Miner Willy's Lair

Manic Miner/Bug Byte

"Miner Willy, while prospecting down Surbiton way, stumbles upon
an ancient, long forgotten mine-shaft. On further exploration,
he finds evidence of a lost civilisation far superior to our own,
which used automatons to dig beep into the Earth's core to supply
the essential raw materials for their advanced industry. After
centuries of peace and prosperity, the civilisation was torn
apart by war, and lapsed into a long dark age, abandoning their
industry and machines. Nobody, however, thought to tell the mine
robots to stop working, and through countless aeons they had
steadily accumulated a hugh stockpile of valuable metals
and minerals, and Miner Willy realises that he now has the
opportunity to make his fortune by finding the underground store."

Thus begins the most magical tale of them all, the epic
journey of Miner Willy from his initial fortune-finding mission in Manic Miner to the after-party tidy up in the sequel Jetset Willy, these two games changed the world and they are both still brilliant today.
Manic Miner was developed by the enigmatic and possibly quite nutty Matthew Smith back in 1983 when most of us were still fascinated by the fact that The Hobbit computer game had nice static pictures of rivers in it, and we were still impressed by the sheer breadth and scope of Football Manager (ah, happy days of urging little matchstick men to kick the ball in the back of the net...."GO ON, KICK IT IN, YOU USELESS BASTARDS!"....great, innocent days.)
The idea of a proper platform game had never fully been explored before and the fact that Matthew Smith nailed it first time so magnificently had us all wetting ourselves with excitement. (There were a couple of earlier dreary attempts such as Miner 2049'er which were crap to play, had no life in them all and were quickly forgotten about once Manic Miner arrived on the scene.)
The idea is simple. Guide Miner Willy through 20 screens, collecting all the flashing items on the way and then get back to the exit to proceed to the next level. But this wasn't just any old computer programming exercise, Matthew Smith actually breathed life into these 20 glorious caverns, each of which had it's own unique identity, it's own tricks and traps to navigate, it's
own weird and wonderful monsters to avoid. In the hands
of any other programmer, the 'mining robots' from the
long-dead civilisation would probably have ended up as bit
of a yellow blob and would have been repeated throughout
every level.
Matthew Smith, however, created unique and surreal
sprites for each and every level and this is what makes it so
thrilling to play. The sense of achievement after finally
working out how to complete one of the trickier caverns is
matched only by the sense of awe when you gaze upon a
brand new cavern for the very first time.
Manic Miner introduced us to robot penguins, mutant
telephones, deadly toilets and perhaps most famously of all, Eugene, the humpty-dumpty star of the fifth cavern Eugene's Lair, who Smith based on Eugene Evans, a fellow programmer who had told Smith that he didn't think Manic Miner would work.
If Matthew Smith had disappeared after Manic Miner, he would have already left a proud legacy behind him with this one classic game. But he didn't disappear until he gave the world the sequel which, unbelievably, improved on it's predecessor so much that it was equally as earth-shattering......

Jetset Willy/Software Projects

Miner Willy, intrepid explorer and nouveau-riche socialite,
has been reaping the benefits of his fortunate discovery in
surbiton. He has a yacht, a cliff-top mansion, an Italian
housekeeper and a French cook, and hundreds of new found
friends who REALLY know how to enjoy themselves a a party.

His housekeeper Maria, however, takes a very dim view of all
his revellry, and finally after a particularly boisterous
thrash she puts her foot down. When the last of the louts
disappears down the drive in his Aston Martin, all Willy can
think about is crashing out in his four-poster. But Maria
won't let him into his room until ALL the discarded glasses
and bottles have been cleared away.

Can you help Willy out of his dilemma? He hasn't explored
his mansion properly yet(it IS a large place and he HAS been
VERY busy) and there are some very strange things going on
in the further recesses of the house (I wonder what the last
owner WAS doing in his laboratory the night he disappeared).

