Three commercial titles between 1983 and 1984. Styx was the beginning, Manic Miner defined a genre, and Jet Set Willy became the best-selling home video game in Britain. Nothing came after.
Designer & Programmer: Matthew Smith · Publisher: Bug-Byte Software
A maze and arcade shooter with an ancient mythology theme. The first game Smith delivered under his Bug-Byte contract, for which he received 3,000 pounds. Averaged around 70% in contemporary magazine reviews. Also published as "Survival" in Load 'n' Run magazine (April 1984).
Designer & Programmer: Matthew Smith · Publisher: Bug-Byte Software (original), Software Projects (re-release and ports)
Twenty caverns. A miner named Willy. The first ZX Spectrum game with in-game music (a beepy "In the Hall of the Mountain King"). Inspired by Miner 2049er. Won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Arcade Style Game in 1983. Over 100,000 copies sold combined. The C64 version reached number one in early 1984. Also ported to Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Atari 8-bit, Dragon 32, MSX, SAM Coupe, and DOS.
For the full development story and editorial treatment, see Flagship.
Designer & Programmer: Matthew Smith · Publisher: Software Projects
Sixty rooms in Miner Willy's newly purchased mansion. Free-roaming from the start - unlike Manic Miner's fixed cavern sequence. Published March 1984. UK's best-selling home video game of 1984. Spent over three months at the top of UK charts. Shipped with The Attic Bug (memory corruption on entering one room), requiring a POKE fix distributed by Software Projects on cassette. Also ported to C64, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Acorn Electron, TRS-80 CoCo, and SAM Coupe.
For the full development story and editorial treatment, see Flagship.
After Jet Set Willy, Smith began work on a Commodore 64 game referred to in various sources as The Mega Tree or Willy Meets The Taxman. It was designed for the C64 rather than the ZX Spectrum, suggesting a deliberate platform shift. Three months into development the project was abandoned and never completed. No publicly known builds exist.
Software Projects continued operating after The Mega Tree's cancellation, publishing titles by other developers, before closing in 1988. Smith wrote no further commercial games after the abandoned C64 project.
In the original Jet Set Willy, certain rooms had guardians marked in the game's data but never activated. Fans examining the memory found the word "ALLOW" associated with permission flags for these dormant guardians.
The game also shipped with The Attic Bug, which corrupted memory when the Attic room was entered. Software Projects distributed a cassette fix. Matthew Smith described making the game as "seven shades of hell."
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