GeoCities will close on 26th October 2009, so I will be moving this page to my new website (when I have thoroughly checked and edited it):
Please update your links and bookmarks ASAP, because there will be no redirection after 26th October.
Matthew Smith wrote Manic Miner in 1983 and Jet Set Willy in 1984. After that, the MM/JSW community never heard of him (except for odd snippets such as he'd moved to Holland and changed his name to Matthew from Earth) until 1999, when he moved back to England and set up his own website, which now appears to be no longer online:
23rd March 2006: However, archives of the site are available from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (this link is for the front page of his site; the links on the front page are broken, but you can copy & paste them into the "Enter Web Address:" box).
25th March 2006: The following appears to be Matthew Smith's new website:
Matthew Smith's long seclusion from public view was the subject of much obsession, and his very absence reinforced his god-like status in the eyes of many (in my view he isn't a god as such, just the author of arguably the two most influential computer games of all time). Not surprisingly, there were a few web-pages about him:
Matthew Smith lived in a commune in Holland in the mid-to-late 1990s. He worked as a bicycle repairman according to Iain (not Iain Eddy! ;-)) who lived in the commune with Matthew from 1995 to 1997.
It is difficult to prove that the Matthew Smith on the Internet today is the same person who wrote Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy back in the eighties. In a world of fakes and hoaxes, it would not surprise me if an imposter tried to set himself up as Matthew Smith. However, his website does have an unmistakeable Matthew Smith atmosphere about it (especially the little green men :-)), and his 1999 interviews and emails to me sounded very authentic - not, in my estimation, the sort of stuff a shallow imposter would make up.
Chris Cannon [email address spamblocked], who claims to have worked for Bug-Byte and Software Projects, asserted on the comp.sys.sinclair newsgroup that it is the real Matthew Smith. Furthermore, the Matthew Smith who was interviewed on Channel 4's Thumb Candy does look like the photos previously posted on his website (he's changed a lot since he was seventeen, but that's not surprising), and the Matthew Smith article in the November 2001 issue of Edge (see Message 2396 of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group) cites his website.
So I now believe beyond all reasonable doubt that he is the real Matthew Smith, and I'm sorry to have doubted this in the past.
According to the November 2001 issue of Edge magazine, he was living in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. However, more recent intelligence indicates he has moved away from Dewsbury.
His website does not appear to have been updated since 2000, but (as of August 2003) he is still a regular at the Allegro game programming library forums (thanks to Visa-Valtteri "jet_visy" Pimiä for this information).
He attended CGEUK in July 2004.
On 26th February 2005, he gave a fantastic interview at the Screenplay festival, Nottingham, in which he revealed his plans to write a new Spectrum game! Source: redkeyreddoor pp. 75, 76.