I am tired of even having to think about genAI on a daily basis. Right now, just 24 hours not having to contemplate it in any capacity seems positively dreamy.
I also don’t really want to get into that funk this sort of thing can get you into where I end up all “look at this, what is this absolute shite?” either because the sheer volume of shite seems more than any one human can possibly take right now, it could all too easily become an all consuming thing. And no thank you.
Yet.
I can’t pretend a piece of my heart didn’t break yesterday though when browsing Steam’s upcoming games and the same people who have made a disaster of my beloved Rockford have turned to the Spectrum classic, Manic Miner, and slathered it all over with GenAI graphics. Looking at the screenshots legitimately makes me queasy (there is something about GenAI colour choices that does weird things to my brain) so I will not be posting them here, or the video, or linking to the Steam page. It is out there though and it is horrible.
For some reason Miner Willy is an animal now and also a ten year old boy, the AI obviously cannot wrestle with a bunch of references to things that made some sort of vague sense in the UK in 1983 so everything else is less quirky and amusing and just “there’s some stuff on the screen”. It is charmless and wholly depressing to look at. I hate it. It has no soul. It is akin to someone wiping their arse on the Mona Lisa and expecting people to go “yeah, that’s great, have a tenner”
So. So far so “business as usual with GenAI” then.
Look, I know wrestling with updating old games is work, I’ve done it. A bunch of the favourite people in my life do it and have done it for years and I know how daunting doing even some of the most basic sprite work can be, which is why I’ll still try and take the load off folks every now and then if life permits me time. But still.
Manic Miner is a game that runs within, and is designed around, a 256×192 pixel screen. It is from 1983. There are twenty screens. A good percentage of the screen is taken up by the border and score/lives/room display. It contains around thirty sprites, 16 pixels by 16 pixels a piece. Four frames of animation for each. There are 15 colors and half of them are bright variations of another colour. So seven and a bit really. And it still looks bloody good in 2026! There are Spectrum games from the same year that have aged “interestingly”, Manic Miner is not one of them.
Even if it didn’t look good though, the workload involved in recreating it, rejigging it, is still very little by most commercial game standards. It’s a simple game!
You could pay a professional pixel artist to redo the entire thing and still have some change for lunch. You could do it yourself, part time, over a matter of weeks. You could do what so many others have done and ask Andy Noble nicely to use their sprite set, give the guy some love, he’s amazing! Or you could just 4x the original sprites because they look fucking fine over thirty years since they were first drawn.
There is absolutely no good reason to help burn the Earth down further to make a new Manic Miner. The costs of getting a human to do the work necessary to make this look shit-hot are within my grasp (albeit with some saving up) and I’m on the dole.
Certainly if *I* were releasing a commercial version, I would be looking at putting the effort in to getting the best fucking Manic Miner you have ever seen using the power of humans, not the water huffing, heat generating, ecosystem destroying machine your weird uncle gets their racist Facebook memes and bizarre looking takeaway menu photos from.
Partly because I wouldn’t want it to look like complete shit, but even if it did end up looking like complete shit, I’d know some humans put some effort into trying to make it cool even if it fell apart somewhere down the line.
Asking money for a game someone couldn’t even be arsed making with humans is just fucking grim, really. Down with that sort of thing. Have some fucking dignity, you know?