This device had a 3.5 MHz CPU inside with 16 KB RAM upgradable to another 32 KB. Dad never got that upgrade. Considering what we have these days, even the word 'miniscule' would be out of scale. The device had to be connected to a TV and a tape recorder for display and storage respectively. Yeah! a tape recorder, as the data storage was on a music tape. Though the system did support colors, it didn't have a fancy operating system. The operating system was Sinclair's version of BASIC, a very primitive language if you talk about it in today's terms. On the whole, a very primitive machine. So what did I do on it? I dont remember playing any games on it except for my own version of book cricket. Yes, Sinclair BASIC was my first programming language. Like already stated I created my own version of book cricket and enjoyed playing it, I guess. RANDOMIZE, truly a god's gift, was a function that could produce random numbers - no need of books, no possibility of cheating, fair chance - PERFECT. It amazed me as a kid ('95) but I doubt it would be the same today.

It feels nice to know that you worked on something different, something which doesnt look like the prototypes that we get these days. But I sure hell wouldn't want that now.

PS: Something of a diary entry.

**Updated**

PS 1: An old advertisement. '82?? I used it in '95?? God!!!!

PS 2: Alternatives to Book Cricket.

Тот кто слушал скрежещущий писк в ожидании загрузки игры с кассетного магнитофона в ZX Spectrum ни когда этого не забудет. Это чувства сродни чувству ожидания чуда. А разве не чудо, когда спаянная твоими руками плата оживает. И это не какой-то детекторный приемник, это персональный компьютер. Да в нем 64 килобайта памяти, а программы грузятся с кассетного магнитофона, а графика 16-ти цветная и построена на знакоместах 8 на 8 точек. Но какие игры рисовали этой графикой и сколько времени было проведено за этими играми.
После к спектруму добавили блок с расширением памяти и он стал 128 килобайтным. И уровень игр под спектрум изменился. Дальше больше. К спектруму "припаяли" дисковод гибких 5-ти дюймовых дисков и матричный принтер. Принтер позволил печатать рефераты набранный во вполне удобном текстовом редакторе, работающем на том же спектруме. Удобство дисковода наверное не имеет смысла обьяснять. Это был прорыв после жужжащего магнитофона. Игры стали затачивать под дисковод. Во время работы компьютер подгружал данные с дискеты и сбрасывал туда результаты. Ни чего не напоминает? Это был тот же свап-файл на современном компьютере. Потом к спектруму добавили звуковой процессор и он зазвучал ярким многоканальным звуком.
За играми на спектруме было проведено много вечеров. И если кто-то думает что это был черно белый питон или тетрис, он ошибается. Это были яркие, динамичные игры в которые можно было играть неделями. Яркие цветные ходилки, симулятры полетов, гонки. Многие современные игры не идут ни в какое сравнение по интересности сюжетов и зрелищности с играми для ZX Spectrum.
Сейчас существует масса сообществ посвященных zx spectrum. Люди пишут эмуляторы ZX Spectrum и портируют старые игры под ZX Spectrum на новые платформы.

Now this is an interesting one: a game I know quite well having owned it back in the day. I got this game as part of a three-in-one-pack deal alongside Bounty Bob Strikes Back and Jonathan Smith's Pud Pud (both of which are great, by the way). Subterranean Nightmare, published by Americana Software in 1986 and programmed by James Closs is set under the Nevada Desert in the then-future year of 1991. The fortuitiously-named Profession Fusion has been sent to the site of an underground atomic test in 1986 to investigate "unusual seismic disturbances". When he gets there the ground collapses underneath him and he finds himself in a network of caves full of mutated beasties and must find his way out.

The first thing I should mention is the title screen and its "music". This screen consists of the usual nice colourful display along with our bespectacled hero (who's also a little portly, what is it with being a bit overweight and plaform game heroes?) walking back and forth 'twix two huge yellow pillars. But the curious thing is the "tune" which plays which is a repetitive racket that sounds like some sort of siren made up of speeded-up snatches of someone scratching records (and if you're reading this then you're probably old enough to remember what scratching sounds like). Utterly bizarre. Anyway, never mind that, what about the game?

Well, Subterranean Nightmare is a shameless JSW clone and acquits itself well on first glance. Everything moves reasonably quickly and smoothly (although there is some flickering) and the rooms are well-designed and colourful with well-drawn nasties of numerous designs (and sizes). The "underground" theme is also consistent throughtout and the idea that the mutants have built an subterranean civilisation (bloody impressive in a mere six years, that) allows for some variation. Unusually for a game of this type, there's also a lot of use of large scenery graphics such as gravestones, snowmen, giant candles and machinery. These add a lot to the rooms and the general feel of the game and are something JSW (or any of the clones we've looked at) didn't have. That's a big plus in Nightmare's favour.

The object-collecting aspect is also distinctive. Whilst in most games you simply collect the objects as you go along, exploring the rooms at will, in Nightmare some of the objects (radium crystals) affect certain rooms when collected. So, if Prof Fusion clears the crystals on a certain room it will remove a barrier in a later screen. This doesn't make this game as open-ended from the start as most JSW clones are but there's still a lot of freedom to explore with later areas essentially being "unlocked" as the player

progresses. This means there's more incentive to collect all the crystals rather than just pass them by whilst exploring the game and since most of the fun is in trying to collect the crystals this means the game is more fun.

So, is there anything wrong with this game? Well, there's the fact that Prof Fusion can "bounce" on many monster's backs which isn't really a bad thing as such but feels all wrong in a game like this - if you touch a monster you should die really. There's also a few monsters that don't kill you (such as the blue ball-thing in the mine shaft - play the game to see what I mean) which, again, doesn't really feel right and can be a bit confusing. There also seem to be a few bugs, such as the "moving floor" in the mineshaft which doesn't act as a conveyor (as I'd expected) and the way Prof Fusion can jump through some of the walls or into rooms that should be unaccessable such as bouncing across the monster on the first screen which leads to a room called "The Way Out" although I can't seem to reach the exit.

However, these are pretty minor flaws and, overall, Subterrranean Nightmare is a worthy clone of Jet Set Willy and well-worth playing if you enjoyed that. I'll leave the last comment to the (rather snotty) review that CRASH magazine gave this game back in its August 1986 issue (see the scan above-right). Yes, CRASH, yes it bloody well might.

If you say "archaeologist" most people these days will probably think of Howard Carter or Indiana Jones, people exploring Egyptian ruins and digging-up long-lost treasure. Those in the UK may even think of Tony Robinson in a pair of big grey shorts alongside that bloke in the hat saying "ooh-arr, oi be foindin' a noice bit of Roman paaaartery" in the middle of a field somewhere near Bath. This game, The Archaeologist, doesn't seem to feature much in the way of either representation, though, in fact I'm not sure what it's all about.

You see, this game was published as part of a covertape compilation back in 1985 for something called "Spectrum Computing" which I'm guessing was a magazine. Apart from that, I can't really find out much about it. There's a very brief plot on the title screen about entering a volcano and passing through the Earth's core collecting artifacts along the way before emerging out the other side. That's it - no name for the character, no rational to what he's doing - nothing. Maybe he does it for kicks. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about an anonymous character again so, for the purposes of this review, I'm going to assume it's Tony Robinson having decided to do a Time Team episode after too much ale.

On starting, we find Tony standing on the edge of a volcano ready to enter the depths and get collecting. It all starts out well - everything is bright, colourful and moves quickly and the volcano actually looks like a volcano. There's none of the bland look of Stay Kool here. There's even a tune in the JSW "croaking frog" style but for some reason it defaults to "off" and you have to turn it on using the "t" key (and not just at the start - for every life) if you want to listen to it which, fortunately, you won't.

Tony bounces around quite the thing and whilst the movement doesn't feel as smooth and "clean" as in JSW or Fahrenheit 3000 it's pleasant enough. Collecting the relics (which consist of such fabled antiquities as apples and 1980s telephones) and avoiding the nasties requires some skill, there's also a nice sense of cohesion to the rooms with the underground theme being maintained throughout (well, except for the bits in Iceland at the start but we'll forgive that) - this actually feels like exploring a network of caves and the various rooms can be quite atmospheric. There's even a save/load feature which, whilst unusual in a game like this, is a nice idea.

