Forty Niner

In 1849, the Great American Gold Rush started. Almost everyone who could, sold up everything and dashed to the west coast to look for this precious metal - including you!

You must excavate this precious metal - but can you survive the giant rats and that vicious Gremlin which come to infest your mine? Can you trick the snakes into leaving their comfortable nests and destroy the rats for you? Can you keep the Gremlin at bay?

Riches await you - but so do the hazards!

Runs on a standard 16K ZX81 with Spectrum quality screen resolution.

The Game

You must dig for the nuggets but watch out for the giant rats. They burrow through the earth to get into your tunnel. You can delay them for a while by knocking down a support, which causes a small cave-in to block their way, but you can only destroy them by releasing a snake from its nest. A released snake heads for the surface, destroying everything in its way.

All the time, the Gremlin is busy digging its way through your waste earth pile to reach the entrance to your mine. Once it does, you have no escape, so you must stop it getting there by returning to the surface to replenish the main mount with the smaller pile of earth which appears on the surface as you dig.

The deeper you dig, the more points you score - but the further you have to go to replenish that mound! Once all nuggets have been collected, a cave opens, allowing you to pass through to the next stage - if you can reach it! This gives you more rats but less snakes to destroy them with!!