Ultrasoft

~ the obituary ~

Ultrasoft was selling cassettes to Czech and Slovak teenagers when I was a primary school kid in Turkey, which is two kinds of distance stacked on each other. The ZX Spectrum did reach Turkey and plenty of people my age had one, but the scene that grew around this company spoke Slovak and ran on a distribution system I never touched. Everything below came out of a wiki page and a business register.

The register is the better source. The Slovak business register has it as ULTRASOFT, spoločnosť s ručením obmedzeným, company number 00 685 968, entered on 22 November 1990 at Martinská 31 in Bratislava and moved to Záhrebská 2 in September 1993. One partner, one director, the same man in both roles: Ľudovít Wittek, who appears on English pages as Louis Wittek. Paid-up capital was 100,000 Slovak crowns. The declared purpose was development and distribution of programs for personal computers, plus publishing a periodical about them.

Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1989, a year earlier than the register entry, and cites nothing for it. Both can be true, because private companies only became registrable in Czechoslovakia after the revolution and plenty of them existed informally first. The register date is the one with a document behind it, so it is the one used here.

~ the case file ~

~ the cassette economy ~

Most of the catalog was other people's work. Fuxoft and Cybexlab came out of the Czech lands, Gold Storm and DSA Computer Graphics out of Slovakia, and behind them sat a long tail of two-person outfits with no other route to a shop. Over forty titles went out under the label. It also held the exclusive Czechoslovak distribution for Domark and Ocean Software, which meant the same little company in Bratislava was both the local indie publisher and the official route in for British hits.

~ bit ~

The publishing clause in the register got used. Between 1991 and 1994 Ultrasoft put out Bit, a monthly magazine for home computer owners that concentrated on games, which made the same small company both the label and the press that reviewed it.

The catalog kept a straight face about the rest of the Spectrum's uses too. Alongside Towdie and the Atomix puzzle games there were language tutors under the Mantrik name alongside a run of editors for text and for music that treated the machine as a workstation. Somebody at that company still believed the Spectrum was a serious computer in 1993, and was selling to people who agreed.

~ the paperwork ~

The last game in the published list is Twilight: Krajina Tieňov, dated 1995. Bit had stopped the year before. After that there is nothing, and the English article's claim that the company was dissolved in 1998 has no source attached to it and does not match the register, which keeps Wittek listed as director and owner the whole way through.

What actually happened is in the file. A Bratislava court opened proceedings under case number 36Exre/90/2005, issued its order on 19 December 2007, and that order became final on 22 January 2008. It dissolved the company without liquidation, which is what a court does when there are no assets left to divide. On 26 April 2008 the registrar deleted ULTRASOFT ex offo, on its own motion, and the entry closed.

~ what got buried with it ~

Thirteen years passed between the last tape and the deletion, and in that gap the company was still legally alive and doing nothing at all. Small European software houses of the period mostly end exactly like this, and it almost never gets written down, because the trade press stops covering you the moment you stop shipping and the register does not issue announcements. The games and the magazine both survive, scanned and emulated by people who cared enough. The only surviving record of the ending is a paragraph of Slovak legal boilerplate that nobody was meant to read.

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