Manic Miner articles

Sinclair User December 1983
Sinclair User February 1984

Sinclair User December 1983:

Inventive caverns deserve more success

MUTANT telephones, killer penguins and caverns of ice are all part of Manic Miner for the 48K Spectrum. The game includes some impressive graphics routines which you will encounter when you take your player-character, Willy the miner, through a series of caverns inhabited by all kinds of strange creatures.

To exit from a cavern you have to pick up a series of keys hung from various parts of the ceiling or from bushes which are deadly if you touch them. To reach those keys you must jump on to ledges which are situated at various heights and you must jump in the correct order or you will fall back to earth again.

If you are not careful you could bump into a patrol robot, shaped in various guises, which will take away one of your lives.

The other killer is a fall from one of the ledges which disappears as you walk along it. If the ledge is high a life could be lost.

The game is very inventive and a great deal of thought must have gone into creating the many screens full of colourful characters. It is one of the few games on the market which deserves to succeed automatically because of the effort put into it. It has the depth of concept and quality of sound and vision to make it an instant winner.

If you cannot pass all the caverns and discover the secret of the game in the last sector the author has included an excellent taster routine which runs automatically at the start of the program. It shows the various caverns as they can be seen in the game.

Manic Miner should keep anyone, child or adult, enthralled through the long winter evenings. It costs £5.95 and can be obtained from computer branches of W H Smith.

Article found at SUMO an unofficial tribute to Sinclair User

Sinclair User February 1984

Manic Miner seeks new horizons

THE BUG-BYTE best-selling program Manic Miner is appearing under a different label. Matthew Smith, the 17-year-old-author, has left his old firm to join Software Projects, a new company. Smith will become a director of the company when he comes of age. Besides Manic Miner, Software Projects will be marketing its sequel, Jet Set Willy, as well as several other new games. Bug-Byte, which held a licence to produce Manic Miner but not the copyright, says it is not too hard-hit by Smith's decision to move. "It is still an excellent game and we have 50,000 copies of it left," says Bug-Byte director Tony Baden. "We wish it the best of luck under any label."

Article found at SUMO an unofficial tribute to Sinclair User