Matthew Smith
Game Programmer - born 1966, Penge / Wallasey
Matthew Smith was born in 1966 in Penge, south London, and moved to Wallasey on the Wirral peninsula at the age of seven. He received a Tandy TRS-80 for Christmas 1979, at the age of thirteen, and began writing software almost immediately. His first significant program was Delta Tau One, a clone of the arcade game Galaxian.
Bug-Byte Software's offer - a loaned ZX Spectrum in exchange for three original games - brought Smith into the commercial games industry at sixteen. His first Bug-Byte title was Styx (1983), a fast-action shooter for which he received £3,000. The second was Manic Miner (1983), which became the most talked-about ZX Spectrum game of the year and won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Arcade Style Game.
After taking the Manic Miner rights from Bug-Byte - a consequence of an oversight in his original freelance contract - Smith co-founded Software Projects with Alan Maton and Colin Roach. The company's first major release was Jet Set Willy (March 1984), which became the UK's best-selling home video game of the year and spent over three months at number one in the UK software charts.
After Jet Set Willy, Smith made no further original games. He largely disappeared from public life through the late 1980s and 1990s, and various accounts circulated about what had become of him. He re-emerged in the mid-2000s, giving his first recorded interviews for retrospectives and documentaries. He has appeared at retro gaming events and spoken about both games, though he has never returned to commercial software development.
Smith described Manic Miner as his most enjoyable game to make, and Jet Set Willy as "seven shades of hell." His quotes and interview appearances are collected on the Interviews page. The full account of his career is on the History page.