Stuart Fotheringham speaks to GTW about work on Megatree...

"My only unreleased C64 game -- and I mainly did C64 games -- was "MegaTree (Manic Miner III)" that was the sequel to Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner being developed by Matthew Smith, Marc Dawson and me. It was a C64 title rather than a Spectrum game because we were going for the US market with the franchise.

The project was cancelled after four months of development. The MegaTree stuff is almost entirely accurate. Miner Willy Meets The Taxman was the name we gave to the press to put them off the scent of the real project. Matthew, Marc and I put a great deal of work into the game design documents -- I still have copies of most of them, including logos and stuff. One day I'll put it all on a web-page."

And later on after the game was partially uncovered...

"The second photo is not of Marc Dawson, its Matthew again. Note the checked shirts that he was so fond of, and I can tell that it’s him. ? Marc looked totally different, and still does!

The walking bird is Marc Dawson’s pet buggie called “Wonga”.

The graphics after the tree trunk fill the green squares in the “Menu selection... koala picture.” The first
ones are the house, the remainder at bushes.

You’ll also notice the graphics inbetween the numbers and tree trunk, those are holes in the floor (in hi-res mode) that was sprinked about too; these were brown in colour like the large hole in the middle.

I have often seen this “menu selection” screen and it’s not that, it’s the first game-play screen. And the
final version does not have the black grids – they are just for layout – and the background colour should be light green.

There were eight exits from this screen, the black ones behind the trees (and the house) then up the
Mega-tree in the middle or down the hole in the centre. This was the demo screen (with my colours as listed above) that had the various types of tree running around and the white “willy” sprite running around.

No. The blue sky is blue. The bit I am referring to is the bottom 2/3 of the screen that is currently light
blue with black grid lines – this should just be solid green (as per the green blocks underneath the pictures of the trees).

How this screen worked was…

Willy could run around up-right-down-left via joystick control.
When over entrances you could press fire button (jump) to select
There were trees running around “Big Tree” left and right.
Willy could run behind the Mega-tree trunk
Willy could run up the front of the Mega-tree trunk
If Willy hit a “Big Tree” he died, if he fell down a hole (except the big one in the middle) he died.

The font was for the bottom line of the screen in hi-res text: this was where score/lives was going to appear. There was a raster split between bitmap (top section) and character map (bottom section)

If you need to know anything else, or need more details to get a demo of this screen working then just let me know.

I’ll see if I can dig some more Mega-tree development photos out for you."

Stuart Fotheringham.