Mined-Out

Mined-Out is a maze video game requiring the player to complete a series of nine levels to rescue Bill the Worm, a famous movie star being held captive in the game's final area. Each maze is a grid-shaped minefield that must be carefully traversed from the bottom to the top of the screen by moving up, down, left, or right. A detector displays the number of invisible mines in spaces possibly above, below, or beside (but not diagonal to) the player's current position. This requires one to deduce the correct path as stepping on a mine results in instant death.

The player also has a "speed score" whereby more points are awarded the faster a stage is completed. An instant replay of the player's attempt is shown after dying or completing a stage.

Mined-Out was written and programmed by Ian Andrew. He ran a postage stamp and postcard business in Reading and was among the first individuals to purchase a Sinclair ZX81 after seeing it advertised in the Daily Mail. He taught himself to program in BASIC with the machine and then bought a ZX Spectrum when it launched in 1982, leisurely creating games for his own amusement. Mined-Out would be his first commercial product.

It took Andrew three months to program and six months to complete all work on Mined-Out. He stated that the game's concept was a result of the Spectrum's colour limitations, as each "character square" (consisting of eight by eight pixels) could have only two colours, making the system ideal for games using grids. Simply moving through such squares did not qualify as a game to Andrew, so he made some of them invisible and gave the player clues to avoid them, leading to its mine detection gameplay. Mined-Out was originally designed as a single level that became faster the longer it was played.

Mined-Out was well received by British computer publications upon its release. Critics largely agreed that the mine-detection gameplay offered a simple yet novel addition to the maze genre. Mike Gerrard of Personal Computer News, Chris Adam-Smith of ZX Computing, and reviewers for Games Computing and Home Computing Weekly all positively noted this feature as addictive in its various releases. Assessing the ZX Spectrum version, Gerrard summarized, "Can you praise any game higher than by saying it's one of those where you decide you'll have just one more go, then find yourself still playing half an hour later?"

Acorn User reviewer Vincent Fojut called the BBC Micro version "a refreshing change from the usual 'blast 'em out of the sky' derivatives." Crash recommended the game in its 1984 catalog of Spectrum reviews by stating "it hasn't dated a bit" and it that it was "still worth the money if you haven't tried it." Stuart Campbell of Your Sinclair listed the game as the 97th best Spectrum game of all time in 1991, citing its core logic gameplay as "one of the greatest mind-teasers ever devised." Vic Fielder of Popular Computing Weekly oppositely found the game to lack replay value.

Mined-Out was an early Minesweeper-style game and preceded the popular 1990 Windows inclusion Microsoft Minesweeper by several years. The two share important similarities such as a grid layout and a display showing the number of adjacent mines. Eurogamer writer Dan Griliopoulos labeled Mined-Out as an inspiration for Minesweeper and even received commentary from Mined-Out creator Ian Andrew in 2014 that he believes Microsoft copied his game. In an interview that same year with Graeme Mason of Retro Gamer, Andrew humorously admitted he would have liked a credit from Microsoft. Griliopoulos was told by Microsoft programmer Curt Johnson that an unnamed Macintosh clone of Mined-Out was instead used as the base for Microsoft Minesweeper.

Will Freeman of PCGamesN and Cracked.com contributors Adam Wears and Jim Avery pointed to Cube, submitted to Creative Computing in 1973 by Jerimac Ratliff, as the original forebear of the genre. Freeman also saw Minefield from a 1982 issue of Sinclair User as another earlier example, but credited Mined-Out for refining the notion of displaying mine proximities. Wears and Avery remarked that despite having less features, Microsoft's game earned fame and ubiquity thanks to being on the popular Windows operating system. Mason also talked with Damien Moore, creator of the Authoritative Minesweeper website and world rankings, who drew a direct link between Relentless Logic and Microsoft's game but felt that Mined-Out was an influence.