Bubble Bus Software

87 High Street, Tonbridge

This is why I'm not allowed to make jokes.

I wanted to include a small joke in the Christmas review about not allowing this blog to run on for too many years. "No one wants to be here in 2056 when I visit the offices of XXXX," Followed by a picture of the offices of XXXX. Hilarious. I immediately worked this little joke into a big problem by overthinking my choice of software house. It couldn't be one so obscure no one had heard of it and it couldn't be one that I might want to write up later. It also, and this is me being soppy, couldn't be a crap software house because I didn't want to feel I was being needlessly mean. Bubble Bus was perfect. A small software house that never changed their business address and was, probably, best known for publishing Steve Crow's two games Wizard's Lair and the outstanding Starquake. I was even able to get to Tonbridge in December and snap a picture. This really was ideal. Or so I thought.

3pm on Saturday 23rd December. 87 High Street is an unremarkable modern building which has obviously replaced whatever was there originally. It's inoffensively bland in a way I associate with stuff built in the late ninties. Tonbridge High Street was busy and I waited impatiently until I could snap a photo with minimal cars and pedestrians in shot. Then off to Greggs for a moment to savour my triumph with a cup of tea.

December 2023

While nursing my tea, I did what I often do and I typed the address into Google to see what comes up. What came up immediately was a picture from the Tonbridge Daily facebook page showing an old photo of 87 High Street, Tonbridge in 1964. It's copyrighted so I'm not going to post it here but you can get a better look on the Tonbridge History website. I realised, with a familiar sinking feeling, that Bubble Bus was accidentally more interesting than I thought.

Before Bubble Bus, 87 High Street was home to the Tonbridge branch of a shop called The Computer Room. Their groovy 1980 cinema advert is on Youtube. Bubble Bus appears to be a software label spun off from The Computer Room around 1983.

COMMODORE COMPUTING INTERNATIONAL 
September 1983 page 12

It's not easy to get a grip on the history of Bubble Bus. I can't find the name before 1983 but Mobygames credits Bubble Bus with titles appearing as early as 1982, and there's also this title screen for the game Exterminator.

The best I can tell is that Mobygames has mashed together some credits. The Computer Room released a few games for the Vic-20 in 1982 and these were later rereleased for the Commodore 64 by Bubble Bus in late 1983. I also found an old COMMODORE USER profile (September 1984 page 54) which included this revealing snippet:

Two of the games in the Bubble Bus range were not written in house. Both Exterminator and Widow’s Revenge are licensed from an American software house. And [Mark] Meakings [one of the two Bubble Bus directors] got hold of them through a dubious and tortuous route - “We got them from a guy who’s notorious in the industry as a pirate and a crook. We knew the games had been pirated so we found out which software house had written them and came to an arrangement.”

That software house was Nüfekop an American company based in Shady Cove Orgeon (sounds lovely). Exterminator was originally a Vic-20 game and the copyright message on the title screen probably refers to the US release date. As usual, if I've got this wrong please let me know. The COMMODORE USER profile also solves a small mystery raised by CRASH when they interviewed Anne Lovejoy of Bubble Bus and programmer Steve Crow in March 1985. The introduction casually mentions:

It would have been much more pleasant to have interviewed Steven on Bubble Bus' home ground — they're based in a converted granary in Tunbridge, Kent, which is quite an idyllic setting — 'duck mind your head' signs on the beams and a river meandering at the bottom of the garden. 

What's all this converted barn business? Well, the COMMODORE USER profile includes a picture of the building in all it's glory.

Lovely. If only more magazines printed pictures like this. Next question. Where is it? As we've seen from the Tonbridge History website, 87 High Street was an odd one-story shop. Could it be The Computer Room's other shop at 21 Monson Road, Tunbridge Wells? No. Not only does the barn look wrong for Tunbridge Wells but there's no river anywhere near that address. CRASH doesn't help matters with its scattergun approach to proofreading, is their "Tunbridge, Kent," supposed to be Tonbridge or Tunbridge Wells?

Look more closely at the photo. See those signs for The Computer Room. It's one of their two shops and the only one close to a river was the Tonbridge branch. 87 High Street is on the junction of the High Street and Medway Wharf Road, which runs down the side of (you'll be surprised to learn) the river Medway. Back to the Tonbridge History website. Do they have photos of Medway Wharf Road? They do. Initial optimism turned into disappointment. The first picture looking at the buildings on the Medway side of the street showed nothing like the COMMODORE USER photo. But the second did. It shows clearly how the wooden slatted building pictured in COMMODORE USER runs into the weird single story shop at 87 High Street. 

It turns out Bubble Bus is one of those rare companies where the office building no longer stands but was well documented. I discovered a blog that photographs old Woolworths buildings and Bubble Bus' address was a couple of doors down from Woolworths. Poundland is now in the old Woolworths building, as you can see in my photo further up the page. The Woolworths blog has pictures taken in 1982 and 2000, and in both you can just see the same odd building on the corner of High Street and Medway Wharf Road. It looks like the Bubble Bus office was finally demolished around 2005. Over at the stardot.org forum is a thread started by Kenton Price, who converted Starquake to the BBC Micro, and in this thread another user called Reuben remembers:

"in 2004 I moved from London to Tonbridge, Kent, and after a year or so there I found I'd been living directly opposite Bubble Bus's old office. We'd visited it once as boys 17 years previously, but I'd totally failed to recognise I'd been living even in the same town. Two weeks later developers knocked the whole building down, which was rather sad."

What happened to Bubble Bus? They carried on releasing games, mainly on Commodore formats with a few diversions back on to the Spectrum and Amstrad. Website www.atarimania.com records that Starquake got an Atari ST release in 1988 by a company called Mandarin Software; who appear to be a joint venture with fellow software houses Level 9 and The Power House. Atarimania.com also records a 1989 release date for an Atari ST version of Hustler, which means one of the very first games released by Bubble Bus also became one of their last. Their actual last game seems to have been written for Mirrorsoft, Final Frontier. Mobygames has a picture of the acknowledgment page from the manual "Programmed by Bubble Bus and David Bolton".

In the end Bubble Bus, the company that was supposed to be the subject of a throwaway joke, turns out to have an office that's among the best documented I've found. Looks like the joke's on me.

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