Jet Set Willy
Miner Willy cleans his mansion after a wild party.
Jet Set Willy, a platform game for the ZX Spectrum, was created by Matthew Smith and released by Software Projects in March 1984. As the follow-up to Manic Miner, it became the UK's top-selling home video game of 1984, holding the charts for over three months.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Software Projects
- Publisher
- Software Projects; Tynesoft (Atari)
- Designer
- Matthew Smith
- Composer
- Rob Hubbard (Atari)
- Series
- Miner Willy
- Released
- 9 March 1984: ZX Spectrum
- 1984: Commodore 64
- 1986: Atari 8-bit
- 2012: Xbox 360
- Genre
- Platform
- Modes
- Single-player
Facts from the source article.
Gameplay
Jet Set Willy is a flip-screen platform game where the player guides the character Willy through his mansion, picking up items along the way. Unlike its predecessor, which moved screen by screen, this game lets players roam the mansion freely. Willy’s controls are simple: left, right, and jump. He can ascend stairs by walking into them, or jump through them to skip them, and climb swinging ropes by pressing left or right depending on the rope’s motion. The game world includes 60 playable screens covering the mansion and its grounds, filled with hazards like static killer objects, guardians that move along set paths, arrows, platforms, and glowing collectible items that stand out from other objects. Willy loses a life if he touches Maria, a hazard, an arrow, a guardian, or falls too far. When he dies, he returns to the room’s entry point, which can create a loop where he repeatedly falls from a height or hits a guardian, losing all lives in a row. One oddly named room is We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg; on the Amstrad version, it’s misspelled as We Must a Quirkafleeg. Before release, this screen was called The Gaping Pit. The name comes from the comic strip Fat Freddy’s Cat, a spin-off of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, where the quirkafleeg was a strange ritual from a foreign land, performed when seeing dead furry animals. For the Spectrum version, the menu music is Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and the in-game music is Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King. Early copies used If I Were a Rich Man for in-game music, but it wasn’t licensed, and the song’s publishers wanted 36,000 pounds for its use. The C64 version features Moonlight Sonata on the title screen and J.S. Bach’s Inventions #1 during gameplay, with some rooms playing Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca. Rob Hubbard composed the music for the Atari 8-bit computer version.
Reception
Sue Denham, writing in Your Spectrum during June 1984, called Jet Set Willy just as good and refreshing as its predecessor. The ZX Spectrum version later placed 32nd on Your Sinclair’s official all-time top 100 list and 33rd in the magazine’s readers’ poll, both published in its final issue. Retro Gamer readers ranked it the 6th best game ever in 2004, a vote originally tied to a special Your Sinclair bundle.
Ports
A version for the Commodore 64 was released by Software Projects and ported by Shahid Kamal Ahmad. The original releases for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64 also contained bugs making the game impossible to complete; in the Commodore 64 version, it was impossible to reach all items in the Wine Cellar. There are two versions for the MSX: the Software Projects version sold in the UK dated 1984 programmed by Cameron Else, and another published by Hudson Soft in 1985 as a Bee Card in Japan. A port for the Atari 8-bit computers was released by Tynesoft in 1986, receiving generally poor reviews for inferior graphics and animation, though Rob Hubbard's theme music was considered a highlight. Like the Spectrum version, it was impossible to complete, as some legitimate items caused the player to lose a life. A port by Tim Titchmarsh to the Camputers Lynx was released by Phoenixx Software in 1985. Ports for the Amiga and Atari ST were cancelled before release but have since been made available on the internet.
Legacy
Jet Set Willy: The Final Frontier was an Amstrad CPC expansion that later made its way back to the ZX Spectrum under the name Jet Set Willy II. Both the original and the sequel appeared on the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, MSX, Commodore 16, and Commodore 64. A separate expanded edition for the Dragon 32/64 added new rooms but contained a fatal flaw: The Drive could not be crossed from right to left, a necessary move to reach the bed after collecting everything. A built-in cheat, activated by pressing M, A, and X at the same time, let players bypass this by placing Willy anywhere on any screen with the arrow keys and spacebar. This Dragon version later got a port to the Acorn Archimedes, where improved collision detection fixed the right-to-left issue. On the original Spectrum, room data was stored without compression, which made customising the game fairly simple. A review in Your Spectrum issue 4 included a hacker’s guide whose author had already figured out some of the data structures, enough to remove walls in the Master Bedroom. Issue 13 provided a program to insert a new room called April Showers, and issue 15 fully documented the data formats. Several commercial and type-in editing tools followed, letting players design their own rooms and sprites.
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