Suzy Soft

~ the obit ~

Zagreb, 1985. Suzy Records was a record label, in the business of pressing and distributing music inside a socialist economy, and in 1985 it opened a software division and called it Suzy Soft. Why a label decided to do that is not recorded anywhere, though a company already pressing cassettes for teenagers was better placed than most to notice what else they were putting in their tape decks. That made it the first company in Yugoslavia whose actual stated business was publishing software.

The word "first" is doing real work in that sentence. Yugoslav home computing in the mid-eighties ran almost entirely on copies. Machines arrived through the gray market or came back in a relative's suitcase from Trieste, programs arrived on tapes that had been dubbed down through who knows how many generations, and the magazines printed listings you typed in yourself. Suzy Soft was not fighting piracy so much as proposing an alternative to it: a tape with a label on it, a known author, a price, bought in a shop.

It published for the two imported machines everybody actually had, the Spectrum and the C64, and also for the Orao, a Croatian-designed computer built for schools that ran on hardware nobody outside Yugoslavia will ever have touched. Publishing for the Orao is the detail that marks the operation as serious rather than opportunistic. There was no export market for an Orao title and no second territory to port it to. It existed because the schools had the machines.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the catalog ~

The list that survives is short and strange and reads like a country figuring out what software is for. Vruće ljetovanje in 1985, a Spectrum game, and Ali Baba the same year by Mario Mandic. The Drinker, by Saša Pušica. Bajke in 1986, made with Xenon, then Jamski Heroj and Game Mix in 1987 and Flower Man in 1988. Sitting among the games is Dobro jutro programiranje, which translates as Good Morning Programming, a teaching title from 1985 written by Damir Muraja. The label was selling children a course in writing the thing it was also selling them finished.

I was a year old in 1985 and in a different country, so none of this is memory, and the honest version of the distance is that the Yugoslav eighties are a generation and a border away from mine. The shape of it does carry across, though. Those same imported micros and those same multi-generation tape copies were circulating in Turkey, and the first Turkish software anybody sold properly rather than passed around arrived on identical logic. The machines were the same ones; the customs regimes and the companies around them were not.

At least one title never made it out. A Commodore 64 game called Kljuc, dated 1988, sits in the Games That Weren't archive, which is the register kept for software that was finished or nearly finished and then not released. It is the last thing with the Suzy Soft name attached to it, and it never shipped.

~ the parent ~

Nothing dramatic happened here and no court was involved. In 1988 the management of Suzy Records decided it no longer wanted a software publishing department and closed it. A hundred corporate side projects in a hundred countries have ended on exactly that sentence. The difference is that in Yugoslavia in 1988 almost nobody else was doing it on that footing, so a label's internal reorganization took the country's first proper software publisher out with it. Three years later the country itself started coming apart, and the question of who should have been publishing Croatian software became somebody else's problem in a much worse year.

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