Unfortunately, this game doesn't quite work. The first reason for this is that it feels untested and unfinished. Some of the screens, once you get used to them, seem poorly designed and ill thought-out. Another problem is that, instead of altering the room design, the programmer has incorporated some sort of super-jump key which, when pressed, allows Tony to jump much higher than usual. This makes the feel of the game a bit farcical since it seems designed to be played on "normal" jump with the super-jump only existing to rescue Tony from the occasional bit of bad room design (although if you hold it down too long it kills our erstwile archaeologist so you have to be careful). Having two heights of jump (and especially implemented as they are here) feels all wrong in a JSW clone and has a bad effect on the playing experience - I'd much rather one height of jump to deal with problems all the way through thankyouverymuch. And, last but not least, this game has the same "infinite death" problem as JSW except in this game it's less predictable.

The Archaeologist seems quite good at first but the game's flaws (especially that ridiculous jump feature) chip-away at its good features leaving it decidedly average. I suppose it should remembered that it was a covertape game and, with that in mind, it's not too bad but there's real promise in this game that I'd like to have seen built-upon rather better.

Next up, we should have more underground exploration fun with Subterranean Nightmare.

Having been disappointed with Luke Warm and his stupid helmet yesterday I thought today I'd try out Softstone's Fahrenheit 3000 to see if it can do the JSW-clone thing any better. This time, the player controls some bloke who's been sent into the nuclear reactor, the reason being that the reactor is going into meltdown and (you've guessed it) the only way to prevent the surrounding countryside turning into Chernobyl is to collect lots of objects over interconnected screens.

After a title screen which plays a BEEP-based version of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" (thanks to Jimmy from the World of Spectrum forums for identifying the tune for me) you enter the game and first impressions are good. The graphics are decidedly average but they're nice and clear, even if the player character looks a bit podgy, and everything moves smoothly and at a reasonable speed (man, that's so much better after the sluggish feel of Stay Kool). The first screen has a few obstacles to avoid and a couple of nasties; shouldn't be too hard. Except that that's deceptive. It actually requires near pixel-perfect positioning and timing from the player and... this is the thing, maybe it's because he's on the stout side but the wee man bounces! I mean he rebounds off the walls when he hits them, he doesn't go through them or have his jump come to a standstill when he hits a solid block like in JSW he rebounds all over the place like he's in a pinball table or (more pertinently) in the manner of Henhouse Harry in Chuckie Egg 2.

And that first screen, the game's opening screen? It's hard, I mean really bloody tricky. It took me about fifteen minutes just to pass it and there's a lot of learning to do regarding timing and avoiding (or utilising) the bounce. After Stay Kool's rather simplistic and easy screens, being thrown into the deep-end of platforming skill like this takes some getting used to. But it's worth it because when you get past that first screen not only does the game get a little bit easier but it's actually not too bad.

Okay, there's none of the imaginative character of the JSW screens on display here but the various rooms our little chap has to negotiate are actually quite well-designed for gaming purposes and beating them feels satisfying. The bounce, which I started-off hating, actually comes into its own on some of the screens where the player needs to use it to "climb" to some areas. This gives the game a somewhat different feel to most JSW-clones which goes in its favour. You also don't die from falling too far which, in a game designed like this one, is a Good Thing. You also get loads of lives (in the form of a radiation level which goes higher each time you get zapped - I'm not sure how many lives you have but it is loads) and given how hard this game is you're going to need them.

But despite all these positives Fahrenheit 3000 can't reach JSW's crown and knock it off its head. For a start the items that need to be collected aren't the glowing miscellany we're used to in this type of game, instead they're pressure valves (that nonetheless vanish when collected) which look like sparkly-box thingies that change colour and can only be collected when red. This is rather a mean-minded aspect of the game since the colour changes apparently happen at random making collecting them slightly risky - something that is unnecessary and annoying. As I said before, the screen designs, whilst often quite devious aren't actually all that interesting and there's not the same desire as in JSW to get further and see more of the game. Also, the nuclear plant setting means there's not much variation in the subject matter for rooms and they seem all have various depressingly doom-laden names like "The Pools of Certain Death" and "The Acid Bath". There's probably a screen called "You're Going To Die, Arsehole" in the game somewhere but I haven't found it yet.

Despite these problems, though, F3000 is a pretty good JSW clone, it moves nicely and the screens, whilst a bit bland, are reasonably challengingly-designed. it's definitely worth a look if bouncing a fatty around depressingly-named but quite devious levels appeals to you and you like a challenge. It's not as good as JSW but it's reasonably different to be worth recommending in its own right.

The link to the game on World of Spectrum is here. There are actually two version of this game, the original release from Softstone and a re-release by Firebird Software. The re-release has the option to choose joystick control and (for no apparent reason) a pyramid on the title screen (?!).

Okay, so we've got Jet Set Willy out of the way for anyone who wasn't up to speed on that particular game; now we're onto the clones. And the first of these out of the hat (ie the first one I chose out of the many suggested by the kind souls on the World of Spectrum forums) turns out to be a title called Stay Kool. This largely-forgotten game was published for the ZX Spectrum in 1985 (yes, I know the copyright message says 1984 but the game was published in the Spring of '85) by Bug Byte who were, as it happens, the original publishers of Matthew Smith's Manic Miner. In Stay Kool the player controls an astronaut with the horrible punning name of Luke Warm. Our Luke has managed to cripple his ship following an unsuccessful space battle (possibly fought with someone who objected to his stupid name) and now the ship is overheating (something like that anyway, it involves a time limit based around a thermometer) so Luke needs to make like a tree in his escape shuttle. But, of course, this being videogameland, it's not that simple and Luke must first explore his vast ship collecting the fuel rods he needs to escape. So, essentially, we have a game with a very similar plot to Jet Set Willy: fuel rods instead of random objects and an escape shuttle instead of a bed. How does it measure up, then?

The first thing you notice about Stay Kool is that it feels slower than JSW. Alright, it's not quite the Commodore 64 version of Driller (snicker), in fact it might well move about the same speed when placed side-by-side with JSW but it feels slower and more sluggish to play than its inspiration, and it flickers; well, the main sprite does at least. Smith's masterpiece is apparently a bit notorious for being a horrendous mess under the bonnet but, hell, it looks and moves nice and smoothly even if the code is a dog's dinner. This game moves a bit slow and it's got a flickery main character; that's not the best start when you're trying to attract JSW fans who've grown fed-up with the attic bug into buying your game.

That brings me onto the look in general. JSW doesn't have the greatest graphics in the world (although some of the monsters are rather nicely done) but Smith managed to use the various 8x8 cubes and the Speccy's bright and cheery colour palette in an imaginative way creating a game where each room looked and felt individual. Stay Kool doesn't really manage that. There are a few rooms that are quite well-designed and the room names provide a certain amount of atmosphere but there's nothing here to challenge "Doctor Jones Will Never Believe This" or "The Banyan Tree" and, unlike JSW, there's no real sense of exploring a cohesive environment. Willy's mansion actually felt like a big house, Luke's spaceship feels more like a bunch of rooms joined together even if many of them are given names to suggest they're the ship's bar or the passenger's quaters or whatever there's little in the design of them to add to this impression; they might as well be "the strawberry jam store" or something equally random.

And the "poor man's JSW" stuff doesn't end there, oh no. The monsters are largely an unimaginative lot of wibbly things and flying do-dahs some of which are a bit similar to Matthew Smith's creations. They're also not that hot at killing the player, there were several moments when I was playing where Luke clearly touched a nastie whilst jumping around and wasn't penalised for it. That comes a poor second to JSW's rather-ace collision detection. The rooms are also rather poorly designed; there are few devious screens requiring much thought or skill and in some cases the programmer seems to have substituted an annoying amount of nasties for good room design. The main sprite also looks slightly-ridiculous, I mean I know the Speccy's graphics were limited but what on Earth (or off-Earth in this situation) is going on with Luke's massive goldfish-bowl helmet? I'm surprised the poor man can balance. And I know this shouldn't matter so much in a videogame but some of the punctuation in the screen names is appalling. I mean, look at that example below-left. Just look at it!

So, is there anything good about Stay Kool? Well, there are some nice features that JSW didn't have such as melting platforms (a la Manic Miner) which dissolve as Luke walks across them as well as tractor beams which suck Luke up (that's up) and teleporters (the design of which is based on the TARDIS from Doctor Who for some reason) which transport Luke across the ship. I also quite liked the (admitted inexplicable) game over screen where Luke is dropped into a cess pit (I thought he was supposed to be... oh never mind) and the fact the game has a highscore table (something JSW notably lacked) even if it's called the "Hall of Scum" for no discernable reason (alongside the cess pit, I can't help but wonder if the programmer was in a mysanthropic state of mind when he wrote this game). Oh, and there's a Loch Ness Monster somewhere in the game which can only be a good thing.

