Minigun Miner

It's Time to Hunt for Treasures!

Armed with a minigun, fire at will to begin digging holes! Your goal? To unearth coins, diamonds, rubies and other treasures! But beware, there are also very dangerous beasts living underground, and death comes quickly to reckless miners.

Your excavator is a powerful minigun, but you'll find it is quite fragile and explosive when colliding with walls or the bottom of your mine. Your left and right thrusters will work fine when avoiding the walls, but, sadly, your minigun is lacking a vertical thruster. To keep from colliding with the bottom of your mine, you'll have to take advantage of the gun's recoil when you shoot. Each downward shot forces your mighty minigun upwards, allowing you those precious moments of free fall to expand your mine.

Great riches await the skilled Minigun Miner. Are you up to the task?

Gameplay

Holding Fire causes you to shoot to dig holes and will push you in the opposite direction of your shots. Move the joystick while holding down the Fire button to aim in any direction.

Move the joystick Left and Right while the Fire button is released to move left and right.

There are items to collect (earning you points), and enemies to avoid (to not lose a life). Some enemies can be shot before they touch you, while others are invincible and must be avoided.

You start the game with three lives, displayed as "small squares" in the bottom left corner of the screen, next to the score. In Arcade and Contest modes, you can earn extra lives when your score reaches 100, 300, 600 and 1,000 points.

Game Features

• 3 Game Modes: Arcade, Challenge, and Contest.
• AtariVox/SaveKey support for saving scores in Arcade and Contest modes, and levels completed in Challenge mode.
• Pause game with Game Select switch.
• Select between NTSC, PAL and SECAM modes (a single ROM for all TV types).

Game Modes:

• Arcade: aim for the high score in an infinite and randomly generated level.
• Challenge: clear a set of 16 finite levels of increasing difficulty. You score will start at a high number, and will decrease each time you earn points. Reach a score of 0 to complete the current level.
• Contest: aim for the high score in a single, infinite and non-random level. This is the perfect mode to challenge your friends!

An actual Atari 2600 game

This game is an actual new game for the Atari 2600 console. You can get the ROM version from this page, but it's also available as a gorgeous physical cartridge with box and manual from publisher AtariAge.

Looking for challenge?

My best score in the contest mode is 186 points, can you beat it?

About

This game started as a Jam entry for the Retro Platform Jam #6, back in 2023. I've then spent 2 years to extend, enhance and improve this prototype to create the current "full version" that you can buy from here in digital format (ROM), or in physical edition  from AtariAge.

A free demo version of the game is also available below. It comes with the full Arcade and Contest modes, but only 4 of the 16 levels available in Challenge mode. Your progress / highscores saved through AtariVox / Savekey will be kept from the demo version if you decide to buy the full version afterwards, as they use the same save slot on the device.

I hope you'll enjoy this game, and don't hesitate to ask me if you have any question.

Enjoy!