Manic Miner creator Matthew Smith gets officially endorsed Spectrum box set

An officially endorsed box set of ZX Spectrum games by Manic Miner creator Matthew Smith has launched on Kickstarter and nearly doubled its funding target on its first day.

The Matthew Smith Collection is being made by Pixel Jockey with Smith's permission, according to Video Games Chronicle. Pixel Jockey specialises in products for the ZX Spectrum, the British home computer from the early 1980s that loaded games from cassette tapes, including re-releases of original game cassettes.

The set will cost £39 plus shipping. It contains three newly manufactured cassettes holding Styx, Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, housed in an illustrated box.

All three games date from Smith's early run as a teenage programmer. He wrote Styx in 1983 at the age of 17. It was published by Bug-Byte Software, which then signed him to a three-game deal.

Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy followed and became two of the Spectrum's best-known platform games, the run-and-jump adventures where players guide miner Willy through caverns and then a sprawling mansion. The collection does not include two later Smith projects that were never finished, The Mega Tree, also known as Willy Meets The Taxman, and Attack of the Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars.

For collectors, the extras may be the draw. Backers can add the first-ever cassette release of Andre's Night Off, a game Smith once submitted to CVG magazine as a type-in listing, printed code that readers typed into their own Spectrums by hand. Other add-ons include the 200-page book Matthew Smith: Mining for Success, a badge set and a limited-edition signed artwork set.

The box features entirely new commissioned artwork by Trevor Storey, whose illustrations regularly appeared on the covers of ZZAP! and Crash, two British games magazines from the 1980s.

Smith left the spotlight after his early hits and returned to the games industry in 1999 at the UK studio Runecraft, which has since closed.