These things are nice additions but they can't really make up for the fact that Stay Kool is a poor cousin of JSW. It's not a terrible game, I had some fun playing it, but it's full of flaws which hampered enjoyment too much to make me want to play it for too long. Worth looking at if you're crazy about platform games, probably worth a miss otherwise.

And if you really want to know more, the World of Spectrum link is here.

I am glad to see that Mr Smith is ticking over happily (he really was a supremely influential and important figure in my teen years). I hope that he finds his feet again within the gaming industry as it is surely in need of his wayward, wired and weird worldview. More importantly he truly deserves to gain some reward for the happiness that he created amongst so many – this sounds pompous but we shouldn’t forget how many people played his games.

As noted, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy are legendary amongst 8-bit game players, particularly those affiliated to the ZX Spectrum chapter of the Retro Gaming community. Matthew Smith was a weird and wired eccentric of the Jeff Minter mould, who is probably guilty of being the subject of the longest running “I wonder what happened to…” hunt in computer gaming history. Theories as to his whereabouts include, somewhat surreally, him being employed in a fish factory in Holland. Anyway, whilst preparing my article I stumbled across this amongst the inner recesses of my hard-drive and thought to myself that it would be a nice accompaniment for my piece. I particularly like the piece about wanting an arcade machine in your bedroom. It was this that led me to persuade my father that 'a computer would help me with my homework' whilst all the while all I wanted to do was play Gorf, Centipede or Galaxians. One of the reasons I believe that Manic Miner was such a hit because it was the first time a Spectrum game could truly be said to have been of arcade quality. Alright, it wasn't exactly up to the standards of Taito's output or Miner 2049er for that matter, but it was surely better than Horace Goes Skiing!

I am not sure what the source of the article is, but I am guessing at Retro Gamer. I am also guessing that they will not be happy that this is being reproduced without any citations. Furthermore I am probably transgressing copyright laws - but I thought to myself, sod it! See how far I am willing to go for you, my gentle reader?

I have also added a walkthrough video of Manic Miner posted on Google at the bottom of the page, just so that you can see what my obsession is about. I realise must stop this and leave the poor man alone, this is after all a form of virtual stalking!

The Wisdom of Matthew Smith

Anyone who believed the rumours that Manic Miner author Matthew Smith was dead would have been taken aback to see him at the CGE UK show, larger than life itself. With a distinct rock star swagger, Matt mingled with the crowds and delighted everyone with anecdotes about his previously clouded past. Having spoken to him and attended both his Saturday and Sunday Q & A sessions, we present Mr Smith’s best bits…

HIS LIFE
On starting out…
It started like most of us, with a computer I got as a Christmas present to help with the homework. I was one of those pestering kids who’d seen Space Invaders in the arcade, and what we didn’t tell our parents was that we wanted a Space Invaders machine in our bedrooms. And the only way to do it was to learn to write a game. Quite a lot of us met up in various computer shops – Tandy were renowned for being generous with their space and time – and we just started writing games for our own amusement really. Fortunately at the time, the publishers were just starting to look for software.

On his first industry job…
Bug-Byte was looking for Spectrum software. I was recommended as someone who could write a game, although I had never seen a Spectrum. That’s not too bizarre, because I knew the chip inside the Spectrum inside out already. So I just borrowed a Spectrum and three weeks later delivered a simple game called Styx.

On leaving Bug-Byte…
I took Manic Miner off Bug-Byte because the company wasn’t paying me quick enough. It was actually three months late paying me, and to a 17-year-old that seemed outrageous [smiles]. I’ve since left my own landlord without rent for longer than that. So I not only set up my own publishing house, but I also took their best-selling product off them. So I set up Software Projects, and shortly after that I met Stu (Fotheringham). My main motive for starting Software Projects was financial control. I already had total artistic control as far as I needed it.

On life at Software Projects…
At Software Projects, the lunatics did take over the asylum. Most of us were very young and a bit wild, and we didn’t have the self-discipline. And my partners, who were attempting to manage everything, they didn’t have what it took. But it was a fun time, and we did produce the games, and we were selling them, and we were doing the business. And the industry grew.

On Manic Miner royalties…
I did have a large mountain of money from Bug-Byte for Manic Miner. But by the time I finally got it to cough it up, I was already owed another £30,000. So when the £30,000 landed in my sweaty hands as a 17-year-old – who was just beginning to discover women and drink and motorbikes and all that stuff – I spent it. I’m sure some of the people I used to drink with respect me greatly for the amount of alcohol I could consume in a night. And of course I wouldn’t do it again. If you’re listening kids, keep it safe. Just say, “No thank you” – there’s no harm in being polite.

On Jet Set Willy royalties…
I never received a penny in royalties from Jet Set Willy and haven’t to this day, in any form. That’s largely due to being the director of the publishing company, and ploughing it all back in, until it was all ploughed in and ploughed away. Jet Set Willy sold way over half a million copies, and that was just on the Spectrum and Commodore 64 in Europe. And there were plenty of copies sold in Japan on Japanese consoles, so it might have been a million seller. It might still be if the GBA version comes out. And if I do receive some money for the GBA version, that will be the first time I have ever received royalties for Jet Set Willy.

On dropping out of the scene…
Fame is a very funny thing. There are two versions of the scene. There’s the scene that the media perceive, and there’s the scene, which is the alliance of all the people, meeting in their own time, drinking in the same places, generally hanging out together and feeding off each other. It’s very hard to stay in touch with people when you can’t afford a bus fare and you can’t afford a telephone… It was never actually a conscious decision to drop out of the scene, more a force of circumstances I’m afraid. You don’t become a hermit. It’s just that one day the invitations stop arriving, the money runs out…

On leaving the country…
I went over to Holland – it was all part of a united Europe. So when the rules changed, I could go and seek employment somewhere where there was a chance of getting a job, and that certainly wasn’t anywhere near Liverpool in the early nineties. So I got on my bike basically.

On rumours about his disappearance…
I didn’t realise there was any big mystery. I thought people had just generally forgotten me. I’d had my 15 minutes in the spotlight and that was over and it was gone. But as soon as I got the Internet, I typed my name into Google to see what would happen and started to find strange stuff, about where people thought I was. It was slightly shocking.

HIS GAMES
On creating Manic Miner…
I went on holiday to Italy for two weeks and I bought a notebook in which I drew some of the levels. I came back from that holiday, got to my computer and literally eight weeks later we were duplicating cassettes. That shows the benefits of a good holiday, I suppose. But eight weeks after Manic Miner Bug-Byte was asking me why I hadn’t written another one! The company was very, very upset that eight or nine months went into Jet Set Willy.

On the success of Manic Miner…
I wasn’t surprised by the success of Manic Miner at the time. I thought that it was going to be a blockbuster – it was obvious. I thought so, the publishers thought so, everyone who saw it thought so at the time. So I accepted the success as my due reward at the time. But there was nothing revolutionary about what I did. I took some ideas from Donkey Kong, some ideas from Miner 2049’er, and I cooked them up a treat for Spectrum owners. But there were better Spectrum games after that, like, erm…[shrugs his shoulders and smiles].

On the cheat code in Manic Miner…
It’s actually a corruption of my driver’s licence number. It’s not accurate, which is fortunate because there’s a security risk there I’d rather not incur.

On naming Miner Willy…
Yes, there is a joke in there somewhere. Willy is a funnier name than erm… George.

On the ZX81 version of Manic Miner…
I saw one screen. It was very well done, something the VIC-20 couldn’t manage. Actually, Perils of Willy on the VIC-20 started out as an attempt to port Manic Miner. The guy who said he’d do it gave up after two months, but presented what we had managed to do, which we released as Perils of Willy.

On the Oric-1 version of Manic Miner…
I think that we sold 10 copies.

On the inspiration for Maria in Jet Set Willy…
There was a lady who lived over the road from me. She was Greek – hair up in a bun – and looked like the keeper of her own house. Maria was just a generic name for a servant. There’s probably a bit of racism there – a servant with a Mediterranean name.

On the first person to complete Jet Set Willy…
A guy called Cameron Else disassembled the Spectrum version, found the bug, fixed it, and we gave him a prize. And he then did the MSX version of Jet Set Willy.

On the bug in the Banyan Tree…
There’s no bug in the Banyan Tree. It was exceptionally hard, but I proved for my own satisfaction before the game was released that you could get from the right-hand side to the left-hand side. But there was no formal testing on Jet Set Willy whatsoever. A lot of the problems were fixed in Jet Set Willy 2 by Derrick Rowson, a very talented guy who’s been in the industry longer than I have.

