Slick Willy — A Manic Miner Graphic Improvement Project for the ZX Spectrum

Following the stall of an ambitious project to remake Manic Miner with enhanced graphics, titled Slick Willy, developer Bob Fossil has integrated the new assets into a playable mod that can be downloaded right now. While the original, high-performance engine overhaul by ParadigmShifter stalled in 2024, the updated, though slightly animated, sprites now offer a fresh visual experience for the classic ZX Spectrum title. To coincide with this news, you can check out the latest footage of this new graphics improvement below.

Here's the latest from the website linked below "Two years ago I started working on the Spectrum Computing forum lively and productive discussion on the topic «Why not make a modern version Manic Miner, by redrawing the sprites properly?» Started it Gabriel Amore- who we know from a lot of cute Spectrum games: he tried throwing a miner Willie sprite in the AGD editor and shared a piece of work with forum members. Whether for a long time or for a short time, a kind of initiative group was formed under the leadership of someone ParadigmShifter, who decided not to chat, but to get down to business. Namely — remake Manic Miner from scratch, leaving the levels and gameplay intact, but redrawing the graphics, improving the animation, achieving 50 fps and so on and so forth."

"ParadigmShifter even posted this project on GitHub and... I scored on him almost immediately. There were no more updates, but to the questions «What happened?» the comrade stopped answering, although he calmly appeared on other branches of the forum. Most likely, the person simply ran out of free time, but why he did not inform his colleagues about this after so much work had been done — is not very clear. At the beginning of 2025, another spectrumist, Bob Fossil, decided to put the redesigned graphics into action: he took the original game (more precisely, its mod with AY music during gameplay) and simply replaced a fair portion of the sprites with new ones. True, for the main character it was necessary to cut the animation — in the new version it is animated in 8 frames, and the game supports only 4. The main character began to move a little twitchy, but you can get used to it. So now you can even play Slick Willy — however, this is not the project that was originally conceived, but rather the Manic Miner mod."

• Code and font: Paradigm Shifter
• Updated Build : Bob Fossil?
• Graphics, animation, original concept: Gabriel Amore
• Additional animations: Li Bi
• Picture for the final level: Dmitry Smolyannikov (Grongy)

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