Mirrorsoft

~ the eulogy ~

Mirrorsoft was set up in late 1983 by Jim Mackonochie as the software arm of Mirror Group Newspapers. That reads as harmless until July 1984, when Robert Maxwell bought the newspaper group. From that point it was a games publisher sitting inside a private empire whose accounts nobody outside it understood, and that turned out to matter far more than anything it published.

On the products it was good. The Image Works label carried the Bitmap Brothers at their peak, Xenon 2 Megablast in 1989 and Speedball 2 in 1990. Sensible Software's Mega-Lo-Mania went out under the same badge in 1991. The American arm traded as Arena Entertainment, and Maxwell's side of the business also controlled Spectrum HoloByte in Alameda, California.

Then Tetris. Mirrorsoft took European computer rights through Robert Stein's Andromeda, and the chain behind those rights had been sublicensed before the underlying Soviet contract was even signed in May 1988. Nobody could say cleanly what had been sold to whom. The question got answered in Moscow in February 1989 by an ELORG negotiator named Nikolai Belikov, and it was not answered in Mirrorsoft's favor.

The Maxwell name reached Turkey and the software division under it did not. He was a figure the Turkish papers covered, a British press baron who went into the sea off a yacht in November 1991 and left a pension fund with a hole in it, and that story travels anywhere. A games label sitting three levels below him in the same group structure travels nowhere. I learned this company existed by reading about Tetris, which means I met Mirrorsoft as a footnote in somebody else's lawsuit.

~ the dossier ~

~ the tetris problem ~

Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris in 1984 at the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and because he wrote it inside a state institute he owned none of it. Robert Stein of Andromeda Software went after the rights and started selling them before he had them in hand. Mirrorsoft took Europe and Spectrum HoloByte took America, and both shipped in 1988.

The trouble was the word computer. Mirrorsoft's board asked what it owned beyond that and sent Kevin Maxwell to Moscow in February 1989 to establish it, on the assumption that the family name would carry the room. Henk Rogers of Bullet-Proof Software turned up the same month for the same reason. Belikov let Kevin Maxwell talk himself into confirming the narrow reading, then handed the handheld rights to Nintendo, which shipped Tetris in the Game Boy box and sold it by the tens of millions. Atari Games had its NES version pulled by injunction in June 1989.

~ how it actually ended ~

Robert Maxwell went overboard off the Canary Islands on 5 November 1991. Within weeks the group's borrowing against its own pension funds became public and the banks moved. Arthur Andersen came in as administrator at the end of November.

For Mirrorsoft the mechanism was quick and stupid. The administrators stopped sales, which was the division's only source of revenue, so a working publisher with a shelf of finished product had no way to turn any of it into money. Most of the staff were let go on New Year's Eve 1991. Trading stopped early in 1992.

~ what got buried with it ~

Acclaim Entertainment bought Mirrorsoft's assets and the Arena Entertainment label in 1992. Mindscape took the Cinemaware brand that Mirrorsoft had carried in Europe, and MicroProse picked up European distribution for the Spectrum HoloByte catalog. Every piece found a home. The company did not survive being one of the pieces.

Throwback Entertainment relaunched the name as MIRROR Soft in 2020, which is a trademark rather than a continuation. What actually ended in 1992 was one of the few British publishers with the money to compete on scale, killed by nothing it did and by everything its owner did.

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