Mulberry House, Canning Place, Liverpool, L1
251 Henley Road, Coventry CV2
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| COMPUTING TODAY (August 1980 page 74) |
Bug-Byte was already a toddler when Tony Baden gave an interview to YOUR COMPUTER magazine in August 1982: "Two years ago he was studying Chemistry at Oxford when Tony Milner, a student in the next room, bought a ZX-80. They played the machine and wrote a few programs before noticing that no-one seemed to be selling ZX-80 software. A £3 classified advertisement paid dividends. To their surprise, the 40 cassettes they had recorded were all sold in two weeks so one night in the pub they thought up a company name, sent off the £1 fee, and Bug- Byte was born."
Bug-Byte also crop up in the December 1980 issue of PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD. Guy Kewney writes: "Now that the Atom has passed its first 1000 sales, we have to start looking forward to the time when it becomes acceptable. Acceptable, as defined in my Rules of Thumb for selecting a system, means having more than 5000 users because that is the sort of figure that attracts software writers to start selling programs. And, right on cue, Bug Byte of Coventry write in with the news that the company is the first to offer Atom programs. Bug Byte is a partnership of three -Baden, Fitzgerald, and Milner- the last of whom has written to complain that his company, not Econsoft, was the first to offer software for the Sinclair ZX80. For details of their products, Milner says, I should look in the advertisement which he recently sent for inclusion in the December issue of this magazine." That advert is on page 160.
251 Henley Road is an unremarkable terraced house in the north-east of Coventry. It's, presumably, the family home of Tony Millner used in preference to a student residence address which was seen as not very "confidence inspiring." Christmas 1980 saw Bug-Byte selling £150 of Acorn Atom, Sinclair ZX80, and Nascom 2 software in a week. The YOUR COMPUTER interview continues the story: "Early in 1981, just
months from the end of their college careers, the two Tonys gambled
on placing a full page advertisement for the ZX-80 tapes.
Unfortunately Clive Sinclair chose the same month to launch his new
ZX-81: "We had doubled our advertising and halved our sales",
admits Baden." Silversoft and Addictive Games would experience a similar slump when the launch of the ZX Spectrum and undermined a healthily ZX81 software market. Nascom 2 software is dropped from advertising in March 1981, and ZX80 software disappears after July 1981; the same month Bug-Byte move from Coventry to Liverpool, Tony Baden's home city.
98-100 The Albany, Old Hall Street, Liverpool, L3
Only Tony Baden and Tony Milner made the trip to Liverpool. The move happened in July but it's not reflected in advertising until October. The same month Bug-Byte waved goodbye to PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD, where the company had advertised monthly since December 1980. A new magazine launched in November 1981 and was a better fit for Bug-Byte; COMPUTER AND VIDEOGAMES, Britain's oldest games magazine. Bug-Byte is there from issue one and their adverts rapidly become more professional as the company settles in to its new existence as a full time business rather than a profitable hobby. Issue 2 see the company all over the C&VG news pages with stories about a game called Rhino, another called Startrek, and a seedy picture accompanying a story about a game called Damsel and the Beast. This turns out to be the first game from veteran programmer Don Priestley who would go on to write colourful ZX Spectrum programming miracles like Popeye and The Trap Door. Tony Badon remembers writing "eight cassette games in one day once," but those days were passing as Bug-Byte began to use external programmers. Issue 2 also sees the company taking out their first full-page advert. The focus is on the Acorn Atom, and the offer includes a magazine called The Atom (6 bi-monthly issues for £4). Bug-Byte are looking for ways to diversify, and in this case they seem to be taking inspiration from Micropower who, in early 1982, began to publish a magazine for the Nascom called Program Power. ZX81 software becomes more important and by issue 4 the balance of the advert has reversed. Atom games only occupy a quarter of the page with the rest given over to ZX81 titles. Dictator is one of the ZX81 games, another title from Don Priestley. Aside from his games there's not much originality on display. The money seems to be in providing versions of popular arcade games; unlicensed versions because prior to the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act the law was vague on how much protection was offered to software. Bug-Byte was about to find out when they copped a sideswipe in a legal dispute between Atari and Commodore International.
Atari was in dispute with Commodore over a Pac-Man clone called Jelly Monsters. HAL Laboratory had a licence from Pac-Man creator Namco to release the game on home computers in Japan. Commodore brought this version of Pac-Man, renamed it Jelly Monsters and released it in the US and Europe, where Atari held the rights to Namco titles. POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (26 August 1982 page 4) carried more details of the UK end of this legal campaign: "ATARI has fired the opening shots in what promises to be a copyright war with far- reaching implications. Commodore has been the first to feel the effects but other companies, including Bug-Byte. A and F Software and Micropower are also involved."
