Software Projects was the company Matthew Smith set up when he left Bug-Byte, and it ended up with both of his hits. It took Manic Miner away from its first publisher, and it published Jet Set Willy. One of its first advertisements, in the December 1983 Computer and Video Games, was not for a game at all. It was a pitch to programmers: “Would you like to retain your copyright and licence us to market your game?”
Out of Bug-Byte
Three people left Bug-Byte to found it: Smith, and Alan and Soo Maton. CRASH’s first issue, in February 1984, reported that “Alan and Soo Maton left leading software house Bug-Byte to form Software Projects together with Matthew”. Smith was still too young to own shares legally, the magazine said, and would receive them “on his eighteenth birthday, this February”. Personal Computer Games described Alan Maton’s career at Bug-Byte as a “rapid rise through the ranks… from despatch rider to marketing manager in a matter of months”, and concluded that “it’s not surprising that he now wants to run his own company”. He was not Bug-Byte’s managing director, as later accounts sometimes say.
The company worked from the Bear Brand Complex on Allerton Road in Woolton, Liverpool. CRASH named one more full-time member of staff: sixteen-year-old Chris Cannon, author of Bug-Byte’s adventure The Castle, who looked after “the technical side of things”.
Taking Manic Miner
Manic Miner came too. Personal Computer Games ran the news under the headline “SMITH LEAVES BUG-BYTE”: “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.”
Sinclair User explained how. Bug-Byte “held a licence to produce Manic Miner but not the copyright”. Its director Tony Baden told the magazine that Bug-Byte was not too hard hit: “It is still an excellent game and we have 50,000 copies of it left. We wish it the best of luck under any label.” Baden gave a fuller account to Big K in July 1984. The contract was ambiguous because of a misplaced comma, he said, and Bug-Byte’s lawyers advised that against a minor in open court “nobody has a chance”, so it let the game go. He also said that Smith had been paid £50,000 for the game while Bug-Byte sold it. The Bug-Byte entry has that side of the story.
Jet Set Willy
The new company’s first announcements were the Manic Miner sequel, Jet Set Willy, with “action in a cliff-top mansion bought with the loot from his mining activities”, a Commodore 64 Manic Miner, Crazy Balloons for the 64, and three Spectrum games: Push Off, based on the arcade game Pengo; McKensie, a space adventure; and Thrusta, a shoot-’em-up.
Jet Set Willy took longer than planned, and went on sale in spring 1984 at £5.95. CRASH gave it 95%, and it went to number one in Personal Computer Games’ chart. It also shipped with a bug that could wreck a game in progress, and Software Projects spent the summer first calling it deliberate and then giving magazines permission to print the POKEs that fixed it. The Jet Set Willy entry tells that story. Software Projects released a Commodore 64 version at the end of 1984, and an Amstrad CPC version followed in 1985. Jet Set Willy II, which CRASH credited to “Messrs Smith and Lawson”, followed in 1985 at £6.95.
The rest of the catalogue
Most of what Software Projects published was not by Smith. CRASH’s index of every Spectrum review it had printed, compiled in January 1988, lists these Software Projects titles:
| Game | CRASH issue | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Push Off | 1 (February 1984) | 85% |
| Thrusta | 2 (March 1984) | 73% |
| Ometron | 3 (April 1984) | 80% |
| Jet Set Willy | 4 (May 1984) | 95% |
| Tribble Trouble | 4 (May 1984) | 91% |
| Orion | 4 (May 1984) | 76% |
| Lode Runner | 12 (January 1985) | 81% |
| Astronut | 12 (January 1985) | 81% |
| Learning with Leeper | 16 (May 1985) | not scored |
| Jet Set Willy II | 19 (August 1985) | 61% |
| BC’s Quest for Tyres | 23 (December 1985) | 46% |
| Dragon’s Lair | 34 (November 1986) | 54% |
| Escape from Singe’s Castle | 39 (April 1987) | 83% |
| Hysteria | 45 (October 1987) | 78% |
From late 1984 the catalogue turned to conversions of games from other machines and licensed characters. The Spectrum Lode Runner had 150 screens, 75 on each side of the tape. BC’s Quest for Tyres was based on the newspaper cartoon character B.C., and CRASH ran a competition asking readers who had created him.
