Matthew Smith

In 1983, Matthew Smith was a seventeen-year-old from Wallasey, Merseyside. Bug-Byte Software had lent him a ZX Spectrum in exchange for a freelance contract to write three games. The first, Styx, was a serviceable maze shooter. The second was Manic Miner - eight weeks of work on a Model III Tandy that produced something nobody had seen on a British home computer: 20 caverns of precise platform action, a score that never repeated, and the first in-game music the ZX Spectrum had ever played. It was "In the Hall of the Mountain King" rendered in single-channel beep.

The game sold over 100,000 copies across the Bug-Byte and Software Projects releases, won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Arcade Style Game in 1983, and placed third for Game of the Year at the same ceremony. Smith was still a teenager. He became, reportedly, a millionaire.

A year later came Jet Set Willy - sixty rooms of free-roaming chaos in Miner Willy's newly acquired mansion. It spent over three months at the top of the UK charts and became the best-selling home video game in Britain for 1984. It also shipped with a bug that made certain rooms impossible to complete, required a cassette fix distributed by Software Projects, and was described by its creator as "seven shades of hell" to write.

Then Smith largely disappeared. Software Projects closed in 1988. He spent time in a Dutch commune in the 1990s, returned to the UK in 1997, worked briefly in the games industry again at Runecraft in 1999, appeared on a TV documentary in 2000, and has given only a handful of interviews in the decades since. The games he left behind remain among the most influential platform games ever written in Britain.