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Message: 6381
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 02/03/2008
Subject: UK magazine-alert: Matthew Smith and MM in Retro Gamer
In the latest (Load 48) issue of Retro Gamer magazine, which came out
on 28th February, there is a massive interview with Matthew Smith,
including a blow-by-blow commentary on each cavern in the original
Manic Miner!
The front cover is full of coloured Miner Willys, with the
words "MANIC MINER" as they appear on the loading-screen, and the
following BASIC program:
10 PRINT "MATTHEW SMITH IS ACE"
20 GOTO 10
The Manic Miner commentary is on pp.22-27, with a screenshot of each
cavern, and some fascinating insights from Matthew, including (in my
own words):
* Matthew developed Manic Miner using a room-editor he wrote for the
Tandy (he developed MM and JSW on the Tandy, using a cable to
transfer them to the Spectrum). "I'd do a bit and see if it was
possible to get past that. Then I'd add the next bit."
* He drew the graphics on graph-paper, though, and typed them in as
hex. Later (perhaps for Jet Set Willy?), he used BOUGIE (Byte-
Orientated Universal Graphics Interactive Editor), which let him run
through 4 animation-frames either forwards or backwards.
* He playtested many of the caverns only once.
* A MM/JSW cavern can only have 8 guardians due to memory-
restrictions (except in JSW64, of course, which isn't mentioned in
the article). But Matthew also recommends 8 guardians as the limit
beyond which a room becomes too slow (which is certainly true of
JSW64 rooms with an excessive number of guardians).
* The robot in "Central Cavern" with the mouth in its belly was
inspired by Yellow Submarine.
* The conveyors were originally going to be streams of water -
impossible to go backwards.
* "Central Cavern" is a difficult test-bed, but after that, the rooms
are in increasing order of difficulty.
* The items in "The Cold Room" are either snowshoes or tennis-
rackets, and Matthew wonders whether he should have toggled one pixel.
* The birds in "The Menagerie" are emus, ducks or even liver-birds.
* In "Abandoned Uranium Workings", he drew the rotating ball first,
then decided to stick a seal under it.
* "Eugene's Lair" is a reference to Eugene Evans, who worked for
Imagine, of whom Matthew was jealous because they were making more
money, hence the items which are stacks of credit-cards (there's
supposed to be an extra line to show that they're stacked).
* "Eugene's Lair" also plays on a childhood-fear of a monster that
lived in the toilet and would reach up and grab you! Which is
interesting, because I've always associated that room with a
recurring nightmare I had about a big black ball, which made its way
into We Pretty.
* In "Processing Plant", the pacmen have legs because they have a
diameter of 10 pixels - the maximum width for smooth horizontal
guardians.
* "Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" is a tribute to Donkey Kong, and
Matthew wishes he had included hammers.
* "Wacky Amoebatrons" is supposed to be a test of what shapes you can
clear, and he wanted to make the tall, thin sticks go up and down so
that you had to jump over them at the correct time. Of course this
can't really be done properly in Manic Miner because all horizontal
guardians in a room have to have the same sprite, but it could be
implemented using two guardians in JSW.
* The vertical-guardian sprite in "Wacky Amoebatrons" is supposed to
be the Bug-Byte logo, and Matthew claims in the interview that he
changed it for copyright-reasons for the Software Projects edition
(in fact he didn't - the only rooms he edited were "Processing
Plant", "The Warehouse" and "Amoebatrons' Revenge").
* Matthew wrote "The Endorian Forest" immediately after watching Star
Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi at the cinema, and yes, the
guardians are Ewoks! He put "Jedi" as his religion on the last census.
* "Return of the Alien Kong Beast" is so named because of its
pulsating head.
* In "Attack of the Mutant Telephones", I think the horizontal
guardians might be joysticks - a reference to the Golden Joystick
award he won.
* The items in "Ore Refinery" are lumps of ore.
* The items in "Skylab Landing Bay" are computer-chips. "Skylab was
launched the year before, and it crashed and burned."
* The horizontal guardian in "The Bank" is a bouncing cheque (I
always thought it was a letter in an envelope), and the Water-cells
on the right are a trellis.
* I have to say that "The Bank" is the most underdeveloped room in
the game: it doesn't force you to go up the left-hand side to the
portal, it doesn't force you to do the difficult jumps needed to jump
up for the top-right item, and it doesn't force you to jump over the
cheque. All these flaws could be fixed simply by removing the trellis.
* Like me, Matthew numbers the caverns from 0 to 19, despite 15 being
called "The Sixteenth Cavern".
* The guardians in "The Sixteenth Cavern" are flag-bugs (a reference
to bugs in the code), and the items are credit-cards. He's
particularly proud of the way you have to collect the item under the
portal last, although I have to say, it would have been even more
impressive if he'd put Water-cells in the portal to stop you falling
down for it, forcing you to pass the yellow flag-bug, which is
obviously the route he intended.
* Matthew says "The Warehouse" is impossibly hard. It's certainly
daunting to the uninitiated, but once you have mastered it with
practice, you shouldn't die in it again.
* "Amoebatrons' Revenge" "has all the different speeds the enemies
can move at, up to four pixels a frame". The vertical guardians are
jellyfish, which may have "evolved into a higher life-form".
He compares the room with the "Kitchen" diptych in Jet Set Willy.
