Projects]”, and Personal Computer Games names “Matthew Smith’s co-founders, Alan and Soo Maton” as “also Bug-Byte veterans”. Soo Maton is routinely left out of the standard account.

⚠ Alan Maton’s Bug-Byte job is unsettled. He is often given as its managing director; Personal Computer Games in 1984 describes “Alan’s rapid rise through the ranks at Bug-Byte — from despatch rider to marketing manager in a matter of months”. The contemporaneous account is the weaker title, and it is the one cited here. The company existed primarily to publish Smith’s Manic Miner and the upcoming Jet Set Willy after a contractual dispute with Bug-Byte over the original Manic Miner royalties.

Software Projects’s release of Jet Set Willy in April 1984 made the new label commercially significant overnight. The mansion-exploration platformer sold quarter-of-a-million copies on the Spectrum alone and was ported to multiple other platforms. Subsequent releases — none with Smith’s involvement after 1985 — included Lode Runner, Twin Kingdom Valley, Glug-Glug, and Star Trek: The Rebel Universe. The company declined alongside the Spectrum market through the late 1980s and ceased trading around 1989.

The Bug-Byte split

The split that created Software Projects is one of Spectrum-era’s most-told business stories. Smith had written Manic Miner and signed it to Bug-Byte in 1983. The game sold extraordinarily well, but the contract terms — typical of early Spectrum publishing — gave the publisher rather than the programmer the bulk of royalties. Smith and Bug-Byte’s MD Alan Maton both believed Smith was owed more.

The resolution, depending on which version of the story you read: either Smith retained ownership of the Manic Miner source code per the contract’s wording and Maton resigned from Bug-Byte to co-found a new company with him, or Maton left first and convinced Smith to move with him. Either way, by early 1984 both were at Software Projects and Manic Miner migrated there for its later cassette runs. Bug-Byte itself continued for a while but lost much of its momentum without Smith.

What the trade press said at the time

Personal Computer Games ran it as news under the headline SMITH LEAVES BUG-BYTE, and its account is shorter and firmer than the versions told since:

Bug-Byte’s top programmer Mathew Smith, author of best-seller Manic Miner, has left the company to form his own software house, Software Projects. The new company is off to a flying start since Matthew has taken the rights to Manic Miner with him, and the game is now available from Software Projects in a slightly modified form.

No dispute is mentioned, no ambiguity about the rights, and the modification of the game for its new label is stated as fact. Whatever was argued privately, the press in early 1984 reported a clean departure with the asset attached.

The same item previews Jet Set Willy — “action in a cliff-top mansion bought with the loot from his mining activities” — alongside a Commodore 64 Manic Miner, and Spectrum titles that are largely forgotten: Push Off, based on the arcade game Pengo; McKensie, a space adventure; and Thrusta.

What they published

After Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, Software Projects’s catalogue grew through a mix of in-house development and externally-acquired titles:

Jet Set Willy (1984) — Matthew Smith. The mansion sequel.
Manic Miner (1984 re-issue) — Re-pressed under Software Projects branding.
Lode Runner (1984) — Ported from the US Broderbund original. Strong seller.
Twin Kingdom Valley (1984) — Text adventure.
Star Trek: The Rebel Universe (1987) — Late-era licensed title.
Glug-Glug (1984) — Submarine action game.

Smith worked on a never-released Jet Set Willy II and an even more ambitious never-finished project called Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars. Neither shipped before Smith disengaged from the company around 1985. Software Projects published Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier in 1985 as an expanded version of the original, but Smith was no longer the designer.

The arc, in scores

The company’s decline is usually written as market weather — the Spectrum contracting, the label fading with it. The CRASH issue 48 index tells a more specific story, and it is chronological.

Game	Score	Issue	Year
Push Off	85%	1	1984
Tribble Trouble	91%	4	1984
Orion	76%	4	1984
Lode Runner	81%	12	1985
Jet Set Willy II	61%	19	1985
BC’s Quest For Tyres	46%	23	1985
Dragon’s Lair	54%	34	1986

⚠ Jet Set Willy’s own rating takes care. The review sits on a two-panel spread (issue 4, page 9) carrying both 95 and 91, and the panels are told apart by the Lives: 8 line in the comments — which is Jet Set Willy’s, giving it the 95%.

The shape is plain. The last title with Matthew Smith’s name on it scores 61%; the two after it score 46% and 54%. This is a publisher whose catalogue quality tracks one person’s involvement almost exactly.

Dragon’s Lair

The end of the story is a licence that could not be delivered on the hardware.

Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair was a laserdisc coin-op: full-frame hand-drawn animation, with gameplay amounting to pressing the right direction at the right moment. Amiga Computing, looking back in 1989, sets the problem out neatly — “the gameplay wasn’t up to much, but it was worth your while just to see the Disneyesque cartoon plot unfold” — and records that “an 8-bit interpretation of the concept followed in 1985, courtesy of Software Projects”.

An 8-bit machine cannot show the animation, and the animation was the entire product. What shipped was a set of separately-loading minigames. Amstrad Action, reviewing it in May 1987, gave graphics 68% and sound 66% and objected most to having to restart from the beginning each time; CRASH gave the Spectrum version 54%.

Then Amtix’s readers placed it joint third in Least Pleasing Game of 1986, alongside Elite’s Commando and Firebird’s Harvey Headbanger. (The category was won outright by Ocean’s Knight Rider.)

There is a straight line from here back to the founding. Software Projects was created because a programmer believed he should own the value he had made. Three years later the company was buying the rights to somebody else’s product and discovering that the rights were not the thing — the laserdisc was the thing, and it did not fit in 48K. A publisher built on an asset it owned outright ended by licensing an asset it could not reproduce.

Why this matters to Code Like It’s 198x

Software Projects is the company that published the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy most players experienced. The beeper music — Mountain King and “If I Were a Rich Man” — that defined Spectrum audio in the 1980s came through Software Projects releases. When the Shadowkeep curriculum talks about period-faithful Spectrum game development, the Software Projects releases are the canon being referenced.

Matthew Smith's company, born of a Bug-Byte split