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| Vicmen |
YOUR COMPUTER (July 1982, page 23) contains a full page Bug-Byte advert which could have attracted the attention of Atari's lawyers. Vicmen is advertised alongside Another Vic In The Wall (ho-ho) a clone of Atari's Breakout, and Vic Asterioids (Atari again). Further down the page for the Atom and ZX81 there's Invaders (Namco, so probably covered by Atari's licence), and for the Atom Galaxians (Namco again), another version of Breakout, plus a copy of Atari's arcade game Lunar Lander. In fact, that one issue of YOUR COMPUTER looks like ground zero for the whole Atari legal action with an advert for A&F's game Polecat on page 48 and Micropower's Munchyman on page 87. Acornsoft probably got a letter as well based on page 33's screenshot and description of Snapper as "similar to PacMan games." Atari's lawyer could have earned his fee for the day simply by uncapping his pen and circling all the copyright infringements in that one issue, then going for a long lunch.
Ironically in the midst of all angst about copying other people's ideas, Bug-Byte published another original ZX81 title from Don Priestly, Mazogs. Bug-Byte hyped the game with full page adverts, a highly unusual tactic at a time when companies tended to economise by packing a single advert with as many different games as possible. You can watch videos of Mazogs being played. It doesn't look remarkable now, but it was released at a time when Don Priestley's goal was, "trying to get away from all those games which revolved around a dollar sign being chased by an asterisk. Mazogs featured large mobile sprites in a solid maze all constructed using Sinclair's sugar cube graphics," as he later told CRASH (November 1986). It must have been a blow when Bug-Byte lost Don Priestley to dk'tronics at the end of 1982; especially as he offered his new company Spectrum versions of Mazogs and Dictator.
Next to leave Bug-Byte were programmer Dave Lawson, software manager Mark Butler, and head programmer Eugene Evans. They stayed in Liverpool to found Imagine at an address barely five minutes walk from Bug-Byte's office. Tony Millner put a brave face on the loss in POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (6 January 1983 page 5). "I gather some of our old people have set up an outfit just up the road... We are not at all worried- if anything we have become more efficient since they left. We're still good friends. They are not any competition yet but it will keep us on our toes." The experience the Imagine team gained working at Bug-Byte is writ large in the early days of the company; bold full-page adverts dedicated to a single game; retail only sales (the front page of the 6 January issue of PCW is headlined with Bug-Byte's plan to ditch mail order sales by the end of March 1983); and a desire to release original titles rather than copies of other people's intellectual property. It can't be any coincidence the baddies in Imagine's first game, Arcadia, are the Atarian nation, described as "steadily and inexorably extending its empire; quietly engulfing smaller, more vulnerable planets. It is now in a position of immense power, and poised to make a bid to enslave the entire galaxy." Clearly there were still sore feelings about the fate of Vic-Men.
Departures and legal letters aside, there was a lot going on behind the scenes as a news story in HOME COMPUTING WEEKLY (15 March 1983) revealed. Under the headline Bug-Byte stops mail-order sales, the article says Tony Baden: "and Tony Milner, 24, are linking up with two others to open up a tape duplicating plant... Explaining the ending of mail order, he said that over the last six months demand for orders by post had fell 50 percent, yet dealer sales were up by 300 percent. The limiting factor was the rate at which cassettes could be copied - one duplicating company wanted eight weeks but Bug-Byte needed a two week turn-round. This lead to the decision to open their own plant.... The partnership sold 30,000 cassettes a month from a catalogue of about 40 titles, had 220 dealers taking its products... and is moving to new premises in central Liverpool in May." Even taking all that into account it's odd how quiet Bug-Byte goes in the last few months of 1982. Advertising is reduced across magazines at a time when you'd expect Bug-Byte to be preparing for big Christmas sales; YOUR COMPUTER don't carry a Bug-Byte advert after the September issue; in C&VG it's October 1982; and PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD in November 1982. This while their rivals Silversoft and Micropower continue advertising as normal. There's no word from Bug-Byte until February 1983, when the company buys a double-page spread in YOUR COMPUTER. The tone of the advert is noticeably different, advertising the Bug-Byte brand as much as the games, a tactic pioneered by Imagine who are about two months old at this point and have taken three pages of adverts in the same issue. The software on offer is all old(ish) 1982 titles; Spectral Invaders, Mazogs, Aspect, Panic, Dragon Quest, and VIC Chess. It's not until March 1983 that the company offers a new game, The Castle (ZX Spectrum) in another double-page advert. That same issue includes five pages of adverts from Imagine.
