Matthew Smith (games programmer)
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Matthew Smith is a British computer game programmer, best known for his games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum, released in 1983 and 1984 respectively. After the creation of Jet Set Willy he started work on The Mega Tree for publication by his company Software Projects. Unlike his previous two hits The Mega Tree was not developed for the ZX Spectrum but the Commodore 64. The project failed to gain traction and was abandoned three months into development.
Smith closed Software Projects several years later without completing any more programs and vanished for a while. He was living in a Dutch commune and reappeared on the Internet in the late 1990s.
In 1999 Smith returned to the UK industry by taking a job at Dewsbury-based computer game developer Runecraft. Unfortunately his employment there was relatively short-lived and resulted in only one new game (Scrabble for the Game Boy Color) from the 8-bit coding superstar of the 1980s.
External links
- The Matthew Smith mystery (http://jswremakes.emuunlim.com/Authors/Smith/mystery.htm)
- Matthew Smith category at ODP (http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Platform/Miner_Willy_Games/Matthew_Smith/)