I can remember, back in 1984, when I was just a young slip of a lad, eagerly awaiting the arrival home of my brother from school. He was going to bring home Jetset Willy, the new sequel to Manic Miner, and words can't express the excitement and anticipation I felt. Sadly, my brother was an unrealiable tit and he forgot, so I had to wait another week before he finally got off his fat ginger arse and brought a copy home, but you get the general idea.
Surprisingly, my initial reaction to playing the first screens of Jetset Willy was one of mild disappointment. I didn't quite get it. You didn't even have to collect the flashing items to progress to the next screen, you could just walk straight through to the next room in Willy's mansion. What was the point of that, eh? What my tiny uneducated mind hadn't realised though was that Matthew Smith had just created a whole new breed of platform game, one that could be played in several different ways, where simply exploring the house and trying to access new mysterious rooms was just as much fun as playing it in the old Manic Miner style and trying to collect all the flashing items.
It didn't take long before me and my freaky friends were spending the whole summer holidays desperately trying to outdo each other and be the first one to 'discover' a new room. The further you progressed into the house, the more bizarre it became - the secret laboratories of the previous owner Doctor Jones, the monks in the forgotten abbey, the entrance to Hades.....the game was HUGE, it was mind-boggling inventive and twenty-odd years later it's as amazingly playable as ever.
Even the background music was beautiful, a heart-warming rendition of 'If I Was A Rich Man' that went down a key every time you lost one of your seven lives. Jetset Willy was just absolutely perfect. Well, OK, it had a bug in it which made it impossible to complete the game, but apart from that, it was perfect. (and of course you can now play fixed versions on your Spectrum Emulator, proving again what a truly wonderful world it is we live in today.)

Matthew Smith

Jetset Willy was Smith's final game for the Spectrum, and he pretty much disappeared from the scene soon afterwards and was never heard of again for about twenty years. All sorts of rumours began circulating on the net that he had become a fishmonger in Norway, or that he had become a trappist Monk in Tibet and spent his spare time hunting the Yeti. But that wasn't quite the truth.
In 1984, Smith had begun working on the The Megatree, a follow-up to Jetset Willy which apparently would have been a semi-3-D game although actual details are a bit vague as Smith didn't get very far with it. (This mythical unfinished game is sometimes referred to as Miner Willy Meets The Taxman but this was just a joke title sent out to the press to keep them interested - probably inspired by Smith's ongoing problems with the taxman himself at this point.)
Not much is known about The Megatree, other than one bloke working for Software Projects at the time claims to have seen a single finished screen which saw Miner Willy waltzing with Maria the Housekeeper, with haunting music in the background.

An official sequel was released in 1985 but sadly Jetset Willy 2 had no input from Smith himself (although it's still a dead good game - see below). Smith's last planned project for the Spectrum was going to be an entirely original game called Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh-Eating Chickens From Mars which would have featured a new hero, Zappo The Dog. This one even went to the stage of being advertised in the press but sadly that remained unfinished too (although Software Projects would release Star Paws the following year, written by a different programmer but containing some elements of Smith's original idea - it wasn't great).
As for Smith himself.....after spending some time living in a commune in the Netherlands, he was deported back here to the UK in 1997 for reasons he'd rather keep to himself. Since then the greatest creative mind that ever existed has been working in factories, in order to earn enough money to keep his internet connection going. They keep coming and cutting him off apparently. I bet it's Telewest as well. WANKERS.

