How did Manic Miner move from Bugbyte to Software Projects?

[bluespikey]

Just that. How did the game get released twice with very minor modifications? The DB just says :

"ZXSR: Famously moved onto Software Projects label after Matthew Smith left Bug-Byte through a legal loophole."

But I can't find any other details. Was Software Projects just another publisher or did MS own it somehow?

[HEXdidnt]

Details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Projects and http://www.carlylesmith.karoo.net/spect ... ttpcw.html

Essentially, Smith was a founder of SP, and maintained the rights to Manic Miner due to an aspect of his freelance contract with Bug Byte, specifically that he could request they withdraw the game from circulation, at which point the rights would be returned to him.

[Mpk]

My hazy non-authoritative memory is that MS didn't think that he was getting sufficient reward from his Bug-Byte deal, so he co-founded Software Projects with a couple of buddies, and was able to publish Manic Miner in parallel with the Bug-Byte release due to a poorly-worded contract.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Projects backs me up, and wikipedia is never wrong.

[bluespikey]

Thats good info, thankyou. There isn't much mention of it on the Manic Miner wiki page. I've not seen the interview before.

Matthew sees the games he produces as adventures, which use only three simple commands.

That is something profound.

From Alan's point of view, Software Projects is at an important point. "We need to build up a large range of respected and popular titles. We can't just rely on Matthew - we are developing an in-house programming team, with Matthew acting as sort of overall supervisor and technical advisor. Anything that's good, we'll issue. I don't want us to become just the 'manic miner' software house.' "

Reader, they failed.

[Sham Mountebank]

I'm going to be incredibly lazy and quote something I wrote on my blog

The exact circumstances which allowed him to revoke Bug-Byte's licence to produce the game are not clear but it revolved around a clause in his contract. Smith recalled in an interview with POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY volume 3, number 14 (April 1984 page 13) that, "there was a clause which said that should a game be withdrawn from the market upon written request, it would be returned to the programmer - I don't think anyone had expected that a programmer would withdraw his own game!" A couple of months later in BIG K issue 4 (July 1984 page 19) Tony Baden of Bug-Byte gave his side of the story. "There was a clause in our original contract... which, due to a comma in the wrong place, or a missing comma, can't remember which, was a bit ambiguous. Rather than spending a lot of time and money fighting it in court, we agreed to let him take the game with him. At the time, you see, Matthew was a minor, and our legal people told us that against a minor in open court no one has a chance."

[AndyC]

Makes sense. It was probably supposed to say "should a game be withdrawn from the market, upon written request it would be returned to the programme"

Moving the comma like that changes whether the written request is to remove it from the market, or to get the rights once it has been removed.

[spider]

The opportunity was taken to alter the joystick control routine a bit too (and a few other things, the car sprite has a missing pixel fix for instance and some cavern sprite changes) , which is why the code itself is in a slightly different place, which varies a bit but its not difficult to 'translate' between the BB and SP engines. I do mean to do the disassembly of the SP version at some point***

As to -why- the routine was changed I am not 100% sure, it did make perfect sense and perhaps it was something that was thought about while only the BB version was out aka "maybe this should of been done" , but its not a huge issue imo.


*** been on my ever expanding "todo" list for about 5 years...