Manic Miner is the world's coolest platform game, pride of the Speccy. It's well worth digging out the dead flesh keyboard for this one (or find it on an emulator near you).

The levels are

1. Central Cavern (6)
2. Cold Room (61) Do the penguins indicate a taste for GNU/Linux?
3. The Menagerie (62)
4. Abandoned Uranium Workings (621)
5. Eugene's Lair (63) Yup, those are toilets alright.
6. Processing Plant (136)
7. The Vat (632)
8. Miner Willy Meets The Kong Beast (6321) Go on give him a dip.
9. Wacky Amoebatrons (64)
10. The Endorian Forest (641)
11. Attack Of The Mutant Telephones (642) The telephones are beautiful.
12. Return Of The Alien Kong Beast (6421)
13. Ore Refinery (643)
14. Skylab Landing Bay (6431)
15. The Bank (6432)
16. The Sixteenth Cavern (12346)
17. The Warehouse (65)
18. Amoebatrons Revenge (651)
19. Solar Power Generator (652) This one is quite tricky.
20. The Final Barrier (1256)

The numbers in parentheses are cheat codes but you don't need those do you? Just in case you do, start up the game as usual and then type in the programmer's old telephone number 6031769. Then the above codes (hold down the keys simultaneously and then release) will allow you to jump to any level.

The eponymous hero, Miner Willy, looked a bit like this:

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Manic Miner was a great leap forward in ZX Spectrum gaming when it was released. OK, so the soundtrack was painful, but that wasn't the point. The point was that it had a soundtrack! It was the first game to play 'music' and let you play the game at the same time.

The game was written by Matthew Smith for Bug-Byte software. "Eugene's Lair" level was named after Eugene Evans, a fellow Bug-Byte employee at the time, who had told Matthew that he didn't think Manic Miner would work.

Manic Miner was also the only ZX Spectrum game that I was ever very good at. I played it every spare minute I had, and eventually got so that I could make a single game last 'for ever'. One Saturday I got up early and played the game for hours, building up a collection of 20 or so marching Miner Willies along the bottom of the screen. I was still going strong at 4pm when I had to do my paper round. I paused the game, leaving strict instructions with my Dad not to let anyone touch it and rushed aronud my paper route in record time.

When I got back to the house, I was eager to get stuck into the game again, but to my utter shock all the stomping Willies had vanished. I was suddenly on my last life. My Dad explained that he had "had a little go" for me, knowing I "wouldn't mind". Well, I did mine. I minded a lot. In my anger I failed to notice that the area of the screen where the spare Willies march had been obscured by a length of sticky tape. Imagine my relief when all the Willies were alive and well under the tape.

Luckily I saw the funny side, and went on to achieve fame and glory in the hallowed pages of Computer & Video Games magazine.

Pretty obsessive, huh?

Level 14, the 'Skylab Landing Bay', is almost certainly the first instance of satire in a computer game. The level consists of some platforms which Miner Willy must traverse; falling from the sky are multi-coloured Skylab space stations, which crash onto the ground and endanger the well-being of our hero.

The satire comes from the disparity between the word 'landing' in the title of the level, and the fact that the Skylabs are clearly crashing, thus suggesting that NASA and the American government are incompetent liars. Despite this inflammatory attitude, there are no recorded protests against the game.

Satire does not feature highly in most computer games - unless you assume that 'Raid Over Moscow' and 'Rush'n'Attack' were secretly ironic.

The 'Skyland Landing Bay', if I recall correctly, was actually one of the easier levels (certainly compared to the 'Solar Power Generator'). You went off to the right, up a bit, off to the left, up a bit more, and then back to the right again. I think.