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Message: 6614

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 21/12/2009

Subject: UK TV-alert: Manic Miner on BBC 4

 

andrewbroad wrote:

Games Britannia is a three-part series about popular games in
Britain from the Iron Age to the Information Age.
So I'm guessing that Manic Miner will appear in Part 3, and that
it will be televised on Monday 21st December.

I guessed right! There are three mentions of Manic Miner in Games Britannia Part 3, "Joystick Generation", which covers gaming from Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s to the virtual-reality, social-networking computer-games of today.

(1) One minute into the programme, there is a glimpse of Miner Willy getting killed in "Central Cavern" as presenter Benjamin Woolley talks about a world (of games) that's "sometimes extremely annoying".

(2) Nine minutes into the programme, there's a more detailed look at Manic Miner, as we see "Processing Plant", "The Menagerie", "The Cold Room" and "Abandoned Uranium Workings" on a 2x2 split screen.

Benjamin Woolley: "There couldn't be a better example than this: Manic Miner. It looks horrible, and sounds dreadful."

[Central Cavern]

Benjamin Woolley: "You're a miner, exploring a series of excavated coal-scenes, picking up treasure whilst avoiding a plethora of ever-more surreal moving objects."

[Eugene's Lair]

Charlie Brooker: "It was a really basic game, but it had a weird, Pythonesque sense of humour to it, which is a very British thing.
And a lot of those early British games did. When you died, you'd get squashed by a Pythonesque foot, which descended from the heavens and crushed you. I think that was what appealed to me: the weird humour of it."

[Processing Plant]

Benjamin Woolley: "When people first started to talk about the addictive quality of computer-games, Manic Miner was Exhibit A."

[Attack of the Mutant Telephones / The Endorian Forest]

"Although it looks crude by today's standards, the game was an instant sensation, and a landmark title for the ZX Spectrum."

(3) 46 minutes into the programme, Benjamin Woolley is talking about a game called _Little Big Planet_:

"Launched in 2008, it looks like a cuddly version of Manic Miner: a platform-game in which the player runs and jumps across a childlike landscape of building-blocks and poster-paint.

"But beneath the surface-layer of smothering cuteness lies a technological marvel: a powerful, elegant game-construction set that allows players not just to play the game, but to create new ones, which they can publish across the Internet, thus helping to build a bigger, better Little Big Planet."

He goes on to talk about the Little Big Planet community, whose members upload their levels to the Internet. The levels appear on a massive list, ordered by how many times each level has been played. It's extremely difficult for a LBP author to get a level on the front page of the list, as so many people are doing this that a new level is released every 27 seconds!

Games Britannia Part 3 is repeated on BBC Four at the following times:

* 2009:12:22 02:30 GMT
* 2009:12:31 00:20 GMT

For those in the UK, Games Britannia Part 3 is available on BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pddc6

--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://abroad.sqweebs.com/spectrum/mmjsw/

 

 

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