Our podcast is not to be taken seriously. It’s an excuse for three cousins to talk to each other every week and have a laugh doing so. We hope people listen in and have a chuckle too, but mostly we’re doing it for ourselves. We haven’t reached double digits with the episodes yet and we’ve already tackled two of the ZX Spectrum’s classics – Horace Goes Skiing and Manic Miner and after thirty-odd years of not thinking about either very often, I’m now thinking about both of them. All the time.
Objectively, there isn’t much to either of them. They aren’t games that I’m going to play again often. Yet… I’m thinking of Manic Miner and Horace every day since we covered them on the Podcast. Why does Manic Miner make me feel better than The Return of Shinobi? During the Podcast I was struggling for the words to describe how it makes me feel, and I still don’t have those words, but it’s something almost comforting. I don’t consciously pine for my childhood days. I don’t dwell in nostalgia. I’ve always wanted to live in the future when I should focus on the present. I don’t even collect Retro games (sorry!). Yet… I started a Podcast called “Spectrum days” – a reference to a time when our lives were full of colour, lightness, opportunities and, of course, the ZX Spectrum.
Manic Miner is as hard as nails. It’s unforgiving. There’s no room for error. There’s no changing your mind mid jump. It’s frustrating. There’s not even much to it. No character progression, no power-ups. Once you’ve lost all your lives, you need to start from the beginning, meaning you have to keep repeating levels you’ve already mastered just to get back to the new ones you want to conquer.
As soon as I heard that music though, for perhaps the first time in almost forty years, something clicked. I couldn’t suddenly remember what I was wearing or what the weather was the first time I played it. I couldn’t remember if I had loaded the tape, or if, most likely, my dad had. There was, though, a general feeling of familiarity. A feeling of comfort.
How much did I even play it back then? However much I played it, it was enough for it to make an important imprint somewhere in my memory. It doesn’t matter how bad I was, or am now at playing it. It just feels right. Even if I miss-time the same jump with Miner Willy again and again.
During the episode, I called the game Magic Miner instead of Manic Miner various times. It became an in joke between Phil, Jon and I. We laughed at my mistake. We hope you did too. Now I think it was a type of Freudian slip. The more time that passes since I played the game, I am convinced – it is magic.
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