Many of Synapse's games made their way to the UK as part of the initial wave of U.S. Gold-distributed imports (under the "Synsoft" imprint). Some were also converted to run on the more popular UK home computers, such as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Synapse was an early developer for the unsuccessful graphics-accelerated Mindset PC project and created the first-person game "Vyper" (1984). Synapse developed an official port of the arcade game "Zaxxon" for the Commodore 64. The Atari port was from Datasoft. Synapse also published "Encounter!" in 1983, which was originally released in the UK by Novagen Software without the exclamation mark in the name. Although it is for their success with arcade-style games that they are primarily remembered, Synapse started out selling database software for the Atari 8-bit computers. In 1982 Synapse released "SynAssembler", a 6502 development system which was much faster than Atari's offerings at the time. "SynAssembler" is a port of the S-C Assembler II Version 4.0 from the Apple II. The port was done by Steve Hales, who also wrote a number of games for Synapse. Synapse was developing a series of applications: "SynFile+" (written in Forth by Steve Ahlstrom and Dan Moore of The 4th Works), "SynCalc", "SynChron", "SynComm", "SynStock", and "SynTrend". Some time before their demise, Synapse had started work on interactive fiction games (or as they called them, "Electronic Novels"). The games were all based on a parser called "BTZ" ("Better Than Zork"), written by William Mataga and Steve Hales. Seven games were written using the system but only four released, the best-known being the critically acclaimed "Mindwheel". By early 1984 Synapse was the largest third-party provider of Atari 8-bit software, but 65% of its sales came from the Commodore market. The company ran into financial difficulty. According to Steve Hales they had taken a calculated risk in developing the aforementioned series of applications, and had entered into a collaboration with Atari, Inc. When Jack Tramiel purchased Atari's consumer division from Warner Communications, he refused to pay for the 40,000 units of software that had been shipped. This in turn hurt Synapse financially. Having been thrown into a cash crisis, Synapse was purchased by Broderbund Software in late 1984.