Matthew Smith | Code Like It's 198x

Matthew Smith wrote Manic Miner in 1983, while still in his teens, and it became the best-selling computer game in Britain within weeks. Jet Set Willy followed in 1984 and went straight into the charts. After that no new game of his appeared for many years, and in 2001 a magazine was still asking readers where he had gone.

He was born in 1966 in Penge, south London, and his family moved to Wallasey, across the Mersey from Liverpool, when he was seven. His career grew out of Liverpool’s computer scene.

Interviewed at 18

Personal Computer Games sent Peter Conner to Liverpool and ran the piece in March 1984 under the standfirst “At 18, star-programmer Matthew Smith says he’s over the hill.” He had only just turned 18: CRASH had reported the month before that he would receive his shares in Software Projects “on his eighteenth birthday, this February”.

Conner met him at Lime Street Station “one grey December afternoon in 1983”. The first thing he noticed was that Smith “wasn’t wearing any socks”, which made him wonder whether the author of the top-selling Spectrum game could afford them. He could. The profile goes on:

Matthew is not the whizz-kid breed of programmer, the adolescent brat who trades in his push-bike for a Ferrari on his 17th birthday. Instead, he is an unassuming, but confident, teenager.

How he got there, in his own words

The route runs through a shop.

I’d been keen on electronics, building transistor radios and so on, and five years ago my parents gave me a Tandy for Christmas. It only had 4K of memory and unextended Basic, but it got me hooked.

He joined the Tandy users’ group that met at the local dealer’s shop: “We used to hang around after closing. Fortunately the manager was an enthusiast as well.”

His first commercial program came at 14: a version of Galaxians called Delta Tower One.

It took me weeks to write it. I think it sold 13 copies and I made about £50 profit. It was just an average game.

Through his contacts at the Tandy shop he started writing business and accounting programs for companies in the Liverpool area. That freelance work carried him after he left school in October 1982 with, he said, nine or ten O levels: “I didn’t like school, and it didn’t like me.”

He only got a Spectrum in April 1983. By then he was working with Bug-Byte, and he wrote Styx for them before Manic Miner.

Manic Miner

Manic Miner was on sale from Bug-Byte by the summer of 1983. Personal Computer News reviewed it in its issue for 11-17 August 1983, at £5.95. Smith told Personal Computer Games that the idea came from Alan Maton, who suggested “a figure tunnelling down”; Smith turned it upside down. He wrote it in eight solid weeks on a Tandy Model 4 with a 5 megabyte hard disk, transferred it to the Spectrum, and drew the graphics on graph paper. By December 1983 he had banked “£20,000 or so” from it, and said: “The money has just made it a bit easier to be lazy.”

Software Projects and Jet Set Willy

Early in 1984 Smith left Bug-Byte and set up Software Projects with Alan and Soo Maton, becoming a major shareholder. Alan Maton had risen at Bug-Byte “from despatch rider to marketing manager in a matter of months”; he was not its managing director. Manic Miner went with Smith, because Bug-Byte “held a licence to produce Manic Miner but not the copyright”. Sinclair User reported that Smith would become a director of the new company “when he comes of age”.

Jet Set Willy was planned, he said, over meals in restaurants in September 1983. Smith described it as an “arcade adventure” and reckoned he had got “about three times as much into the program as in Manic Miner”. It took longer than expected. In March 1984 CRASH told him to “get off your Eugene’s Lair and back to the surface”. The game was finally on sale in spring 1984, and CRASH’s May issue found it in the reader chart after “only a very few days on sale”.

It also shipped with a bug in the room called The Attic. In July 1984 CRASH printed “Jet Set Willy Attic POKEs” to fix it, with Software Projects’ permission.

After Jet Set Willy

In the 1984 interview Smith talked about a follow-up “perhaps to be called Willy Meets the Taxman”, and about programming for MSX machines. He also said: “Programming games won’t keep me going for the rest of my life.”

His next announced game, Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars, never came out under his name. Steve Foster of Odin, who said the idea grew from a visit Smith made to see an early version of Odin’s Nodes of Yesod, told Retro Gamer in 2004 that it “eventually became Star Paws (after some alterations)”. Star Paws came out on the Commodore 64.

By 2001 PC Zone could write that after Jet Set Willy he “disappeared without a trace. Matthew, if you’re out there drop us a line.” Public accounts say he spent part of the 1990s in the Netherlands, and returned to the industry in 1999 at Runecraft, a developer in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Sources

Personal Computer Games, issue 4 (March 1984), pp. 29-31: Peter Conner, “Human to Human” profile. Source of the quotes and details on the Tandy, the users’ group, Delta Tower One, the accounting work, leaving school, the Spectrum in April 1983, Styx, eight weeks, the Tandy Model 4, graph paper, Alan Maton’s idea, “£20,000 or so”, Jet Set Willy’s planning, “Willy Meets the Taxman”, MSX, “arcade adventure” and “three times as much”.
Personal Computer Games, issue 3 (February 1984), p. 3: “Smith leaves Bug-Byte” (Software Projects; “co-founders, Alan and Soo Maton”; “from despatch rider to marketing manager”).
Sinclair User, issue 23 (February 1984), news pages: “the 17-year-old author”; director “when he comes of age”; Bug-Byte “held a licence to produce Manic Miner but not the copyright”.
Personal Computer News, 11-17 August 1983, p. 48: review of Manic Miner (Bug-Byte, £5.95).
CRASH, issue 1 (February 1984), news: his shares “on his eighteenth birthday, this February”. Issue 2 (March 1984), news: “get off your Eugene’s Lair”. Issue 4 (May 1984), Hotline chart report: Jet Set Willy “only a very few days on sale”. Issue 6 (July 1984), p. 100: “Jet Set Willy Attic Pokes”.
Retro Gamer, issue 5 (2004), p. 47: Steve Foster on Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars becoming Star Paws. Retro Gamer, issue 107 (October 2012): “C64 title Star Paws (which was based on Matthew Smith’s unfinished Spectrum game Mutant Zombie Flesh-Eating Chickens)”.
PC Zone, issue 107 (October 2001): “disappeared without a trace”.
Birthplace, the move to Wallasey, the Netherlands and Runecraft (1999): Wikipedia, “Matthew Smith (games programmer)” (web, secondary).