Manic Miner For Collectors (Part 3) – Second Edition

Part 1 of the Manic Miner For Collectors series was about the First Edition, First Release on Bug Byte – the so-called “Whistler” version. Part 2 was on the First Edition, Second Release that was also from Bug Byte.

The Introduction (Part 0) here includes an important Footnote about how these articles hope to lead to a definitive statement of all the variants of the Spectrum releases of Manic Miner, and the spirit in which Adrian Grubb originally wrote the Facebook versions of the articles, and the spirit of the Spectrum community which will be maintained here.

When Matthew Smith and others left Bug Byte (see the interview in Popular Computing Weekly April 1984), another version of Manic Miner was released on the Software Projects label.

This article is about that release and its variants.

This release is named as the Second Edition by Adrian Grubb, seen by many as the authority on Manic Miner versions and passionate collector of all things Manic Miner.

Like Part 1 and Part 2 in this series, this article does not look at the game itself, just the versions. For information on the differences to the game/program itself, please see here.

The Second Edition is also the Third Release a.k.a. the ‘(Mutant) Telephone’ cover.

1. Cassette Variant 1. The top cassette has no sleeve and a label to both sides.
2. Cassette Variant 2. The middle has one label and no ‘software evaluation’ offer in sleeve.
3. Cassette Variant 3. The bottom has one label and comes with or without ‘software evaluation’ offer in sleeve.

This series has dealt only with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum releases of Manic Miner. The game was released on many other platforms, including the MSX (er… pun intended for this platform game!).

I have had a request to do a series for the Horace games. Look out for that soon! 🙂