Manic Miner – “Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast”

When I was five years old, teachers would seek me out to resolve issues with the school’s BBC Micro. I didn’t have a BBC Micro at home, but my aunt had one, and I had played with it sometimes. I don’t remember my advice going much beyond the turn-it-off-and-on-again level, but I was generally able to get Podd up and running again. My special position didn’t last long. Within a few years, the school had bought a bunch of Nimbuses and it had become nothing special to know how to use a computer. For a bit, though, I was a trusted authority just through virtue of enthusiasm and familiarity.

I thought back to those experiences on reading an interview with Manic Miner developer Matthew Smith. He talked about being part of a group of teenagers hanging out at the Tandy computer shop in Liverpool, and how they would end up getting work from companies buying there. “There simply weren’t consultants available anywhere else who knew the machines like the horde of kids did”. If you could program a computer in the early ‘80s, there were a lot of opportunities. Perhaps even to make lots of money.

Money was part of the reason for the exclusivity involved, of course. Matthew Smith got a TRS-80 for Christmas at the age of 13, the equivalent of a present running into the thousands of pounds now. He coupled that privilege with both enthusiasm and aptitude (he taught himself machine code from Rodnay Zaks’s heavy Programming the Z80), but it was still part of what worked out for him, together with being in Merseyside with access to a busy hub. Smith saw others making games, and at the age of sixteen managed to agree a deal with local software house Bug-Byte to make three games for Sinclair’s new ZX Spectrum, a computer Bug-Byte would supply him with.

The first Spectrum game that Matthew Smith made was Styx. It’s a single screen shooter in which you can move in four directions and must make your way past spiders and fish before shooting the Grim Reaper, then do it all over again. A little bit of strategy comes with the fact that your shots get gradually less powerful each time you use them, but there is really not a lot to it as a game beyond the initial novelty of having three distinct sections to get through. It was still enough to be a commercial success (“you could sell any old tat for that little magic period!” as Smith put it later). With his skills duly proven, Bug-Byte next asked him to make something along the same lines as Donkey Kong.

He did deliver a game in which you move a guy left and right and carry out jumps to make your way up and down different fixed screen layouts, as well as a lot more besides. Jumping over enemies in Manic Miner, pressing a button and then waiting for the predetermined arc to complete, feels very much like in Donkey Kong. At one point in Manic Miner you face off against a gorilla-like ‘Kong Beast’ and rolling barrels. You can reach a switch and make the beast drop down the screen head-first, just like the original.

That’s not the only inspiration that Manic Miner makes obvious. Matthew Smith was also a fan of Bill Hogue’s 1982 platformer Miner 2049er. That was a twist on Donkey Kong’s platforming with similar ladders and tilted floors, but set in a future uranium mine and with a greater emphasis on collecting items. It had been enough of a success in the UK on Atari’s 8-bit computers to still be at #7 in the first published British games chart in 1983. Thus, Manic Miner. If its mining theme didn’t make things obvious enough, one level is called Abandoned Uranium Workings. The cover art’s depiction of main character Miner Willy as a rugged, bearded miner also makes most sense as inspired by the artwork of Miner 2049er’s Bounty Bob, since neither look like that in-game.

Miner 2049er had as many as ten different levels, but Matthew Smith set his sights higher still. Working mostly at night because power surges would crash his computer every time his family put the kettle on, he worked at doing more and more with the Spectrum’s 48 kilobytes of memory. Over the course of eight weeks, he aimed for sixteen levels and eventually landed on twenty distinct and individually named screens. In each of them you have to collect a set of objects before making it to an exit portal to progress to the next. The game’s size and variety stood out. John Scriven, writing as part of a review round-up in Popular Computing Weekly, said of the first level alone: “If the game had been limited to this, it would have provided a few hours’ fun and would have been as good value as several other cassettes reviewed here”.