On Mega-tree…
We were set up in a house – a very smelly house. Basically we were disrupting the company, so we secluded ourselves in a small house so we could get a game donewithout bringing the publishing empire crashing down around our ears. You can actually see the core idea of the game in a later game called Nebulus. It was a platformer with some extra ideas. We should get Mark (Wilding), because Stuart’s concepts in Retro Gamer magazine ring bells, but it isn’t quite exactly what I thought we were trying to do. We should get together and find out what we would have ended up with if the plug hadn’t been pulled. One question I had to ask myself was how come I’m the director of the company and I’m letting my own projects get cancelled? I used to get very angry about that, but life goes on. I would like to finish Mega-tree one day, but I’d like to do that with Stuart and Mark, if we could get together. It wouldn’t be right for one of us to finish it.

On Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens from Mars…
Mutant Chickens started off as a game based on the Wile E. Coyote franchise. We were all assured we had it in the bag, paid for, done and dusted. I spent ages getting “That’s all folks” displayed on the Spectrum! But then we found out that we hadn’t got the licence, so most of our preliminary work was down the drain. As the Spectrum market was declining at this time, and my personal resources were also declining, I had nowhere to live but the Software Project’s factory, and I had no money except what I could literally crowbar out of the petty cash tin. I was having my telephone sabotaged – very strange. Anyway, Mutant Chickens had some nice effects, with some really hugs sprites overlapping each other without any colour clash. But it never got finished. There may possibly be something left of it somewhere, but I’ve had to move with the world in a suitcase on occasions, and most of it hasprobably been binned now to be honest.

On life after the Spectrum…
When the Spectrum market had dried up, I switched to the Atari ST as my development machine. I was going to write games just for the ST, but the market was running out there too, so I gave it up. I was making a football game just called Footie but I never got anything to the market.

On GameBoy Scrabble…
The last thing I did professionally was Scrabble on the Colour GameBoy, published by Ubisoft. I did 90% of that myself; it was a normal one-arm effort. But on the cartridge there’s credits for 59 people and one dog. That adds to the perception that it takes 60 people to create a GameBoy game. Actually, I’ve only got credit as Additional Programmer, but 90% of the code was written by me.

On unfinished games…
I’m still missing some of my early stuff, but I’m not really looking that hard because I’m trying to look forward.

On current projects…
I’ve recently been chugging away, working on my own engine and own tools. Whenever I’ve got enough money saved to pay my rent for six months, I just bury myself and say that I can produce a game in six months. But any project that you estimate will take six months will actually take five years. I’m looking to do work on the Xbox. My 3D engine has got a few nice features. I have got a few things going on, but I’m not mentally geared up to selling my ideas to a publisher anymore, although that’s what I did with Manic Miner originally. The best way to approach a publisher is to have something visible, so they can see where it’s going. When it’s half-finished maybe, and I’m not that far off with one particular project.

On programming a new Spectrum game…
I’d like to, but I haven’t got any immediate plans and it would have to fit in. And I’m not tooled up to be honest – I haven’t got a good Z80 assembler installed and I don’t actually have a Spectrum at the moment. But it would take me about eight weeks to do it.

THE INDUSTRY
On publishers and programmers…
When I started, the developer used to be very much in control of the games that were written. And many people say this contributes to what was seen as the golden age of gaming. The games were written by artists, by programmers with ideas, and then offered to the publishers. And if the publisher didn’t like it, there was always another publisher. But we were still dependant on the publishers to pay us our royalties, and that was often a question of trust. We had contracts, but by modern standards, they were flimsy legal documents. And it wasn’t always the publishers deliberately trying to screw the programmers; sometimes the programmers were demanding contracts that left the publishers with very little rights to publish.

On bedroom coders…
I’m not entirely sure of the commonly perceived wisdom that games cost millions of pounds to develop. This perception is based on the fact that most games do actually cost millions of pounds to develop [smiles]. But I think in some ways there’s no reason why you can’t write a game in the bedroom by yourself. Maybe not by yourself anymore, but small teams of bedroom coders can still write games. Let’s remember that Peter Jackson’s best film, I’m sure everyone would agree, is Bad Taste. That cost 10,000 New Zealand dollars, and there I rest my case on that subject.

OTHER STUFF
On Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy remakes…
I personally don’t have any problems with it at all. But there are legal complications with the copyright law as it stands, where you are forced to protect something or abandon it. So if I start actively encouraging modding then it is in a sense giving up any rights I have to it. But with the case of Jet Set Willy it’s very complicated, and nobody should be worried if they’re making mods. I wish them luck basically.

On Bill Hogue…
Miner 2049’er was one of my favourite games, and quite a lot of that ended up in Manic Miner. But Bill Hogue has probably never heard of me because he’s American. I also wrote a version of Galaxians for the TRS-80. It was probably not as good as Bill Hogue’s version, he was the daddy on the TRS-80.

On playing games…
I try not to play games these days. There were times when I was struggling to keep a roof over my head, so when I’ve got a computer, and electricity, and an Internet connection altogether, I try to spend all the time I can working on my back catalogue of unfinished titles. But if I had to have a choice of playing new games or old games, I’d choose new games. It’s the wrong place to admit that, but everything moves on.

On the game he wishes he’d written…
I’m not a great fan of violent shooting games. I like playing them, but I wouldn’t like to publish them. Nonetheless, I’d still like to have written Doom.

On Spectrum vs Commodore 64…
I’m in the Speccy camp, although I was jealous of the C64 because I couldn’t afford one until it was time for me to work on it. I did get an Atari 800, so for me it was always Atari versus Commodore. The Atari was better – much better. Much nicer, much more polite users, better software, but it was £100 more expensive than the C64, so it was always going to be fifth or sixth choice after the other available machines in this country.

On Pepsi Cola…
Pepsi – the drink of the successful [holds up can and grins].

On the Classic Gaming Expo…
I don’t come to events like this very often, but that’s because there aren’t very many of them. It’s very nostalgic. It’s great to see all the people and all the old games. I’ll be back next year for sure.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4247854969941907776]

zx-spectrum

Смотреть вот тут.

К сожалению, это всего лишь "сборка конструктора"... Исходный thread в форуме смотреть вот тут.

Some dude found this aging cassette of Apple's first Basic operating system. It used to take about 30 seconds to load on the Apple I machine. And it sounds good. The guy created an mp3 of it and uploaded it for everyone to enjoy. It just reminds me of waiting for Manic Miner to load on my ZX Spectrum.

You can read more about it in geek speak right here.

You see, after waiting weeks for my first computer to arrive from the catalogue (remember them?), I soon realised that none of the games would load because the audio leads from the tape cassette player to my ZX81 didn't work properly.

Only, instead of telling my parents to send it back to the catalogue, for some unknown reason I decided to ignore the games completely and learned how to program games for myself.

I was clearly an odd child. I also remember being an avid collector of novelty keyrings and old copies of Look-In magazine.

On that bombshell, BBC Radio 4 has posted an audio interview with the inventor of the ZX81, Sir Clive Sinclair. He still thinks we'll all be driving around in flying cars y'know. Bless.

In an interview on Radio 4, the very splendid Sir Clive Sinclair said that we'd all end up with our own personalised flying machines. So I've created an artistic impression of what it might look like if the Cambridge-based boffin decides to do it himself.

He also said that he never uses the internet - even although he's the man behind the ZX Spectrum which gave most of us geeks our first taste of coding.

I love this guy. He's a genuine fruit-loop. And he's had a track record of failure that would put Edison to shame.

