Steve ‘Bit’ Boxer continues our semi-regular feature on legends of the gaming industry. Following the wizard that was Matthew Smith, we now bring you those Codemaster brothers, Richard and David Darling.

The Darling brothers, who built up and recently sold leading UK publisher Codemasters, must have been exactly the sort of kids you used to take pleasure in hating at school. In common with many British games industry luminaries, they were siblings and had a distinctly transatlantic upbringing. At school in Vancouver in 1981, they acquired a Commodore Pet, followed by a Vic-20, and set about writing games while their schoolmates sneaked fags behind the bike-sheds.
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It’s a huge industry these days, but the games industry has featured its fair share of characters – nutters, geniuses, eccentrics and the like – in the past. In the spirit of enlightenment, we thought we’d start a semi-regular feature in which we introduce you to some of the industry’s most enduring legends. First up, take a bow, Matthew Smith.

To describe Matthew Smith as a games industry legend is perhaps wrong – he’s more of a myth. In fact, he’s the industry’s equivalent of Syd Barrett: a wunderkind who went off the rails spectacularly. Although, unlike Barrett, he’s still alive.
By the time he was 20, Smith had created what were then hailed as two of the best games ever: Manic Miner (1983) and Jet Set Willy (1984). Anarchic, hilarious platform-style games for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, they were vastly successful. Smith, naturally, was under vast amounts of pressure to follow them up, but the third “Miner Willy” game, generally touted as Willy Meets the Taxman, never saw the light of day – and Smith self-destructed and disappeared.
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