Jetset Willy 2 - The Final Frontier/Software Projects

The official sequel to Jetset Willy was more a happy accident than anything else. The original game had by now been converted to the Commodore 64 by Shahid Ahmad (although Matthew Smith was unhappy with the results and felt it proved that the Spectrum was a superior machine - the gameplay on the C64 was slightly jerky and the whole thing looked watered down and inferior to the great Speccy classic). When Software Projects decided to release an Amstrad conversion too, the hired programmers, D.P.Rowson & S.Wetherill, took it upon themselves to add an extra 71 rooms to the original game - and the results were deemed so successful that it was given the tag of a 'new' sequel and was itself converted back to the Spectrum and Commodore 64 for a simultaneous release.
The press hated it. By 1985, computer games had moved on a tad, and this new release was considered to be simply a slightly extended version of an outdated game. Despite that, it still sold bucketloads and I'm happy to say it's actually a pretty worthy sequel.
Miner Willy has had the builders in to improve his
mansion whilst he is having a stay in hospital. Upon his
return home, the builders have mysteriously disappeared
without even asking for payment, and Willy must now
clean up the mess they made whilst exploring the brand
new rooms he never even asked for. Perhaps the most
famous feature of this sequel is that Willy can now travel
into OUTER SPACE (yay!) using the newly-built Rocket
Room. It took me bloody months to even find out where
the Rocket Room was (it's at the top of The Watch
Tower, fact fans!) but once you arrive there, you are
rewarded with the sight of Willy in a spacesuit and loads
and loads of brand new outer-spacey screens. There's
lots of other brand new screens scattered about the mansion in weird and wonderful places and whilst some of them may lack a little of that Matthew Smith magic, the new programmers do their best to stay true to the surreal nature of the original classic. My favourite bit of the whole game is the inclusion of a screen called 'Deserted Isle' which harks back to a hoax regarding the original Jetset Willy. Somebody wrote into Sinclair User magazine claiming that if you went to The Bow and waited for 12 hours then a little boat would come along and take you to The Deserted Isle. Of course, no such room existed but that didn't stop thousands of Willy fans waiting patiently for 12 hours to witness this new secret screen - the poor lambs! (No, I wasn't one of them. Look, I bloody wasn't!!) Forunately for us, in this sequel, the myth became reality and you really can get to The Deserted Isle. You don't have to wait for 12 hours to get to see it (hooray!) but you do have to do something very very hard indeed which involves not losing a single life for about thirty dead tricky screens, so mere mortals like yourself won't ever be able to do it. (Boooo!)
One last thing worth mentioning about Jetset Willy 2 is the in-game music which is the lousiest god-awful dirge you have ever heard in your life and pisses all over the memory of Matthew Smith. Which I think is a shame.

Miner Willy - The Legend Continues

Despite the best efforts of my friends to convince me otherwise, it's not just me who loves the Miner Willy games. Hundreds of amateur fans have written unofficial sequels to the game, most of which can be played using a Spectrum Emulator such as Realspec. Admittedly, most of them are totally fucking wank, but at least the thought was there, eh? You'll even find the odd gem here and there - Jetset Emily is a favourite of mine, featuring Miner Willy's baby daughter as the heroine in a redesigned mansion - it has lots of lovely touches and it's a sobering moment indeed when she comes across her late father's body in The Swimming Pool.

There are also some wonderful PC re-makes of the original games,
the best of which have to be Andy Noble's famous updates of both
Manic Miner and Jetset Willy. Both stay absolutely true to the
gameplay of the originals but with bigger, brighter and bouncier
graphics and sound. They're so good, they've even been endorsed
by Matthew Smith himself which is a rare privilege indeed as he
tends to dismiss the vast majority of stuff like this. Andy Noble's
re-makes are stunning to play and they can both be found here.

I was quite literally creaming my pants just a few months ago when, after all these years, I finally came across the legendary Amiga conversions of the games using the WINUAE emulator. Amiga emulators are, by their very nature, a swine to use and I wouldn't recommend using one unless you have the patience of a saint. My determination to play the Amiga conversions finally won through and after weeks of fiddling about with WINUAE, I was finally able to play these two rarest of the rare versions of Manic Miner and Jetset Willy. (Rare in the sense that not many copies were sold when they were first released, and not many people can be arsed to mess about with WINUAE to play them today).
Manic Miner on the Amiga is AWESOME.
It completely updates the original single
screen caverns and introduces four-way
scrolling to make each cavern seem HUGE!
It has wonderful graphics and even speech
and yet still manages to capture the spirit
and feel of the original classic. It's a shame
that not many people in the world are ever
going to play this because it's Magnificent.
Jetset Willy, on the other hand, is a bit
disappointing on the Amiga. It loses each
individual room title to create one massive
sprawling playing area but also loses a lot of
it's identity along the way. It gets very samey and repetitive after a short while and it becomes difficult to tell where you are or which way you should be going, as everywhere just starts to look the same as everywhere else. At the end of the day, it just looks like an average Amiga platform game with all the original Jetset Willy magic beaten out of it with a big bland stick. Ah well.

I think I've played pretty much every possible version of these
games now. There's even a snazzy Gameboy Advance version,
which again features a wealth of brand new screens.
Every kid in the land should be using their Nintendo DS to play
this mini-masterpiece, but they're all far too busy tossing about
with useless Nintendogs and the like. Idiots.

Now that we've had a look at the best games ever made, let's take a look at the very best Software Label that ever existed......let's go back to the Ultimate years.........

Rough Guide To Home Computing & The Arcades
Click here to go back to the Title page and view the whole Guide