I feel a special attachment to Matthew Smith. All the trouble he got into kind of boiled down to me Chris Cannon
Eugene initially worked for Bug-byte before he joined Imagine. Is that how you ended up there?
I hadn’t spoken to Eugene for maybe six months but he must have had my phone number from Microdigital days. He rang me and said he was working for a company called Bug-byte who were publishing games and they’d just got a prerelease version of a new machine called the Colour Genie, based on the TRS-80. He said if he got me one, could I write something for it? I thought, ‘Why not?’
Did you manage to write something for the new machine?
My assembler skills weren’t brilliant so I thought I’d do something in BASIC, which I could do quickly. I loved puzzle games and adventure games, so I made a Tower Of Hanoi game in a few days and then did a very simple text adventure with just half a dozen rooms and a couple of puzzles to crack and a few pretty graphics. Alan Maton, one of the managers at Bug-byte, sent them off to the Colour Genie people and they ended up putting them on a demo cassette that came with the computer when it was properly released.
Result! Did you get paid?
I got £300, which in 1982 was a small fortune for a 15-year-old from a poor background. The Oric had just come out and Bug-byte gave me one to keep. Alan said I ought to expand on the text adventure I’d written. That’s what became The Castle.
Was the game a big step up from that demo? Oh yeah. I mean unlike most adventures back then, every object had a weight and you could only carry so much. I even stuck scales in the game so you could weigh stuff and work out what you could take with you at one time. I put in lots more rooms, more logic, more puzzles and took it to Bug-byte. They said it was good but too easy.
Adventure games back then… if you took a wrong turn, you were dead! So I went back and made it much more difficult.
Have you a favourite puzzle from the game? Yes. At one point, you have to climb out of this cavern and a buzzard swoops down, grabs you by the head and decapitates you. If you search around, you find this decapitated head and if you hold that up, the buzzards grabs it and carries you out.
The Castle also came out on the Spectrum… [Laughs] I really didn’t fancy typing it all in again. I had a mate who’d just got a Spectrum and wanted to learn to program so I gave him the printout from the Oric and said typing it all in would be a great way to learn! I did pay him £50, too. I added in a bit of machine code and made everything work on the Spectrum… and it got good reviews and was pretty successful.
Did you earn much from your first officially released game?
I was getting 30p per sale and I got a £630 advance on delivery and for the first production run. Then I got paid another £300 three months later so they must have sold over 3,000 copies. I was 16 and just sitting my O-levels and had to see the careers teacher, Mrs Fuller. I told her I was going to program computer games on the Spectrum. ‘That’s a flash in the pan,’ she said. ‘It’ll be over it two years.’ Yeah, well done Mrs Fuller. I left school after my last exam, walked to the Bug-byte offices in the Albany Building and started there full-time.
What was your role at Bug-byte?
I realised I didn’t actually like writing games but I was good at knowing what would sell. Games would be sent in and after a few minutes of playing them, I’d know if they were marketable or if we could make some changes to improve them.
Bug-byte were getting 20 or 30 games submitted some days and most of them were useless and went straight in the bin but some were excellent.
Any you can recall being impressed by?
Twin Kingdom Valley. What was good about that game was the NPCS in it. I’d put NPCS in The Castle and they had a bit of intelligence but they didn’t move around. In Trevor’s [Hall – coder of Twin Kingdom Valley], they could wander around and affect the gameplay. I do remember making one mistake, too. Jumping Jack for the Spectrum was sent in and I said it was rubbish. I just didn’t play it long enough to realise how addictive it was. We wrote to the author to say no and he replied saying he’d had a better offer from Imagine anyway!
Bug-byte also published Matthew Smith’s first Spectrum games. Was that down to you?
