Synapse Software

~ the obituary ~

Ihor Wolosenko and Ken Grant started Synapse Software in 1981, and the first thing they sold was not a game at all. It was a database called File Manager 800, written by the two of them for Atari's 8-bit machines. The games came right behind it: Dodge Racer that same year, then Protector, and then in 1982 a maze game called Shamus that fixed the company's reputation for a decade. Wolosenko later agreed in an interview with Antic that Shamus was the moment people started expecting quality from the label.

What followed was one of the better runs any small publisher had on those machines. Necromancer, Alley Cat, Fort Apocalypse, Rainbow Walker and Blue Max all landed inside about eighteen months, most of them with box art by Tim Boxell, a friend of Wolosenko's. The catalog crossed over to the Commodore 64 as that machine took the market, and the games went to the UK through U.S. Gold under the SynSoft imprint. Somewhere in there the company also shipped a 6502 assembler and a suite of biofeedback hardware, because it was 1983 and nobody knew yet what a software company was supposed to sell.

The productivity line was the mistake. In 1983 Synapse started publishing home financial and office applications under the Syn prefix, SynFile+ and SynCalc among them, and according to Steve Hales the company knew it was a calculated risk and took it anyway in collaboration with Atari, Inc. Forty thousand units of that software had shipped when Jack Tramiel bought Atari's consumer division off Warner Communications in July 1984. Tramiel refused to pay for them. Synapse went into a cash crisis it could not get out of, and contracts for the sale to Broderbund were signed in October 1984. Broderbund meant to keep it running and could not make the numbers work, and the Synapse label was retired about a year later.

Synapse came and went before i was old enough to hold a joystick, so this is a catalog i have only ever read about. Neither of its two machines had much of a base in turkey either. The 8-bit sets that turned up in living rooms here were mostly commodore and spectrum, and by the time i had a computer of my own the whole disk-and-joystick-port world these games were built for had been replaced by something with a hard drive in it.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The good Synapse games were good because they used the specific machine in front of them rather than a generic idea of a home computer. Survivor in 1982 supported four players at once, which worked because the Atari 400 and 800 had four joystick ports and each player drove a different part of one spaceship. Nautilus split the screen so a submarine below and a destroyer above could be played by two people, or by one person against the computer. Blue Max put an isometric bomber over a scrolling landscape at a time when scrolling was still something you bragged about.

The overreach showed up in the same place. Dimension X was promoted heavily on a rendering technique the company called altered perspective scrolling, then arrived more than nine months late in a cut-down version and got the reviews that timing earns. Two thirds of the money by 1984 was coming from Commodore owners while the label's whole identity was Atari, which is an uncomfortable position for a company whose reputation is its only asset.

~ the slide ~

There is a version of this story where the productivity bet was reasonable. Home computers in 1983 were being sold to parents on the promise of household accounts, and a publisher with distribution and a known name had as good a shot at that market as anyone. What killed Synapse was not the strategy, it was having no cushion when a single customer decided the invoice was not his problem.

Tramiel's refusal is worth sitting with, because he was not wrong under the paperwork. He had bought a division, not its debts, and he spent the rest of 1984 doing the same thing to a lot of people. Synapse was simply one of the ones for whom it was fatal.

~ the long tail ~

The last real thing Synapse did was the strangest. Under the name Electronic Novels it built four text adventures on a parser that William Mataga and Steve Hales had named BTZ, for Better Than Zork. Seven were written and four came out. The best of them, Mindwheel in 1984, was written by the poet Robert Pinsky, who would be Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997, and it shipped with a hardcover book of his that you needed in order to answer the copy-protection questions.

So the catalog of a bankrupt arcade-game house contains a work of literary fiction with a laureate's name on the box. The other loose thread runs the other way: Salmon Run, the first game by Bill Williams, who later made Necromancer and Alley Cat for Synapse, was originally published by the Atari Program Exchange, which was Atari selling software written by its own customers out of a mail-order catalog, and which died the same year Synapse did.

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