• 1975. One of my earliest memories is of a peculiar experience I had while having my nappy changed. My changing mat was on top of a chest-of-drawers in a small room that looked straight on to the upstairs landing of our house in St.Albans (where I was born). Halfway through being changed the phone rang (or someone knocked on the front door, or something) and Mum left me for a couple of minutes. As soon as she was out of sight, I heard something very big and heavy and invisible come charging down the landing towards me (maybe it was one of the Wild Things, Mrs. G?).
• 1976. Doggy was a cleverly named stuffed toy Great Gran (who was completely brilliant) gave me for my first Christmas - he went everywhere with me, and I slept with him every night. Doggy accompanied me well into my teen years (though not to the same extent), by which time he had no eyes, one ear and all his fur had fallen out. My Mum threw him away one day. R.I.P. Doggy.
• 1977.
• 1978.
• 1979.
• 1980. My Sister was born when I was five. On the way to the hospital, Dad bought me Batman and Superman action figures - the kind with tons of joints and capes made from actual fabric. When I was playing with them in the hospital room later that day, Superman took a dive from a filing-cabinet and his arm fell off. That's what I remember about my sister being born.
• 1981. I think my fear of dogs (cynophobia)can be traced back to a friend's wayward teenage brother, who was always threatening to set their dog on me, even though I was only little.
• 1982. We used to have these incredible street parties on Wynchlands Crescent. One end of the road would be blocked off, and all the adults would set up drinking tents cleverly disguised as colourful marquees. The kids would have chalk-drawing competitions on the pavement (I even think I won one once), and clowns came and made balloon animals. I have no idea what occasion we were celebrating (if any) - I'll call Mum and ask.
• 1983. When I was eight, we moved from Hertfordshire to Nottinghamshire with Dad's job (he worked for Elstree Studios which is where they made the Star Wars movies, Jim Henson's Labyrinth - which is one of my favourite movies along with, oddly, Takashi Miike's Audition - and The Muppet Show, amongst other things).
• 1984. One day, when I was about nine, Mum and Dad were going to town shopping for the day. It was just after Christmas and I had a little money to spend, but I couldn't go for some reason (probably school), so they asked me if I wanted them to buy something for me with my money. I didn't have anything in particular in mind (and probably didn't have enough for the Soundwave Transformer toy I always wanted and never did get), so I told them to get something they thought I'd like. When they got back, I was utterly dismayed to find they'd bought me a motorbike toy that zoomed across the floor when you pulled out the little rip-cord. I had a total tantrum, hurt both their feelings, and still feel bad about the whole thing to this day.
• 1985.
• 1986. My appendix nearly burst when I was eleven because my doctor said the excrutiating pain I was suffering with was caused by nothing more than 'wind' (that's 'gas' to you Americans). I still don't trust doctors.
• 1987. My school years were the worst years of my life. We moved about a lot, for reasons not apparent to me at the time, and I'd gone to eleven different schools by the time I was ten, which made it difficult to have settled friendships with anyone. Secondary school (eleven to sixteen) was worse. A kid with a weird accent that doesn't listen to pop music tends to get picked on a lot.
• 1988. My first computer was a Christmas gift from Mum and Dad to my Sister and I - it was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 (the one with a disk drive). After years of wanting a computer, I freaked out like someone in a clip from America's Funniest Home Videos. One of the first games I got was Magnetic Scrolls' 'The Pawn', which I have on my PC now and still haven't finished.
• 1989. My Mum and Dad got me Bolt Thrower's 'Realm Of Chaos' (one of the greatest death metal albums of all time) tape for Christmas when was I was sixteen and they actually let me play it on the stereo in the living room on Christmas day. Much like anyone, we often had family to stay for Christmas, and my Gran (my Mum's Mum) thought Bolt Thrower had a "good beat".
• 1990. I was a member of the Napoleonic Association for a little while. You know the type of thing - we got dressed up in period costumes and re-enacted Napoleonic-era battles. I was a standard-bearer. The flag-pole fit into a tube that I had to strap on like a belt and which rested dangerously in my groin area (I tried googling for the proper term but couldn't find an answer). I remember trying to march up a hillside like this, once. The standard was extremely heavy, and the hill was rather steep. The combination made it a struggle for me to keep the whole ensemble upright and I was slowly pulled forward, which caused me to stick my bum out awkwardly, much to the crowd's amusement. I was rescued by a fellow soldier quite quickly, but, lamentably, not before my pride suffered.
• 1991.
• 1992. My first job after school was a YTS (Youth Training Scheme - which is supposed to mean you get practical, paid, work experience at the same time as going to college, but which, for me, meant being treated like a dog, often working six days a week for fifty quid a week, and not getting to go to college) position at the local Way Ahead record shop/ticket office in Nottingham, which was mostly known as a rock and metal shop (although I did pick up Front Line Assembly's 'Tactical Neural Implant' and Skinny Puppy's 'Last Rights' LPs - yes, actual vinyl LPs - while working there). I got to meet quite a few bands (Love/Hate, Bang Tango, Electric Boys, Danger Danger, Enuff Z'Nuff, Napalm Death and Carcass are the ones I can remember) when they did signing sessions, and also got free tickets to most gigs at Rock City, so it wasn't all bad.
• 1993. My cousin Steve used to come up from Southampton to Nottingham at the weekends sometimes. One particular Friday night I thought I'd take him to Rock City (he was a huge AC/DC fan and had never been to a rock club). I had crazy long hair at the time and had been going to Rock City for a couple of years (one of the benefits of working at the record shop was getting tickets in a way that didn't require me to prove my age), so I had no problems getting in. Steve, on the other hand, had short hair (he was in the Vehicle Corps of the Army, at the time) and was a new face, so the bouncers took him to one side to check his I.D. In a moment that will live with me forever, Steve pulled out his tank drivers license and the deflated bouncers had no choice but to let him in. The rest of the night was a complete success, and Steve went ballistic when I got the D.J. to play 'Highway To Hell' for him.
• 1994. My parents' second divorce when I was nineteen truly broke my heart (I didn't find out about their first divorce until the second was inevitable).
• 1995. After my parent's divorce, I wanted to stay in Nottingham (my Mum and Sister moved to Cornwall to be near my Mum's family - I'll always regret not going with them) and ended up living with my Dad at my future step-mum's place for a while (which was as bad as you're imagining). One day, my Dad brought a tape home for me. Apparently my Dad and his mate had been having one of those 'my son's into that weird goth stuff' conversations a couple of days earlier and my Dad's mate had given him a demo tape of his son's band for me to listen to. It came with a note about a gig at the Cookie Club (which wasn't then where it is now) in Nottingham. I played the tape and liked it, so I went along to the gig and met my Dad's mate's son, Mike. It turned out that Mike and I had a lot in common - because of where our Dads worked we'd lived in the same places and moved to Nottingham for the same reason - and we hit it off instantly. I spent one of my favourite periods of my life, so far, hanging out with, and roadie-ing for, Mike's band Manuskript. We travelled all over the U.K. for gigs and I got to meet tons of really cool people and bands (Die Laughing, Night Moves, The Horatii, Redemption, Children On Stun, Gethsemane, Vendemmian). A lot of water's gone under the bridge since then, but Mike and Paul are the only people I've lost contact with whose friendship I wish I still had.
• 1996. One particular Manuskript gig sticks in my head more than others. It was in Glasgow (I think the place was called The Cathouse) with James Ray's band The MK Ultra. Why was it so memorable? Well, it turns out that James Ray and I had similar jackets (well, they seemed similar to him in his highly inebriated state, anyway) and when he claimed my jacket (which a friend had painted Death, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, on the sleeve of) instead of his at the end of the night we nearly came to blows. I did get my jacket back after a long argument, but not before discovering an old tobacco tin containing a picture of a goat in the pocket of James'.
• 1997.
• 1998.
• 1999. Until I came to America, I'd rarely been without work. During one summer of unemployment, I decided I needed to figure out a career, thought web design looked promising and maybe I should teach myself HTML. I bought myself a book out of my next dole checque, and so began my web design career (which is on hold at the moment, thanks to America's insane immigration red-tape).
• 2000. I got my first professional job as a web developer when I was about twenty-five. The experience was not a good one. My boss was an impatient, unreasonable and impractical Irishman with a very short fuse. Things went further downhill when Lee, who I'd become good friends with, left for pastures new. I found out a few months later he'd been killed. Lee's replacement at work, Phil, casually remarked, one day, about how his American friend's friend, whose name was Lee, had been killed in a car accident. Turned out that, although Lee and Phil didn't know each other, Phil's American friend had been friends with Lee.
• 2001. When I'd finally had enough with working for the mad Irishman, I was lucky enough to walk straight into another web design job. It was a huge improvement over the last place, although the company was run by Christians who, upon discovering I wasn't religious (I'm not anti-religion, I've just never thought about it much), thought that must mean I was a Satanist.
• 2002. Began my DeviantART page On June 14^th. A quote from my stats page: "safetycopy has 1,465 page views total and his 34 deviations were viewed 1,498 times".
• 2003. The strange story of Mr. and Mrs. G. One day, Mr. G pops along to his local metal CD shop to inquire about a particular band (I forget who it was now). "I've no idea," says the man at the counter, "but you should check out this website called Glitzinet - if those guys don't know..." So, Mr.G hits the website, finds the info he needed and decides to hang out in the forums there more often. Then, along comes Mrs. G, drawn to the website by equally coincidental circumstances. After much forum foreplay, Mr. and Mrs. G become "email buddies" (yes, that's actually what we cagily called it at the time), eventually move to ten-hour phone calls and fall deeply in love. After carrying on like this for a couple of months, Mrs. G invites Mr. G over to America - they couldn't stand being separated any more. In a most uncharacteristically certain move, Mr. G marries the lovely Mrs. G and they still live happily ever after.
• 2004. For a while we lived in a not-so-charming carriage house in Kentucky, sharing the space with shadow people and strange scrabbling sounds in the roof. We eventually decided enough was enough when we were plagued by very boisterous killer spiders (that actually came at you looking for a fight) and a black snake fell through the study roof (we found out too late it was illegal to kill these snakes).
• 2005. I played Neocron and Anarchy Online until I was bleary-eyed, L downloaded so much music we didn't know what to do with it all. We all look back on this time fondly simply because our internet access now is coal-powered. Eventually, the money ran out, the fight for my naturalization dragged on, and we suffered the worst of all humiliations - we had to move into my mother-in-law's place, where we remain, hoping we'll get everything sorted one day.
• 2006.
• 2007. William Gibson was my favourite author for ages and I feel a bit guilty that I prefer Haruki Murakami these days.
• 2008. Apparently, wood is the traditional gift for a five year wedding anniversary. 'Nuff said.
• 2009. ?

