Twin Galaxies is the official supplier of video game scores to the Guinness World Records books.
Twin Galaxies is the world authority on player rankings, gaming statistics and championship tournaments, with pinball statistics dating from the 1930s and video game statistics from the early 1970s.
OUR HISTORY
In 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of the Guinness Brewery, realised that a book supplying the answers to this sort of question might prove popular. He was right!
Manic Miner's 25th Anniversary
This year marks the 25th anniversary of a ground-breaking video game starring a demented miner, a Humpty-Dumpty lookalike called Eugene, some angry telephones and, erm, amoebatrons… It can only be: Manic Miner
The controls were simple – you could only walk left or right or jump – and the premise not much more complicated: simply wander through some caves, collecting keys (or ice creams, or bullion bars) while avoiding nasty monsters. But Manic Miner (1983) revolutionized gaming on the home computer, and set the standards against which all other platform games since have been judged.
The trippy, surreal story of Manic Miner was the brainchild of the enigmatic programmer Matthew Smith. He set his ZX Spectrum platformer beneath Surbiton, a suburban commuter town on the River Thames, in a long-abandoned mine shaft. There, our eponymous hero discovers "evidence of a lost civilization far superior to our own, which used automatons to dig beep into the Earth's core".
The opening screen hints at the surreal things – and cacophony – to come, as what sounds like a honky-tonk piano batters out a crazed version of the Blue Danube waltz. I say cacophony because once you started the game, you faced an unending loop of In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg. Death, when it came (and boy, it came for me a lot), was usually a relief: a Monty-Pythonesque boot would descend from on high and squish you into a rubbish bin.
Smith populated his mine with things the likes of which had never been seen before in video gaming – man-eating toilets, deadly (indeed "mutant") telephones, killer penguins, and "wacky" amoebatrons – and introduced challenging elements of gameplay such as conveyor belts, crumbling platforms and brain-busting stalactites.
Pixel-perfect positioning was needed to negotiate these features and to vault the surreal enemy sprites that would kill you with one touch. I wonder today how many valuable hours I wasted edging ever closer to some poisonous penguin or toxic toilet, only to be zapped each time and sent back to the start of the level. I never did finish the game (well, without cheats), despite what seemed like half a lifetime of effort. I got distracted, you see, by a new game: the sequel, Jet Set Willy…
But that's another story. For now, indulge me by trying out one of the many Manic Miner emulators and seeing what all the fuss was about for yourself. Just be kind when you play and consider what it must have been like to be a 10-year-old boy back in 1983, when the Spectrum was the most amazing thing ever, when games came on audio cassettes and took 10 minutes to load, when no one could moonwalk except Michael Jackson (and NASA astronauts performed their first spacewalk), when no one had heard of Nintendo, and when our boring friends we didn't really like still played rubbish consoles made by Atari or, even worse, Mattel! (Who could forget just how terrible ET was as a game?!)
Javascript (online) version: http://www.ellosnuncaloharian.com/online/mm/manicminer.html
PC download: http://www.retroremakes.com/forum2/showcase/view.php?gm=118
Craig Glenday, Editor-in-Chief
4th March 2008