Microdeal
41 Truro Road
St. Austell, Cornwall PL25 5JE
United Kingdom

Year Founded: 1984
Year Defunct: 1992


Microdeal was a British software company which operated during the 1980s and early 1990s from its base at Truro Road in the town of St Austell, Cornwall.
The company, founded by John Symes was one of the major producers of games and other software for the 8-bit home computers of the time, in particular the Dragon 32 and the similar Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer ("CoCo").

The 8-bit software market dwindled toward the end of the 1980s and Symes officially announced that Microdeal would no longer publish for the Dragon and Tandy machines on 1 January 1988; from this point they would concentrate on the newer generation of 16-bit computers, the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST, with their remaining stock of Dragon and Tandy software to be sold off by a company called Computape. Many of Microdeal's 16-bit titles were updated versions of successful 8-bit games such as Time Bandit and Tanglewood, but they proved less successful the second time around, however they did produce what has been described as the best game ever for the Atari ST which was Goldrunner. This was followed by one of the first film conversions to Software of Columbia's "Karate Kid" The company was quick to recognize the music capabilities of the Atari ST and Amiga and went in production of Music Samplers such as "MasterSound" and "Amas" the latter of which was featured on a Paula Abdul music video which won MTV's Music Video of the year award. The companies publishing licenses were sold to Hi-Soft and it ceased trading in the early 1990s.