The screenshot.

Incredibly rich from his exploits in Manic Miner and partying away in Jet Set Willy, the third instalment was to see our intrepid hero up against the bane of the nouvelle riche, the tax office!... The actual name for the game was to be Megatree, and more on this is explained further down.

Matthew Smith was rumoured to have great programming deadlines set by Software Projects, and eventually moved to Holland to get out the way of things. Jet Set Willy 2 did emerge, done by different programmers after the antics of Matthew. JSW 3 made an apperance, but was a mere rehash of number 2, and was not an official release. None were the holy grail 'Megatree', which was to be the official finale to the famous Miner Willy series.

Matthew was a big fan of the early Nintendo coin-ops (Donkey Kong, Mario Bros.) and the design for Megatree was rumoured to be heavily influenced by them. Originally it was rumoured that even the main sprite was changed to look more like Mario.

The big shock (breaking tradition with the other Miner Willy games) was that the game would be coded first on the 'C64' and ported to the spectrum later, so to try and attract the American market first hand.

The game centred around the 'Megatree' as featured in JSW. Each level was entered from a 'branch' of the tree. After a level was completed you could climb up a bit further to get to the next level and so on (A similar system to that used on the later Mario bros games on the nes and snes, which Stuart Fotheringham pointed out to GTW).

Besides the single screen manic miner type levels, there were also to be horizontally scrolling landscapes. You were to also be able to move in and out of the screen aswell as left and right. You had to collect a certain amount of coins from each level, presumably to pay the taxman at the end. But after recent conversation with Matthew Smith, it seems the "coin collecting" and "Taxman" references were mixed up with his other title "Miner Willy and The Taxman"... a completely separate game.

Matthew was rumoured to be pretty heavily into partying and the progress was very slow. Originally the team working on the game were shoved into a house together for 3 months. Software Projects were rumoured to have brought in a couple more people to try and push the project along, but the 'team' wasn't working out and the project was cancelled after 3 months. Basically it was found out that there was so much discussion on making the game a big hit, that there was little completed in the time given. Software Projects basically wanted a quick knocked up sequel... where as the team wanted to make something a little bit special.

It was originally believed that 40% of the final game was completed before being scrapped, but this has found not to be the case, sadly. After initial contact from Stuart several years ago, Stuart stunned the Retro Community by selling all his development disks on Ebay. The winning bidder?... None other than Retro Gamer magazine.

Issue 5 became the famous issue where the mystery of Megatree was finally laid to rest. At last, we would find out the mystery of the remains of such a sort after GTW title. Alas, findings proved not as fruitful as hoped for, but there was enough scraps to show to the world for the first time, including some rare sprites drawn by Matthew Smith (Including a new Miner Willy character) and a backdrop by Stuart Fotheringham.

Stuart also provided sketches of how the game was to be, and so we could build a picture in our minds of what these guys were planning... and a corking game it could well have been.

Retro Gamer officially released all the disk images on their Issue 7 covermount. Possibly a little runnable demo of somekind allowing you to move the Miner Willy sprite will be produced especially for GTW. Good news is that a Retro Remake programmer has said they are examining the original plans to create the game on PC as it may well have been had it been finished on the C64. Exciting indeed.

Thanks to Retro Gamer, GTW64 now hosts the original screenshots and bits which were salvaged from the disks. So now you are able to see what remains. This includes a specially made picture show to run on your C64 of the game's background, a slideshow that Retro Gamer presented at the CGEUK, all the disk materials and any extras.

GTW also made a small discovery and found on the disks a CHARSET which was being designed for Megatree... this was almost left unoticed as the charset was mixed up on a Sprite disk. But Stuart Fotheringham confirmed that this was infact a unfinished Charset for Megatree when questioned.

Marc (Wilding) Dawson no longer has any code which was created for the game. A playable demo did surface while in development, but these are apparently long gone now. Stuart's disks are now the only known bits of Megatree left... Unless someone else has anything, which could be very unlikely now...

Matthew is now long back from Holland and he made a very famous public visit to the CGCUK in July 2004. GTW hopes to soon hear from Matthew about Megatree, and these will hopefully surface soon here on GTW64. But I tell you one thing, Matthew Smith is a top bloke!...

The famous GTW finally laid to rest.. but is there any code?...

Frank.
(Additional source credits - Ian Osbourne, Deev, Stuart Fotheringham, Matthew Smith, Marc (Wilding) Dawson, Martyn Carroll & Shaun Bebbington of Retro Gamer)