"I love the challenge of running a PR company; to keep it successful, to sustain growth and attract new clients and keep existing staff and clients happy, is a constantly evolving puzzle. I think EML's success is largely down to our flexibility and the way we adapt to the shifts in our target markets.

We've been a part of the boom and crash cycle of the telecoms industry and have ridden the wave of progress in the technology sector. It is a volatile area to specialise in, but I honestly can't understand why anyone would want to do any other kind of PR - technology is the most exciting market in the world. We see the future - and the technology that will be driving tomorrow's market or that might be in next year's top five Christmas presents.

There has also been a change in the PR industry as a whole since EML was founded. When we started up, we invested the mighty sum of £3000 in two, top of the range Apple Classics with a combined memory space of 40MB - in external drives.

We were laboriously printing, photocopying and posting each press release to each editor because email hadn't yet become the ubiquitous business tool that it is today. Thankfully some bright spark invented the Internet and took all of the tedium out of PR.

Everything is much more immediate now and there are so many more possibilities; 'you want a press tour in Taiwan next week? No problem', 'Your release went out 5 minutes ago, here are the first 20 online cuttings', 'You want to be more interactive with your target audiences? Fine, we can help you start a blog'. It's definitely keeping us all busy"

For the next installment of "who's who at EML" I'll be talking to another of EML's recent additions, Darren, about his experiences on the "dark side" as a journalist before he joined EML.

What do you think have been the biggest changes in technology or PR in the last two decades? What will the next 21 years will look like? And did you, like me, take your GCSE IT classes on 'good old' ClarisWorks only to be totally confused by Microsoft Office when you hit the real world?

I wasn’t even a very good games player, completing only The Lords Of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge this despite the fact that I had well over 200 games and recourse to ‘poking’ numbers into the RAM in order to get infinite lives or some other cheat. I am not sure why I persevered with Doomdark’s Revenge, maybe it was down to those sort of games being the first time that a player could be properly translated into a fantasy world. That is, the player would find themselves in a world where every screen was available in a graphical presentation, rather than the intermittent screens you got with efforts such as The Hobbit. It also did away with struggling to find the appropriate word, often required for interaction with a non-player character. I also had and still have an abiding love affair with fantasy and science fiction. I think the knock on of this has been my obsessive attempts at world domination via Civilisation and Age Of Empires. Attempts, I am loathe to add, that have met with the same amount of success as my forays into the Spectrum gaming world.

I really don’t need to dwell on Manic Miner, suffice to say that I have chosen this game as it was really the first piece of software that brought home to me what the Spectrum could do. Written by the infamous Matthew Smith, it was based on a combination of Donkey Kong and Miner 2049′er. Mr Smith became famous not only through his undoubted programming prowess, but also because he disappeared, leading to all manner of theories as to what happened to him. He recently resurfaced and has appeared at Retro Gaming Expos, and has even turned up on television (1). The object was simple enough collect all the tokens by jumping from ledge to precarious ledge, avoid the monsters and other bad guys and escape from the room before your oxygen supply expired. Along with most gaming efforts on my part, I never ever completed the game. The discovery of girls, alcohol and other chemicals interposed themselves preventing me from joining the ranks of Manic Miner perfectionists. I played the game via the Realspec emulator and every time I made it to a new screen I took a screen print. After a couple of attempts I realised that I would need the assistance of infinite lives (Poke 35136,0 is you must ask). Don’t look at me like that! If my far more nimble fingers of my youth failed to assist me, what chance the arthritic vestiges that remain?

Ultimately, this is yet another amble down memory lane (I posted another Speccy related nostalgia fest here), although with the added agenda of finding out if the game was a good as I claim it was.

001 - The central cavern is probably one of the most reproduced game images on the web. I can vaguely recall completing this screen, but am buggered if I knew how. To my surprise (and also to some degree of consternation) I remembered that collecting the third crystal required nifty pixel perfect positioning beneath the first stalactite. The remaining crystals were completed with little effort.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 1 (can’t believe it myself!)
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 4

002 - The retina dissolving cold room. The dim and distant passage of time tentatively groped around my few remaining brain cells to advise me that this was the…cold room. What my memory couldn’t bring to the fore was how to complete the room. Managed to collect all the lollipops despite a close call with melting floor above the travelator (I shall refer to these moving ledges as travelators as I believe that is what they are called at airports – I do not understand their purpose, what is wrong with walking along a normal floor?).
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 3
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 8

003 - The Menagerie. Patrolled by emaciated storks and guarded by magenta spiders, this room brought back absolutely no memories at all. Completing this was going to take time… To my delight it took a mere four attempts to clear the storks on the top row of the screen. That is a least 10 times less than I thought it would take.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 4
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 6

004 - Abandoned Uranium Workings. Do not remember this room at all and was not confident about completing this, this side of 2049 (Do you see what I did there?)! Collecting the jewels was not a problem in the slightest. Getting out of the room before my oxygen supply expired presented more of a problem. Panic and old age assisted diminished finger dexterity led to me coming a cropper a couple of times.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 2
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 2

005 - Eugene’s Lair: Named after the infamous Eugene Evans of Bug Byte and/or Imagine Software. At least that was I was led to believe. I never did find out what Mr Evans thought of his geeky looking sprite. What a bastard of screen to complete! It took three attempts just to get around to collecting all of the tokens. This required a tricky negotiation of passage between the travelator and lavatories. Having managed this I was aghast to discover that once the last token had been collected the aforementioned Mr Evans went all strobe like and descended onto the escape porch. The shit! I established that it would be provident for me to collect the crystal to the immediate left of the escape exit once Eugene reached the top of the screen. Such foresight and game playing finesse, eh?!
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 5
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 11 (including two in the above text)

006 - The Processing Plant was another room that my dotage prevented me from recollecting. This room was surprisingly easy to complete. Once the magenta and yellow pacmen had been passed (cost me two lives!).
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 5
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 1

007 - The Vat. I did vaguely summon up recollections of having problems with collecting the last couple of tokens in this screen. As it transpired it turned out to be a much more amenable task than I had feared. Collect the bottom right token, drop down and follow the kangaroo and collect the last token whilst jumping over the marsupial of the Macropus family (oh, yeah!) as it makes it’s return journey.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 5
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 1

008 - The Miner Willy Meets The King Beast room is the obstacle course that draws together the inspiration behind Matthew Smith’s game: namely Miner 2049′er and Donkey Kong. I don’t recall ever completing this screen although vague memories of flicking the switches at the top of the screen leading to the opening of secret walls and sending Mr Kong to a gravity influenced death, did loom large. What an absolute cad and bounder of a stage. It took twenty-two attempts just to get past the first two sentinels. I kept jumping over the magenta creature, hiding in the escape porch and then endeavouring to jump back over the magenta fiend. This did not work as the blue air around me could verily testify. I then occurred to me that I should jump onto the travelator behind the creature, make an abrupt about turn and make my onwards. This worked - to my immense relief. Flicking the switch did indeed open a secret wall. The second switch also caused the Kong beast to plummet earthwards. Still managed to cock-up the return journey though! Horrible, horrible room.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 23
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 27 (That number is an estimate, to be honest I totally lost count).

009 - Wacky Amoebatrons was one of those rooms that looked far simpler than it was in actuality. I dredged through the bottom of the barrel of my memory and reckoned to myself that there would be issues with oxygen supply despite there being only one token to collect. Oooh, he was a crafty git was Mr Smith! Unlike most games (and indeed most rooms in this game) where dexterity and speed were essential prerequisites, this room needed patience. Something I singularly lack! The teeth gratingly anxious wait reached its zenith whilst waiting for the travelator, and until the cyan amoebatron and green pole like object were positioned to allow Miner Willy to move right-to-left.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 4
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 2

010 - I am fairly certain that Endor was a place in Middle-Earth. Not sure if it was patrolled by monkeys wearing Metropolitan Police helmets though. Collecting the first few apples was no bother. Whilst leaping around I noticed that the Police Monkeys had exactly the same body as Miner Willy, not sure why this struck a chord. The penultimate apple presented a more obstreperous proposition than the previous Braeburn, Granny Smith and Bramley. It required first jumping over the blue monkey-policeman whilst collecting the apple, jumping immediately again whilst the creature passed underneath you. Finally you needed to jump over him a third time (left-to-right) before claiming the last token.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 4
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 6

011 - Bloody hell! What a shit of a room. The first urge is to move along the top platform collecting 10pence coins in a sort of clockwise direction. This invariably means that you lack enough oxygen to make it back from the last coin, located under the escape hatch back to safety. That coin should actually be collected first of all. A procedure that requires pixel perfect positioning, and also represents testimony to Mathew Smith’s programming skills. The journey back is uneventful until it comes to the last coin, which requires the player to remain on the top right ledge until the yellow antenna thingy has started to move right-to-left and the pink telephone is at the top of the screen. All the while, your oxygen supply is dwindling. Horrid room! Amount of deaths before completing screen: 17
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 20 something (as before I lost count)

012 - Return of the Alien Kong Beast. There was a sneaky bit when trying to make your way back to the little ledge in the middle left of the screen. You have to stand to the far right of the ledge directly below the switch, before jumping. After collecting the banana at the end of the travelator, the player must stand facing to the right before jumping directly upward. The travelator automatically turns the player around, and upon landing on it the player must jump again immediately (at this stage I was beginning to wonder if all this effort and frustration was worth it!?).

Then, one must make Miner Willy leap onto the ledge when the blue creature starts to move away, leaping immediately again to collect the banana and land on the safety of the ledge. Flicking the switch sends the Kong Beast to his doom. Finally the player must drop down the shaft to collect the last banana. This last bit was probably put in to cause consternation at the length of the drop. It succeeded admirably.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 5
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 10

013 - The Ore Refinery presented me with no problems. This is something I feel like repeating because it is not often that I can say something like that. In fact it would be fair to say that I breezed through this screen demonstrating a deftness and ingenuity deserving of encores, throwing of flowers and general admiration. The only point to remember was the timing of the last march along the travelator towards the escape hatch in order not to come into eye-contact (heh, heh!). I set off when the eye was about half-way down the screen.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 1
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 1

014 - Skylab Landing Bay. What a fucker of a screen. The player is presented with the task of collecting tokens whilst leaping from ledge to ledge avoiding kamikaze tables. Initially it does seem that the tables are descending randomly, but after 25 attempts it became apparent that there was a pattern and that hanging waiting for the table immediately in front of you to pass was the key.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 25
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 30 or so (in fact it good so bad that I ran out of oaths and started to resort to quaint old English rebuffs, such as “Oh blimey, that rotter has done me for, once more, the blighter and blaggard”)

015 - The Bank. Initially this looked to be what many of my countrymen call “a piece of piss”. Oh how wrong I was. Various attempts at getting past the bouncing cheque (geddit?) met with death, not unlike the feeling that overwhelms me whenever I have to deal with a real bank. Even when I had passed the cheque, I discovered that the spiders web also was fatal to touch. I decided to look at my screen print of the room to plan my approach. If only that had been an option in 1983…sigh! Realising that I did not need to jump over the cheque, I swiftly made my way around the screen, narrowly avoided ruining everything with the little ledge of melting floor before the escape hatch and made my way out.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 9
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 15

016 - Perhaps, by this stage of the games development, Mr Smith was displaying a fatigue for originality in the naming of screens. As such this room was named the Sixteenth Cavern. One also suspects that ideas were starting to get a bit thin on the ground. Two attempts to complete this room. I could sense the end and started to celebrate my platform gaming adroitness.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 1
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 2

017 - The Warehouse taught me that my celebrations were started with a prematurity practised only be the foolish and inane. This is the most difficult screen that I have met so far. Judging distance and even the location of the tokens made next to impossible by the levels being composed of quicksand. Matters were made worse by the creatures bouncing back and forth. Lost count of the times I died. Made it in the end through luck rather than judgement!
Amount of deaths before completing screen: No real idea, but somewhere in the 30’s.
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: too numerous to mention.

018 - Ameobatrons Revenge was another of those screens that looked simple but proved to be teeth gratingly frustrating. The amoebatrons themselves had changed from anemone type creatures and now resembled Cthuluesque Octopi. The bane of the screen for me was the blue amoebatron second from the right. It took me ages to get the timing right between it and and the pink wheely-pole thing. It only dawned on me after the 20th (or so) attempt that I realised that I need to balance on the edge of the ledge between the blue amoebatron and pink wheely-pole creature as the latter denizen did not actually come to the edge of the platform. Was now considering packing the whole escapade up and loading up Tempest 2000!
Amount of deaths before completing screen: Loads, somewhere in the 30s
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: Loads, somewhere in the 30s

019 - The game, by now, was fully demonstrating it’s extremely steep difficulty curve. Conventionally, collecting the tokens would be no real problem, the player only really having to worry about air reserves. However, there is a beam of yellow light that flits around the screen in an unpredictable way, which every time it hits Willy takes takes extra energy - causing him to deflate or flag, as it were. I attempted this screen for nearly an hour. I managed to get all the tokens but would run out of oxygen. I died well over 40 times and my language was foul. In the end I admitted defeat, scurried across to the Tipshop and entered the pokes for infinite oxygen: 34798,0: 34799,0: 34800,0. Since writing this I have attempted the Solar Power screen several times and have still yet to complete it. I really cannot see how anybody can complete this screen in the time given. More importantly, why would anybody wish to spend whole swathes of their life attempting what seems to me, to be perfectly impossible (and pointless)? Thinking back to my yoof, I would never have given up the opportunity to ‘have a go’ on Mandy or Elaine, after consuming several vats of cider out of the need to finish something as annoying as this screen. Yet many chose that exact option. Odd.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 50 (although screen only completed after infinite air supply pokes have been entered - I do have other things to do, you know!)
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: To paraphrase somebody cleverer than myself, swearwords in my mouth like grains of sand in my hand.

020 - The Final Barrier, or as I renamed it: the at long fucking last screen! Not too bad on this screen. Even managed to get the timing between the travelator and the eye correct - first time! Still managed to mistime the last jump over the yellow creature once I had collected the tokens. I put that down to fatigue.
Amount of deaths before completing screen: 1
Expletives blurted out during attempts at completing room: 3

And that was it. More than 23 years after first playing Manic Miner, I had made my way through to the last screen. And what greeted me after this long and winding journey? A little tune with a congratulatory message? A feeling of accomplishment? A sense of ‘well, that was worth it!” Not a chance of it. I was dumped straight back to the central cavern before I had a chance to relax in my own brilliance. Thanks Matthew!

Considering that the player only starts with 3 lives and even including the extra life gathered along the way, it does not surprise me that I never completed this game. What I did notice was that I didn’t really enjoy playing game. Even now, and with the assistance of an infinite lives Poke, it still took me ages. It’s no wonder that I prefer the more sedate empire building games such as Civilisation or Age Of Empires which as noted above, are in themselves updates Lords Of Darkness and Doomdark’s Revenge. I shall stick to what I know. I have been guilty of viewing over fondly, the 8-bit software phenomenon, in particular old favourites such as Underwurlde, Atic Atac and Jet Set Willy. All attempts at playing them have met with the same result: frustration and boredom. Whilst there can be no denying the skill of those programmers, the limited hardware meant that the games were bound to suffer when compared with their modern counterparts. The depth of detail and gameplay in the modern game environment is so much better than what was on offer 20 years ago. This seems a statement of the blindingly obvious comment to make, but it took the time and effort described above to finally ram the point home. Age Of Empires here I come!

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind giving Avalon and its sequel Dragontorc another bash…

More Info...
1)There is an interesting interview with Matthew Smith that was conducted at the Classic Gaming Expo – I have been unable to find a copy of it on the web, but would recommend this site: The Matthew Smith Mystery

2) There is also a brief television interview with a somewhat maniacal looking Matthew Smith which can be found on You Tube: Mathew Smith – In The Flesh, which I have decided to place right here for you my sweet reader...