Dragon’s Lair
The biggest licence was Dragon’s Lair, Don Bluth’s laserdisc arcade game. Amiga Computing later summed up the original: “The gameplay wasn’t up to much, but it was worth your while just to see the Disneyesque cartoon plot unfold.” In the summer of 1986 CRASH sent a reporter to Liverpool to see Software Projects’ conversion. Interest ran high, the magazine recalled, “partly because no-one could see how Coleco’s complex, interactive game would come out on a home micro”.
The answer, written by Paul Hodgson and Andy Walker and sold at £9.95, was nine single-screen scenes of Dirk the Daring on his way to rescue Princess Daphne from the dragon Singe: a falling disc, flaming ropes, a phantom knight on a checkerboard. Each scene loaded from cassette in turn, about 30 seconds apiece, and a player who ran out of lives had to rewind the tape and start again from the first. CRASH’s reviewers liked the large, smoothly animated characters, but found the graphics “hardly video disk quality” and the game “frustrating without being addictive”. It scored 54%. Looking back in 1988, CRASH said the cartoon graphics were “largely regarded as the only really interesting element of the arcade machine”, and without them the game “let it down dismally on the Spectrum”. The sequel, Escape from Singe’s Castle, did better, with 83% in April 1987.
Later years
By the beginning of 1988 ACE could list Software Projects among the smaller independent publishers in trouble: it had “cut their releases down to the bone”. It was still trading two years later. In 1990 it released Manic Miner for the Amiga, with large scrolling sprites, new music and digitised speech. ACE approved: “It is nice to note that Software Projects have taken the plunge and given 16-bit gamers what they have asked for.” Public sources do not record when the company stopped trading.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games, issue 26 (December 1983), p. 190: Software Projects advertisement (“Would you like to retain your copyright and licence us to market your game?”; Bear Brand Complex, Allerton Road, Woolton, Liverpool).
- CRASH, issue 1 (February 1984), news: the Matons and Smith leave Bug-Byte; Smith’s shares on his eighteenth birthday; Jet Set Willy announced; Chris Cannon.
- Personal Computer Games, issue 3 (February 1984), p. 3: “Smith leaves Bug-Byte” (the rights to Manic Miner, Alan Maton’s career, the planned releases).
- Sinclair User, issue 23 (February 1984), news: Bug-Byte’s licence and Tony Baden’s comments.
- Big K, issue 4 (July 1984): Tony Baden on the contract, the comma and the £50,000.
- CRASH, issue 4 (May 1984), pp. 8–9: Jet Set Willy review. Personal Computer Games, issue 7 (June 1984), p. 21: chart. CRASH, issue 19 (August 1985): Jet Set Willy II review.
- CRASH, issue 12 (January 1985): Lode Runner review. Issue 23 (December 1985): BC’s Quest for Tyres competition.
- CRASH, issue 34 (November 1986): Dragon’s Lair review (authors, price, loading, comments). Issue 48 (January 1988): review index (scores and issue numbers) and “The CRASH History” on Dragon’s Lair.
- Amiga Computing, March 1989, p. 57: the arcade Dragon’s Lair.
- ACE, issue 6 (March 1988): the smaller software houses. Issue 32 (May 1990): Manic Miner on the Amiga.
- Amiga Format, issue 9 (April 1990), news: Manic Miner “due for release from its original publishers Software Projects”.
See also
- Matthew Smith
- Manic Miner
- Jet Set Willy
- Bug-Byte, the original Manic Miner publisher
- Liverpool games scene
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum