Bug-Byte

~ the obit ~

Bug-Byte went into liquidation in June 1985. I was about a year old that summer, in a country where a ZX Spectrum arrived as a grey import if it arrived at all, so what I hold of this company all arrived late, off other people's scanned magazines. The address is what sticks: Mulberry House, Canning Place, Liverpool, an office near the docks where two chemistry graduates sold cassettes for machines that had only been on sale a year or two.

Tony Baden and Tony Milner started it in May 1980 and went looking for games to put out. In 1981 they paid seventy-five pounds for The Damsel and the Beast, a ZX81 adventure by Don Priestley, a former teacher who had picked up programming at a night school course. Priestley wrote two more for them, Dictator and Mazogs, and Mazogs turned into one of the best selling things anyone ever shipped on a ZX81. Then he left to become a director at a rival publisher.

In 1982 Bug-Byte published the first commercial games for the BBC Micro and for the ZX Spectrum, Spacewarp and Spectral Invaders, both written by David Lawson. When Popular Computing Weekly printed the first UK software chart that December, Spectral Invaders was first on the Spectrum half of it. Lawson put the money from his next game into starting Imagine Software with another Bug-Byte employee, and left as well.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ styx, then manic miner ~

Matthew Smith signed for three games and delivered Styx in 1983. The second came out of a request from the company's despatch manager, Alan Maton, who wanted something along the lines of Donkey Kong. Smith wrote Manic Miner, and it outsold every other game in the country inside a month.

Then came the argument about royalties. Smith walked, Manic Miner walked with him, Maton walked too, and the pair of them founded Software Projects. Jet Set Willy went out under that label instead. Bug-Byte kept publishing and kept having hits, Twin Kingdom Valley topped the BBC Micro chart and The Birds and the Bees came from a school friend of Smith's, but the biggest title in its own back catalog now belonged to somebody else.

~ cash flow, early 1985 ~

By the start of 1985 the trade press was reporting cash flow problems at Bug-Byte, which in that industry at that moment was the sentence that came before the receivers. Liquidation followed a few months later. Nobody recorded a day for it and the sources do not even agree on the month, some putting the voluntary liquidation in May and the last trading in June.

~ the name as a budget label ~

Later in 1985 Argus Press PLC bought the name and the logo. Not the company, which was finished, and not the people. Just the brand, which Argus wanted for a cheap line. Bug-Byte cassettes carried on appearing for years after the firm that earned the name had stopped existing, padded out with re-releases from the Argus back catalog and from Quicksilva, which Argus had also recently picked up.

A Tennis game under the Bug-Byte label topped the BBC chart in 1986. In 1987 the managing director of Argus Press Software bought the division out, renamed it Grandslam Entertainment and rebranded the Bug-Byte range again. The last cassettes to carry the green bug were re-releases of Domark titles, A View to a Kill among them. By then the two chemistry graduates had been gone from the trade for four years.

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