LEGENDS OF GAMING: NUMBER ONE - MATTHEW SMITH

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.

Already a somewhat eccentric character – one noted hobby which often saw him in trouble with police was building home-made motorbikes – Smith reportedly came off the rails. Unable to concentrate, as a result, he drifted off the development scene and disappeared, prompting all manner of deliciously exotic rumours. Such as changing his name by deed-poll to Matthew From-Earth.

Reports surfaced that he moved to a commune in Leiden, Holland – a hippyish sort of place which suited his communist, anti-establishment ideals – and was spending his life fixing bicycles. Adding to the Matthew Smith legend, the commune burned down, although there’s no suggestion that that was anything to do with him. It appears that he had already moved back to the UK when that happened.

Smith, it seems, is back in the UK now, although he clearly doesn’t want to be found. Reputedly, he’s still programming and has his head together once more – we’d love to see some new output from the man in these next-gen days, although the now-corporate games industry is a far cry from the Gold Rush-like cottage industry of the mid-80s. But the abundance of versions of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy available for modern computers demonstrates those games’ enduring appeal. Come back Matthew: the games industry needs all the mavericks it can get.

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