The Making Of: Miner 2049er

Retro Gamer looks at the history of forgotten classic Manic Miner 2049er

From talking to Bill Hogue, it’s very clear that he was once a devourer of new technology. He recalls working at a Radio Shack in Reseda, California, which received one of the first TRS-80 computers. “Between serving customers, I learned how to program in BASIC and machine code,” he begins. “One night, the store’s alarm system went off, due to a loose wire, and they called me in to wait for the alarm company to repair it. The police were also called, and they had guns drawn on me while I was playing on the computer, waiting for the alarm company.” From Bill’s initial dabbling in programming while working at Radio Shack, Big Five Software was born, initially releasing acclaimed games for the TRS-80. When Bill had tired of the restrictions of the Tandy machine, it was the Atari 400/800 that beckoned, predominantly because of its graphics and sound capabilities.

Bill’s first creation on Atari’s then cutting-edge hardware became a classic of its era, and, in hindsight, something of a genre-defining game. Although David Crane’s Pitfall! is typically cited as the first home-console platform game, Miner 2049er is one of the earliest examples akin to subsequent platform games in any meaningful sense (such as Chuckie Egg and Manic Miner, through to the likes of Impossible Mission and beyond). Unlike many of its contemporaries though, Miner 2049er doesn’t solely task the player with collecting items and avoiding nasties on each of its ten levels – Bounty Bob has to walk over every piece of ground to complete a level. The conceit – added after much of the gameplay was completed – is that Bob is on a mission to inspect every inch of each of the mines, in search of the malevolent Yukon Yohan. However, rather than adding this element to increase the game’s challenge, Bill reckons it was “more to do with Pac-Man than anything else”, although he adds, “I was never very good at Pac-Man, so I’m not sure why I borrowed any elements from the game.”

Elsewhere, it’s clear that gameplay elements from other arcade games seeped into the mix, although, as Bill explains, at the time this was nothing new for him: “All of my early TRS-80 games were very similar to the arcade games that Jeff Konyu [Big Five Software’s TRS-80 graphic artist] and I used to pump quarters into at our various hangouts. Miner 2049er was the result of wanting to blend together fun elements from many different arcade games we loved to play.” Bill notes that there are ideas in the game somewhat based on Donkey Kong – “especially the climbing aspect” – and that Pac-Man’s influence extended past exploring every piece of each level: in Pac-Man, ghosts become vulnerable after a power pill is consumed. Similarly, Miner 2049er enables Bob to dispose of the otherwise deadly radioactive mutants roaming around each level, after grabbing one of the various items found in the mine (presumably left behind by careless or very dead past miners).

Like many games at the time, Miner 2049er was put together quickly. “I believe we had the gameplay sorted first, and then worked later to figure out what it was we had invented”, laughs Bill. “We decided that perhaps our hero was stuck in a mine and – for reasons I cannot remember – he was a member of the Mounties in Canada. Actually, I wonder if that had something to do with a bar at the Disneyland Hotel that Jeff and I used to frequent – it had a definite Canadian wilderness feel to it…”

… continued