If you owned a ZX Spectrum, you owned Manic Miner. Whether you actually paid for it or not was a different question. Manic Miner was written by Matthew Smith in his bedroom when he was just 16. It's one of those tales that's been told a hundred times when it comes to the early Spectrum days.

In Manic Miner you play Willy who has to go through 20 levels of single screen action, collecting all of the flashing objects and then getting to the exit. It's harder than it sounds and I must have spent many many hours trying to get through the game. I think my best ever run through was about screen 15 or so. And that took a serious amount of dedication and time to get to that. Manic Miner was the sort of game where you could, if you practiced enough, run through the thing on muscle memory and I guess that's what a lot of people who became good at the game did. There were only 3 controls; left, right and jump, so by the time you'd gotten all your practice in you could easily find yourself in a flow state that would be working beautifully until that one fatal moment where you were half a second too slow and it would throw you off completely.

So why is Manic Miner one of the Games That Made Me? Other than the fact that the game was seriously good fun and had a decent difficulty curve to boot, it's here for two main reasons; one good, one not so.

Firstly as a fan of good music (according to my opinion!) and also game music in general, as far as I know it was one of the earliest examples of in game music within a Spectrum game. Like, actual MUSIC. It probably introduced more 6 year old kids to the "Blue Danube" and "In The Hall Of The Mountain King" than it ever had a right to do. Even if they're super lo-fi (and in the case of Blue Danube, a bit wonky).

The second reason is probably the reason that resonates with most Spectrum owners and that's piracy. It can't be avoided that most people probably played this game having copied it off a mate. For at least the first year of Spectrum ownership, excepting the games that came with the machine, I don't think I was ever aware of the fact that games were sold. In proper boxes, in shops as well. But it introduced so many people to decent games on the Spectrum and I'm sure it encouraged so many others to just understand the machine and get on with writing games for it, that I suspect we owe Manic Miner and more importantly, Matt Smith more thanks for what happened to the UK computer games industry than he's ever truly received.