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| December 2021 |
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER NEWS June 10-June 15 1983 page 58 |
Mulberry House, Canning Place, Liverpool, L1
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| POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY (30 JUNE-6 JULY 1983) |
Bug-Byte began to focus more on the ZX Spectrum. Mobygames lists eight games released in 1983, and only two are non-Spectrum titles. Adventure game Twin Kingdom Valley was converted for the suite of popular machines at the time; Commodore 16, C64, BBC Micro and Acorn Electron; and a VIC-20 version of Asteroids. This focus on the Spectrum is perhaps not surprising as Bug-Byte now had a secret weapon, programmer Matthew Smith. His first game Styx attracted lukewarm reviews, "a reasonably lively game," was SINCLAIR USER's verdict.His second, Manic Miner, was part of a wave of 1983 games which showed the Spectrum could do remarkable things. Unfortunately Bug-Byte couldn't keep Matthew Smith. In an echo of 1982, the end of 1983 saw Dispatch Manager Alan Maton leave to set up Software Projects. Matthew Smith followed, taking the rights to distribute Manic Miner with him. The circumstances of Maton and Smith's leaving are covered elsewhere on this blog. In an interview with PCW (5-11 April 1984 page 12) Smith recalls, "I really didn't feel any sensible attempt at marketing the programme was taking place at all -the cover of the cassette was pretty awful as well." You can read Bug-Byte's side of the story in BIG K (July 1984 page 18).
Christmas 1983 was a more difficult trading period than Christmas 1982 when shops were desperate for stock. Imagine's Sales Manager, Sylvia Jones, described the early months of 1984 in the Commercial Breaks documentary: "It's never been as slow as it is now. Never. It wasn't like this, this time last year. It slowed down dramatically in the last three months, not just for Imagine, for everybody. Probably because there are a lot more software houses now producing goods than there were this time last year." Imagine went into liquidation in July 1984 and suddenly there was a gap in the market. Bug-Byte was well placed to step up and take their place but they don't. The company looks tired. In the August 1984 edition of YOUR COMPUTER, as the magazine was running the last adverts booked by Imagine, Bug-Byte are still using their old 1983 format advert, indeed they're still advertising 1982's Spectral Invaders. Bug-Byte, Silversoft, and Quicksilva all had the corporate weight, and experience, and potential to be the next Imagine (in a good way) but they don't. The gap is filled by the newer and more nimble Ocean and US Gold who both dominate the UK market until well into the 1990s.
most interesting. It's a very early one-on-one martial arts game by Dusko Dimitrijevic (later to write Movie for Imagine). It's not quite the first martial arts game, but it's very close. It certainly seems to have beaten Brøderbund's Karateka into the shops. CRASH reader Glenn Devey grumbled that the game wasn't Kung Fu, it was Karate, and got a tart response from Letters Editor Lloyd Mangram. Turmoil, by David Turner was also well received, it was rated a CRASH SMASH in November 1984.
Then, in July 1985, CRASH ran an editorial headlined THIS TORMENTED BUSINESS. "I was struck by reading
a phrase in an edition of a software trade paper, it was, ‘... this tormented business of ours.’ It rather neatly summed up the first six months of this year in which the pre-Christmas gloom merchants appear to have been vindicated. To the vanished or quietly disappearing software houses, we can now add Bug-Byte... Bug-Byte looked like it was ailing for some time despite, or in spite, of rumoured tie-up deals with Argus. A shame really, because it severs any final link with the original flowering of Liverpool programming talent that began with Bug-Byte and flowed into Imagine, Software Projects and many of the programming houses that now exist... The way in which companies go bust is often telling. There are, of course, very strict legal rules covering the matter, but they are often easy to get around. Bug-Byte’s receivers informed all creditors (including CRASH) of the situation." The creditors were later informed, at a meeting on 1st May 1985, that Bug-Byte's total liabilities were £132,000. This included £1220 owed to CRASH. And that was that. Five years of computing history wound up. Argus Press Software had been about to sign a distribution deal with Bug-Byte, instead they snapped up the company assets and relaunched Bug-Byte as a budget label towards the end of 1985.
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| December 2021 |
I'm still on Twitter, @ShamMountebank, despite recent developments, and I'll probably stay there for the foreseeable future because the idea of trying to learn how to use another social media site fills me with fear.
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