Like most of my contemporaries, I spent many and hour and ten pence in the local kebab shop attempting to better my peers at Space Invaders, Galaxians and such like. The opportunity to play these games in the luxury of my bedroom (I was still a bit too young to participate in that other fixation of teenage boys) seemed to answer all my prayers. The question was what system to choose and how to persuade my less than financially profuse father to fork out for it. I was unable to utilise the commonly used argument that it would help with my schooling, as well, you had to attend school regularly for that line of attack to work.

As to what system, well I was an avowed fan of Atari. I liked the sound of the name, I liked the fact that the 800 had a nice clunky keyboard, it looked like it meant business. Also, through previous ownership of a VCS I was aware that video gaming was quite a bit more than the silent letters of the alphabet advancing inevitably towards your letter 'A', as found on the ZX81. The local Lasky's (apparently they are only to be found online these days) had Commodore Vics, Commodore 64's, Atari 800's, Acorn Electron's (I think) and ZX Spectrum's lined up like whores presenting before a VIP. Colours flashed, sprites moved and synthesized tunes created a kaleidoscope of sensory overload. With the exception of the Spectrum. The Atari had either Tempest of Space Raiders playing. The Spectrum had Horace Goes Skiing. The Atari recreated noises that swept me into the world of Tron, the Spectrum equivalent was a flatulent emission. The Atari was however, very, very, very expensive. The Spectrum was only very expensive.

I prevaricated and dawdled. By chance whilst thumbing through a magazine I noted that a local dealer (that is, local to my dad) was selling the 16K version of the Spectrum at a less than give-away price of £99! This was a saving of about £25 pounds from the normal price and was simply too good an opportunity to miss. A flurry of written activity ensued, ending with an eventual phone call confirming that I could have the machine on the proviso that it constituted both a birthday and Christmas present. Curiously, I recall my dad asking if I wanted the 48K version and not replying in the affirmative (even though I would dearly have loved that model) due to a feeling of guilt at making him pay the extra forty pounds. This was to soon reveal itself as the vibrant mistake it was, simply because most games were - for what are now obvious reasons - created for the 48K machine (Jetpac, Pssst and Death Chase not withstanding).

No doubt in a situation replicated across the country by expectant children, I monitored the activities of the postman diligently over the next few days. Somewhat paradoxically, the computer arrived when I was making one of my infrequent visits to school. Arriving home, I could barely contain my excitement although this had to be tempered by the complexities of unwrapping the industrial amounts of paperwork that my dad used to blanket parcels with.

It was an advert something akin to this one taken from Your Computer Magazine, that I posted to my (valve loving) father in an attempt to persuade him to part with his hard earned money and assist me with my move towards the digital age.

Rushing upstairs I plugged the machine in and upon turning on the computer was greeted with the following screen:

I was buggered if I knew what to do next. This was far removed from the plug-and-play antics of the Atari VCS. I would have to learn at least the basic instruction which meant recourse to the thick ring-bound manual. This was indeed a whole new world to me. Thumbing through the manual I came across a type in program called ‘Pangolins’. I had no idea what a Pangolin was, but started typing in the program which I have provided for you below (by the way I have re-entered this onto an emulator and can confirm that it works…after a fashion):

5 REM Pangolin
10 LET nq=100: REM number of questions and animals
15 DIM q$(nq,50): DIM a(nq,2): DIM r$(1)
20 LET qf=8
30 FOR n=1 TO qf/2 1
40 READ q$(n): READ a(n,1): READ a(n,2)
50 NEXT n
60 FOR n=n TO qf-1
70 READ q$(n): NEXT n
100 REM start playing
110 PRINT “Think of an animal.”,”Press any key to continue.”
120 PAUSE 0
130 LET c=1: REM start with 1st question
140 IF a(c,1)=0 THEN GO TO 300
150 LET p$=q$(c): GO SUB 910
160 PRINT “?”: GO SUB 1000
170 LET in=1: IF r$=”y” THEN GO TO 210
180 IF r$=”Y” THEN GO TO 210
190 LET in=2: IF r$=”n” THEN GO TO 210
200 IF r$”N” THEN GO TO 150
210 LET c=a(c,in): GO TO 140
300 REM animal
310 PRINT “Are you thinking of”
320 LET P$=q$(c): GO SUB 900: PRINT “?”
330 GO SUB 1000
340 IF r$=”y” THEN GO TO 400
350 IF r$=”Y” THEN GO TO 400
360 IF r$=”n” THEN GO TO 500
370 IF r$=”N” THEN GO TO 500
380 PRINT “Answer me properly when I’m”,”talking to you.”: GO TO 300
400 REM guessed it
410 PRINT “I thought as much.”: GO TO 800
500 REM new animal
510 IF qf>nq-1 THEN PRINT “I’m sure your animal is very”, “interesting, but I don’t have”,”room for it just now.”: GO TO 800
520 LET q$(qf)=q$(c): REM move old animal
530 PRINT “What is it, then?”: INPUT q$(qf+1)
540 PRINT “Tell me a question which dist “,”inguishes between “
550 LET p$=q$(qf): GO SUB 900: PRINT ” and”
560 LET p$=q$(qf+1): GO SUB 900: PRINT ” “
570 INPUT s$: LET b=LEN s$
580 IF s$(b)=”?” THEN LET b=b-1
590 LET q$(c)=s$(TO b): REM insert question
600 PRINT “What is the answer for”
610 LET p$=q$(qf+1): GO SUB 900: PRINT “?”
620 GO SUB 1000
630 LET in=1: LET io=2: REM answers for new and old animals
640 IF r$=”y” THEN GO T0 700
650 IF r$=”Y” THEN GO TO 700
660 LET in=2: LET io=1
670 IF r$=”n” THEN GO TO 700
680 IF r$=”N” THEN GO TO 700
690 PRINT “That’s no good. “: GO TO 600
700 REM update answers
710 LET a(c,in)=qf+1: LET a(c,io)=qf
720 LET qf=qf+2: REM next free animal space
730 PRINT “That fooled me.”
800 REM again?
810 PRINT “Do you want another go?”: GO SUB 1000
820 IF r$=”y” THEN GO TO 100
830 IF r$=”Y” THEN GO TO 100
840 STOP
900 REM print without trailing spaces
905 PRINT ” “;
910 FOR n=50 TO 1 STEP -1
920 IF p$(n)” ” THEN GO TO 940
930 NEXT n
940 PRINT p$(TO n);: RETURN
1000 REM get reply
1010 INPUT r$: IF r$=”" THEN RETURN
1020 LET r$=r$(1): RETURN
2000 REM initial animals
2010 DATA “Does it live in the sea”,4,2
2020 DATA “Is it scaly”,3,5
2030 DATA “Does it eat ants”,6,7
2040 DATA “a whale”, “a blancmange”, “a pangolin”, “an ant”

Apart from rapidly coming to the conclusion that in order to use the Spectrum keyboard required the ergonomic dexterity of an Octopus, I had absolutely no idea what any of the above code meant or did. It was to my eternal surprise that upon running the program I was greeted with the following:

Hardly Space Raiders is it? But it worked. Alright then, it sort of worked, it also made me appreciate that with a bit of hard work and perseverance I could create my own…creations. It should also be noted that it was this program that set me on a course that whilst not making me a programmer, initiated an interest in computers that has persisted to this day. This program provided a foundation upon which I have steadily built – my understanding of computers, the Internet and everything else related - started with Pangolins and certainly career wise has stood me in good stead. It also started a love affair with the Pangolin - a scaly anteater in case you were wondering. Note the error report at the bottom of the screen. At the time even this thrilled me, it meant that the computer was talking to me. I admit that I was soon to weary of such reports, but even so, I still prefer it to the ‘Fatal Error’ type wankery beloved of Microsoft.

I have really enjoyed this brief nostalgia trip and intend to return to this subject with a more in depth post. There is no way that the software of today can be regarded as anyway inferior to that of the eighties – despite the bugs and crashes that seem to be almost wilfully inserted into Microsoft Windows, the frustrations do not compare with the twenty minute loading times, followed by a crash that tape-loading software inflicted on its owners. Yet the huge sprawling companies that dominate the world today lack the personal touch of the early programmers. Maybe that is why I am drawn to the open source software that is becoming ever more popular (this is being written on Open Office). Maybe that is why I will soon be saying goodbye to Windows and hello to Linux as that is a labour of love rather than an attempt at global domination. The programmers that are involved in things like Linux are the descendants of those bedroom programmers who used to be found slaving over some obscure piece of machine code into the early hours of the morning. We have come full circle and it is with those people that I wish to be associated (however remotely).