Miner 2049er - Overview

Overview

Under the name Big Five Software, Bill Hogue programmed commercial computer games in the late 1970s for Radio Shack's TRS-80 Model I home computer. He created several games patterned after actual arcade games, such as Super Nova (Asteroids), Attack Force (Targ), Cosmic Fighter (Astro Fighter), Galaxy Invasion (Galaxian), Meteor Mission II (Lunar Rescue), Robot Attack (Berzerk), and Defense Command (Missile Command). Robot Attack was the first commercial game for the TRS-80 to feature digitized voice.

Hogue was originally going to write Miner 2049er for the TRS-80 Model I, but Radio Shack discontinued it in mid-1982, so he instead decided to develop the game on the Atari 800. Due to a production delay, it was first released on the Apple II. A string of ports followed for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, VIC-20, Atari 5200, Atari 2600, TI/99-4A, and Colecovision. The Atari 2600 version was too big to fit in a 4k cartridge ROM, so two separate cartridges were released, each containing half the game's 16 levels.

After a false start in 1984 with the release of the sequel Scraper Caper, Hogue finally released in 1985 the official sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back. However, it never achieved the same level of success as its predecessor.

Miner 2049er made a comeback in the mobile gaming market with a re-release in 2007 by Magmic Inc. This version contains two forms of the game. One is a faithful recreation of Hogue's Atari 800 original; the second a modernized version with new graphics and ten new levels. The remake received an IGN Editor's Choice Award and won the Best Revival category in the Best Of 2007 IGN awards. In 2011, Magmic added support for iOS devices.