* "Solar Power Generator" is about environmental awareness, hence the
green Air-cells.
* The portal in "The Final Barrier" is "omega - the end!", and he
says here that the fish and dagger it turns into at the end of the
game are simply a couple of sprites he had drawn but hadn't used in
the game, although it is claimed elsewhere that they constitute the
word "swordfish".
The interview continues on pp.52-56, which feature recent (and some
old) photos of Matthew, including one of him reading a draft of
Adrian Robson's recently-published book: Miner Willy - From Rags To
Riches.
Matthew is now back living with his mother in the house where he
wrote MM and JSW! He showed interviewer Paul Drury the very room he
wrote them in - mathoms included an old audio-cassette of JSW II
labelled "MASTER COPY", and a piece of paper from 1984 with a diagram
headed "Optimal Design for Home Computer using available
components/by Matthew from Earth".
According to his mother, he was "born totally brilliant", and had a
reading-age of 13½ when he was 4 (he's now 42).
"My first game design was actually Jimmy Carter in a rowing boat
being chased by rabbits."
The article goes on with Matthew's life-story, which I won't
regurgitate here. But I can't resist posting a couple of tasters:
>>>Mum has headed off to bingo for the evening and we're crouched round
the laptop watching the walkthrough of Manic Miner. Suddenly Matt
notices an anomaly - the Bug-Byte amoebatrons are gone, but the
Software Projects' logo doesn't appear on The Warehouse screen.
'Ah, this could be a very late Bug-Byte version, or a very early
Software Projects version,' he says, with a knowing wag of his
finger. 'With Bug-Byte, I'd take the tape myself up three floors to
the tape duplicators. They had a whole floor at Canning Place. They'd
stick my cassette on their posh tape deck and played it loads and
loads of times onto one big master, these massive ten-inch reels and
they used that to copy at high speed onto cassettes. That master
would be going over the tape heads all day, so when it wore out
they'd come and get me to make a new tape. I'd get the latest version
off the Tandy and squirt it onto the Spectrum and that became the new
master. And I'd change things. Quite often. That's how bugs
disappear! I don't think there are any bugs in Manic Miner because of
that. Loads in Jet Set Willy. That wasn't released, it escaped...
'Jet Set Willy was almost done when we set up Software Projects.'
You mean the mansion was all sketched out?
'Nah, that didn't really happen. I'd do a level and stick it next to
that one and then do another. That's why the map doesn't really make
any sense. It was never drawn as one in the first place.'
<<<
I guess that explains why the version of Jet Set Willy I had for my
real Spectrum had "quirkafleeg" spelled with a small 'q', while all
the versions I've found on the Internet spell it with a capital 'Q'.
>>>All these loose ends. I press him further on his most famous lost
game, 'Miner Willy Meets The Taxman', a ten-level horizontal-
scrolling platformer for the Speccy, not to be confused with the
Commodore 64's Megatree.
'You'd start in modern times and then go back through various periods
of English history. A Tudor level, a medieval one, something with the
Celtic tribes in, back to the Romans, who were the first taxmen.'
He taps the side of his head. 'It's still all up here.'
<<<
On p.56, Matthew answers readers' questions:
* Andre's Night Off (his type-in listing for Computer & Video Games)
is written in BASIC to make it friendlier to type in than if it were
written in machine-code. Andre is indeed the chef from Jet Set Willy.
* Matthew put the teleport-cheat in for testing-purposes, but thought
it would be cool to leave it in for hackers to discover the "code"
(6031769 "was originally my driving licence number, with an error in
and twisted round a bit"). Of course, you don't even need the code if
you use POKE 33885,7 for Bug-Byte MM or POKE 34275,10 for JSW.
* He's reluctant to remake MM/JSW for modern platforms because Tommy
Barton "would pop up wanting a slice... I could do a different game
in my style."
* He lost maps of JSW, a "hard drive with the lost JSW levels on" and
his original metallic green Spectrum 13 years ago when he went to
Holland, as he left them in the attic of a shared house. But he
assumes it's been cleared out without having actually checked!!
* He cites Bill Hogue as a big influence. "I disassembled his code to
shreds. Not Miner 2049er, his earlier stuff on the Tandy. I learned a
lot from pulling his stuff apart."
There's also a big article about the 128K Spectrum on pp.60-67,
and "Top 25 Spectrum games of all time" on pp.82-91 (Jet Set Willy is
#15, and Manic Miner is #5 behind Elite, Head Over Heels, Chaos and
3D Deathchase).
>>>Manic Miner created many imitators, but none quite reached the
heights of the original. It is the Spectrum's best platformer and a
stunning example of the genre.
Every enemy is well placed, the structure of each platform feels
almost organic, while the pixel-perfect jumping will never - for the
most part - test your patience. With its jaunty opening, boot-
stomping ending and bizarre enemies, Smith's game proved to be a
masterpiece that, 25 years later, still manages to impress.
An utterly ingenious piece of programming that shows just how far you
can go with sheer talent and a very healthy imagination.
>>>Jet Set Willy's quirky and colourful palette, warped imagery and
surrealist humour captured perfectly the irreverence of videogames of
the time. And as it was built with the Spectrum in mind, it is widely
considered to house the finest version of the game.
<<<
I apologise to the copyright-holders for including so many quotes in
this alert, but it's only a small percentage of the whole, and should
help to sell more copies rather than put people off.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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