Miner Willy, remastered
This isn't real box art. Nobody at Software Projects is re-releasing Manic Miner in 2026, and this page isn't pretending otherwise — it's a design exercise, built the same way a studio might pitch a remaster's key art: pick a treatment, ground every choice in the actual subject, and see what a modern minimalist cover for a 1983 platformer would look like if you took the Spectrum's own materials seriously instead of reaching for generic retro pastiche.
The palette isn't a retro reference, it's the brand
Every colour on this cover is a real Spectrum attribute value — the same fifteen-colour, eight-plus-BRIGHT system this site's own CSS is built from. Rather than treat that as a nostalgia cue to sprinkle in, the cover uses it as an actual modern colour system: true black as the ground, one committed accent (Spectrum bright yellow) carrying the entire character and wordmark, and the rest of the palette held back for a single purpose — a thin stripe along the bottom edge, standing in for the rainbow border every Spectrum owner watched during a tape load. It's the one deliberately retro gesture on the page, precisely because it's earned: that stripe is the actual data the machine used to show you, once, that something was happening.
Drawing Willy with almost nothing
The silhouette is built from a handful of flat geometric shapes — a circle, a dome, a couple of trapezoids, two legs separated by a single notch — with no internal linework at all. That's a deliberate bet: that a bowler hat and a raised pickaxe are already enough information for anyone who's played the game, the same way a mountain outline is enough to say Celeste without a single pixel of the actual character sprite. Getting there took a couple of visible false starts — an early pass gave Willy a hat wide enough to read as a sombrero, with the pickaxe head clipping straight through the brim. Rendered, looked at, and fixed, the same way any other visual claim on this site gets checked before it's called done.
If you want the real thing rather than a 2026 daydream about it, the site's own Manic Miner review is the place to go.