Yeah, I introduced him to Bug-byte and that’s why I feel a special attachment to Matthew. I feel all the trouble he got into kind of boiled down to me. I was friends with him by then and thought he was a really nice guy. I’d go to his house in Liscard and he was fascinated that I’d managed to con two computers out of Bug-byte [giggles]. I told Tony Milner [cofounder of Bug-byte] I had this mate who was a really good programmer. I showed him some games Matthew had done for the TRS-80 and this code he’d written that let you talk into a microphone and it would play it back using the buzzer in the tape port so the computer seemed to speak. That blew Tony away.
We assume Tony wanted to meet this budding programmer, then?
Matthew came to the Bug-byte offices, dressed in the dungarees he always wore. A right scruffy bugger, he was. I introduced him to Tony and Eugene [Evans], who knew of him already. They gave him a Speccy to see what he could come up with. Matthew asked how long he had and Tony said as long as he needed. He was back three weeks later with Styx. He wanted to do Defender but couldn’t get scrolling working on the Spectrum so that’s why the shots look like that [in the game]. Tony was well impressed and released it… and it did quite well.
At what point did you become aware that Matthew was working on Manic Miner?
The 48K Spectrum came along and I knew Matthew’s favourite game on the Atari 800 was
Bill Hogue’s Miner 2049er so it wasn’t a surprise when he started his version of that. I remember going to his house while he was writing Manic Miner and he had a big print out of the code on dot matrix sheets. He had them all over the carpet, trying to find this bug in the code. We went into the kitchen to get a coffee and when we came back, the cat had shat on it and then clawed it all to ribbons. He went mental.
Did you have any input into any of the levels of Manic Miner?
Matthew got a lot of inspiration from stuff around him, like the snapping toilets are from when his little brother had a toilet seat fall on him and said the toilet had bit him. So yeah, we’d bounce around ideas for different creatures… my dad was decorating the hall at that time so I suggested sticking ladders in and they became the ‘stepladder’ monsters in The Warehouse level. There was no professionalism to it, just two mates having a laugh over the phone. In fact, we even exchanged graphics over the phone…
In 1983? What do you mean?
Matthew lived over the water on the Wirral and I was in Bootle and he wanted to show me
The Warehouse screen. I suggested wiring the tape leads direct to the phone microphone and speakers. He’d save and I’d load [on the Spectrum]… and it worked! Illegally, I might add. We were pumping five volts into the phone lines.
Ingenious! Manic Miner was a huge critical success but then Matthew had a serious falling out with the Bug-byte bosses. What is your view on what happened?
I didn’t know everything at the time but I do remember Matthew came in to our open-plan office – my desk was in the corner – and I saw him talking to Tony Milner. It was getting quite heated and Matthew ended up storming out. Tony had a face like thunder and wouldn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the day. I rang Matthew up that night but he didn’t want to talk about it. In fact, he went into a funk and wouldn’t talk about it for ages.
This led to Matthew setting up Software Projects with Alan Maton, a former Bug-byte employee, and Tommy Barton, an investor. Were you not tempted to go with them?
Well, Alan did ask if I wanted to come and join them. I hadn’t been paid any royalties by Bug-byte for my game for over a year. Not a penny and I’d been asking all the time so that peeved me off. So I started redirecting any games that had been sent to Bug-byte for consideration to Software Projects if I thought they were any good…
Sounds very crafty! Any games you can recall ‘redirecting’?
Thrusta I remember was one. It did well for Software Projects, though I played it again the other day and it’s rubbish [laughs].
We assume you got caught in the end?
I got called in by Tony and he said he’d heard I’d be meeting up with Alan Maton. I said, ‘So, what’s wrong with that?’ He said, ‘I followed you and saw what you were doing.’ I was out on my ear… but I rang Alan up and said something like, ‘Come on, it’s payback time now,’ and I started at Software Projects the next day. This would be late 1983.
What was your role there?
I had three roles really. I did the PR, so talking to magazines and doing a bit of marketing. Then I dealt with games sent it by people, either inviting them in to see us if the game was brilliant or letting them down gently. And then I’d go to the zoo.
Sorry, ‘the zoo’?
