Mikro-Gen

~ the eulogy ~

Mikro-Gen sold cassettes into one country. Crash and Your Sinclair reviewed the games and British high-street shops sold the tapes. By 1987 the company was finished. Every one of those tapes was written for a computer I never owned: the last Mikro-Gen inlay card went to print before I had a keyboard of any kind, and the one I eventually got belonged to a PC.

Mike Meek and Andrew Laurie formed it in 1981, early enough to be selling home-computer software before most people had a home computer to run it on. The first few years read as ordinary for the period, a Star Trek in 1982 and a Laserwarp in 1983. Then came a character called Wally Week, a working man in a flat cap with a job to do, and the reviews stopped being ordinary. Automania took 88 percent in Crash and Pyjamarama took 92. Everyone's A Wally and Three Weeks in Paradise both took 93.

What the company did with that reputation was build hardware. The Mikro-Plus was a cartridge-sized unit that plugged into the Spectrum's expansion port and carried 16K of its own shadow ROM, so a program could be 64K on a machine whose usable memory stopped at 48K. The remaining 48K still loaded off tape in the usual way. Mikro-Gen put one hundred and thirty thousand pounds into producing it and bundled it with an adventure called Shadow of the Unicorn.

~ the dossier ~

~ 11,000 copies ~

The bundle charted. In October 1985 it reached number 5 on the ZX Spectrum chart and number 9 across all formats, a real result for a peripheral with exactly one piece of software for it. Then the figure that mattered arrived: 11,000 units sold, almost thirty thousand short of what the project needed to break even. No further Mikro-Plus titles were produced.

The Mikro-Plus was not a bad idea. It was an idea whose arithmetic only worked at a volume a single software house could not reach, because the add-on had to be bought before the game could be played and the only game was the one in the box. Three Weeks in Paradise had been planned as a Mikro-Plus release and came out as an ordinary cassette instead.

~ wally week ~

Five games carried him, from Automania in 1984 through Three Weeks in Paradise. The family filled in around him as the run went on, up to a son called Herbert who got a game to himself. The Spectrum had a lot of men in capes and spaceships on it. Mikro-Gen's contribution was a man with a toolbox, doing ordinary British jobs rendered as puzzle screens.

~ bought by creative sparks ~

Equinox and Stainless Steel went out in 1986 and that is where the catalog stops. In 1987 the company was bought out by Creative Sparks Distribution, and Creative Sparks went into receivership roughly six months after that. The name stopped appearing on inlay cards. Nobody published a closing statement, because nobody published closing statements for software houses in 1987.

Neither event has a month attached to it in any source, only the year, which is the level of precision the era offers for a company this size. Shadow of the Unicorn will still not run without the box, and 11,000 of those were ever made.

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