The Mystery of Supasoft

Supasoft was a small British computer software business active during the 1980s. Very little information about the company has survived, and unlike many of the larger software houses of the period, details of its ownership, employees and eventual fate remain largely unknown.

The earliest confirmed references date from 1983, when a business called Supasoft Games Library advertised in Computer & Video Games. Based at 2 Station Road, Hammerwich, Walsall, West Midlands, the company operated a software rental service, allowing customers to hire computer games rather than purchase them.

An advertisement in the April 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games invited readers to send their name and address to Supasoft, after which the company would offer them their choice of computer game to hire free of charge. The advertisement gives the company's full name as Supasoft Games Library and confirms its Hammerwich address. The original magazine can be viewed here.

Supasoft had also advertised in the previous issue of Computer & Video Games, where it described itself as the “UK's leading games library”. These advertisements provide firm contemporary evidence that a business using the Supasoft name was operating within Britain's rapidly growing home computer software market by early 1983.

The company is also recorded by the World of Spectrum archive, which maintains an entry for Supasoft Games Library, although the archive currently lists no published software releases under its name.

The Supasoft name reappears later in the decade as a software publisher. Its best documented surviving release is Eazidraw, published in 1988 and written by Bob Draper. Eazidraw was a specialist printed circuit board design package rather than a conventional computer game.

The MAME software archive records Eazidraw with a publication year of 1988 and identifies its publisher as Supasoft. The same information can be found in the Arcade Italia MAME software database, while the program is also listed as Eazidraw (Supasoft) in the Tatung Einstein software archive.

Whether the Supasoft responsible for Eazidraw was the same business as the earlier Supasoft Games Library is currently unknown. The shared name and relatively short period between the two activities make a connection possible, and it would not have been unusual for a small software rental or distribution business to later become involved in publishing software itself. However, no surviving evidence currently identified directly connects Bob Draper or Eazidraw with the Hammerwich address.

For this reason, the two should not yet be treated as definitively the same organisation.

Similarly, little is currently known about Bob Draper's relationship with Supasoft. He may have worked for the company, supplied his software to it for publication, or Supasoft may even have been his own trading name. Without further contemporary documentation, none of these possibilities can presently be confirmed.

There is also no evidence yet of a substantial Supasoft software catalogue. Eazidraw is the clearest surviving software release attributed to the publisher, while the World of Spectrum record for the earlier Supasoft Games Library contains no releases. This suggests Supasoft may have been a very small operation, although the absence of surviving software is not proof that other titles were never produced.

Supasoft is therefore one of the many small businesses whose activities formed part of Britain's early home computer industry but which have subsequently almost disappeared from the historical record. What can currently be established is that Supasoft Games Library was operating from Hammerwich by 1983, while software carrying the Supasoft publisher name appeared in 1988. Whether these represent two stages in the history of the same business remains one of the most interesting unanswered questions surrounding Supasoft.

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