There was a demo released, without permission, on Fred - of a forthcoming mega-mix release of Manic Miner - The Lower Caverns.
A bit of background to this for you….
After the demise of SAMCo, the programmer of SAM Manic Miner never recieved a single penny from this game. Now - don’t forget that this is perhaps the third biggest selling game on SAM (after Prince Of Persia and Lemmings) … and with apparently the “official” source of “Revelation” software finding a pre-duplicated source of disks from the original Revelation.
(Of course, as these disks used professional quality printed labels, where SAMCo used a trusty dot-matrix to print all disks from Newsdisks to Sound Machines… this is rather unlikely…)
Anyway, as Matthew Holt never recieved a penny.. a plan was devised to try and get a better idea of the numbers of copies sold. Quite a simple one… an updated version of the game, which was going to cost next-to-nothing (probably only 1-2 pounds…) which would be available to any customer who returned the ORIGINAL disk to Phoenix Software Systems (who had been granted the rights by Matthew Holt …
The customer would get more levels to play with, for a low price, and the author would have more of an idea on what he was owed in royalties from naughty sales of his software….
Wrong
There was a demo released, without permission, on Fred - of a forthcoming mega-mix release of Manic Miner - The Lower Caverns.
A bit of background to this for you….
After the demise of SAMCo, the programmer of SAM Manic Miner never recieved a single penny from this game. Now - don’t forget that this is perhaps the third biggest selling game on SAM (after Prince Of Persia and Lemmings) … and with apparently the “official” source of “Revelation” software finding a pre-duplicated source of disks from the original Revelation.
(Of course, as these disks used professional quality printed labels, where SAMCo used a trusty dot-matrix to print all disks from Newsdisks to Sound Machines… this is rather unlikely…)
Anyway, as Matthew Holt never recieved a penny.. a plan was devised to try and get a better idea of the numbers of copies sold. Quite a simple one… an updated version of the game, which was going to cost next-to-nothing (probably only 1-2 pounds…) which would be available to any customer who returned the ORIGINAL disk to Phoenix Software Systems (who had been granted the rights by Matthew Holt …
The customer would get more levels to play with, for a low price, and the author would have more of an idea on what he was owed in royalties from naughty sales of his software….