Miner 2049er – Atari Computers – Bootleg

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!

Miner 2049er – Atari 8bit home computer – Big Five

 

This and the Atari 5200 version are the ones that started it all. These are the original versions that all the others are a port of.

There were a few cart/label variations — a picture label (with blue or black case) and a silver/blue text label with blue case. The silver labels tend to wear badly from handling, so it’s difficult to find one in good condition. Thanks to Paul (07pwb) for supplying a picture of a light blue label reproduction. It’s not surprising to see a repro label like this considering the tendency of the original to fade badly.