Yeah, that was Unit 7 of the Bear Brand Complex, where our programmers were. We called it that because it was full of animals. They used to basically live and sleep there while they were coding games and I’d go and sit with them, help them solve any coding problems they were having, giving them suggestions for things they could improve in their games… a support role, really.
A lot was riding on Jet Set Willy to be the killer hit that Software Projects needed.
Did you spend much time with Matthew during its development?
No. Matthew was closed off and never talked about the game. He was an introvert anyway and he just went into himself. These days, you’d probably say he was clinically depressed. It was the pressure. He had got into making games for fun, like we all had, and the fun had stopped… but he was invested and he couldn’t get out of it. One of his business partners in particular was a nasty piece of work. You feel he was harshly treated? The thing I hate from that time was when companies were ringing up asking why Jet Set
Willy wasn’t ready yet, because it had missed its delivery date a few times, and I was ordered to give them Matthew’s home phone number, so they could ring him and ask him directly. I wasn’t happy about doing that but I was told I had to. I feel really bad but I didn’t have much choice.
Matthew’s mum once told us there were always people hanging around their house at that time, pestering Matthew to buy them drinks. Is that how you remember it?
Matthew did like a smoke and he always had a nice supply. Yeah, a lot of people would come round and
I was at Matthew’s house when the cat shat on his Manic Miner printout. He went mental Chris Cannon
he was too nice, basically. I didn’t like them. ‘Ne’er do wells’, as my grandma would call them. A bunch of losers. Every time I went round they were there, sitting in the front room, smoking. Parasites.
When Jet Set Willy did come out, it was a huge success, and work began on the next Miner Willy game, The Megatree. Did you ever visit Matthew, Stuart Fotheringham and Marc Dawson while they were working on it?
They were based in Holt Road, Alan Maton’s old house. Yeah, I used to go over there, take my modem and we’d play MUD [an early online multiplayer text adventure game] all night. And no, I didn’t see much work being done.
Stuart and Marc were sacked from Software Projects after The Megatree was cancelled and along with others like Steve Weatherill and Colin Grunes, set up Odin Computer Graphics. Did you keep in touch?
Oh yeah and I’m still in touch with them today, 35 years later. Colin was best man at my wedding! […] I’d get the bus from Software Projects in Woolton and visit them at their offices in Liverpool. I’d often chat to the director there, Paul Mckenna, who seemed like a nice guy, but not about anything he couldn’t read about in the press. Tommy Barton somehow got to know about it and through some paranoid delusion thought I was giving away company secrets. To be fair, he knew what I’d done for Software Projects when I was still at Bug-byte and thought a leopard doesn’t change its spots.
Didn’t Matthew stick up for you?
Matthew had his own problems. He wasn’t actually there at that time. When I told him I’d been sacked, he was really surprised. He knew nothing about it.
The whole software business was having problems in the mid-eighties, with companies like Imagine imploding spectacularly.
I think it all started with me getting sacked from Software Projects. That was the catalyst [giggles]. To be honest, I wasn’t interested in the industry. It was a hobby for me, something you did with your mates, and once business got involved that’s when it all started going wrong. We were a bunch of teenagers and we were taken advantage of, really.
You left the games industry behind at that point, though you had a long career in IT, and now you run tours of historical Liverpool (www.hiddenliverpool.co.uk). Have you ever considered doing a tour of key locations in the early games business, with Matthew drinking Guinness in one of the pubs for period detail?
[Laughs] I have actually done a couple. There’s not too much left now but I could show you the site of Canning Place, where Bug-byte, Odin and Thor were based, the Albany Building, where the original Bug-byte offices were, and I’d take in some of the pubs where we all used to drink after work like Ma Boyles Oyster Bar. I also do talks in schools and to history groups and I do have a section about all the games companies that began in and around Liverpool. It really was the start of the games industry in this country.
Thanks to Paolo Santagostino for the introduction, Chris and Martyn Carroll for their help, and if you’re ever visiting Liverpool, book a tour with Chris at www.hiddenliverpool.co.uk.