That wasn’t the only way Manic Miner stood out technically. For sound it has an assortment of cartoony sounding jumping and falling noises, and the intro screen has an abrasive bit of Strauss, which was already pretty good going. What was even more remarkable was having music playing the entire time in-game – “very clever” said N.B. of Home Computing Weekly. You are followed around by a short snatch of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, turned into a death rattle and performing much the same tension-raising function as it would in The Witness a few decades later. There is a keyboard command available to mute the music. If you do, the miners at the bottom of the screen stop dancing too.

Much of Manic Miner’s ingenuity comes through using visual variety to make it feel like it’s more wide-ranging than it practically is. Where Donkey Kong had a set of levels which took many of the same graphical building blocks but worked in very distinct mechanical ways, Manic Miner does the reverse. There are conveyer belts and disappearing floors (which it uses cleverly in The Vat) but most levels are not too different from the previous in mechanics. This goes particularly for enemies. The barrels in the level Miner Willy Meets the Kong Beast don’t roam around the screen like in Donkey Kong, or even Donkey King. They just move back and forth, and you die if you touch them. And the same goes for almost every other enemy in the game, from kangaroos to mutant telephones to seals balancing balls on their noses. 

You are still, though, playing a level with mutant telephones, or bouncing cheques, or killer toilets (an inclusion suggested by Matthew Smith’s three-year-old brother). There is a spectacle there which doesn’t rely on mechanics for impact. Manic Miner doesn’t have a story even as developed as Donkey Kong’s, but it has a different British comic sensibility instead. Smith spent his early childhood in Penge in south-east London, but had Miner Willy prospecting for gain in unlikely caves in the more recognisable and funny sounding suburb of Surbiton. When you run out of lives, the game marks it by squashing Willy with a Monty Python extended foot.

It turned out that contrary to assumptions developing elsewhere, platform games didn’t necessarily need to have a story with a rescue motivation drawing on the gender attitudes of 1930s Hollywood. The joy of discovering what weird set-up was coming next could work too. Crash magazine reviewed a reissue of Manic Miner in 1989, well past the point when its technical innovations had become run-of-the-mill, and still scored it 92% as one of the Spectrum’s best games. Playing it now, it worked for me too. 

The game even has what might be described as a tutorial by 1983 standards, to help you to see a range of levels once you get into it. Which is to say that the first level, Central Cavern, is extremely difficult and getting through it requires you to learn the full range of Miner Willy’s movements and execute them precisely at length. The plus side being that if you fail, you are immediately in place to start Central Cavern again. And once you master it, the following levels are a breeze by comparison, right through at least until the fifth cavern, Eugene’s Lair. Even that one has only one jump as hard as Central Cavern, and its cruel and unforeseeable twist can only surprise you once.

Manic Miner was soon much loved, and very successful. After its initial trip to the top of the charts, it returned again a month later, and then took up residence at #1 through most of the first three months of 1984. Even after that was over, a version of Manic Miner for the Commodore 64, the computer emerging as the Spectrum’s biggest rival, went to the top of the charts as well. That version was not released by Bug-Byte, though, as their relationship with Matthew Smith had already broken down, largely over money. They never got the promised third Spectrum game, either. Smith was headed for bigger things elsewhere, and so was Miner Willy.

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Sources:

• Matthew Uncaged, Sinclair User Issue 33, December 1984, accessed via Spectrum Computing
• Matthew “Manic Miner” Smith: complete transcript of 2005 interview, Pixelatron, 2010
• Thumb Candy: Iain Lee’s Brief History of Video Games, Channel 4, 2000, uploaded to YouTube by GuyJD
• Matthew Smith interview, 2011 article by 80snostalgia.com
• Manic Miner is a stone cold classic! Our Sinclair: A ZX Spectrum Podcast 5, Amigos Retro Gaming, 2019
• Hitchcockian nightmare, John Scriven, Popular Computing Weekly Volume 2 No 38, 28 September 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Games off the beaten track – Manic Miner, N.B., Home Computing Weekly No 29, 26 September 1983, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Oldies – Manic Miner, Crash Issue 64, May 1989, accessed via the Internet Archive

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