This is a pre-production cart. These are normally used for evaluation or marketing purposes before the production carts are available.
This one was discovered at a yard sale in Idaho in 2011 by Atariboy from the Digital Press forums along with a NBA 2 All Star Challenge proto.
It is unknown whether it has been dumped and whether it is complete or not but the date on the label is four months before the release of the game, so there may be differences from the final version.
In the early 80’s, piracy on Atari home computers (and most other brands) was rampant. It was popular for pirates to add as many cracked (or dumped if it was a cart like Miner 2049er) and “trained” games on a disk as would fit along with a tiny, crude menu to launch them. Training a game meant adding cheats, usually activated by a simple menu shown upon launching the game. Miner 2049er got the same treatment as every other game. No exception!
Pictured here is a pirate disk full of games, the menu to launch them and the cheat screen. Last level!
Even rarer than the Japanese SCV release by Epoch, the French release from Yeno is incredibly hard to find. While the packaging is different, the game is identical to the Japanese release.
We are missing the manual for this! If you have it and wish to donate it to the Miner 2049er Museum, please reply to this post! We’ll even accept just a picture if you don’t wish to part with yours.
The rarer Canadian release of Miner 2049er for Colecovision featured a plain black and white label with both French and English text. The game is otherwise identical.
We are missing the packaging for this! If you have it and wish to donate it to the Miner 2049er Museum, please reply to this post! We’ll even accept just a picture if you don’t wish to part with yours.