Jet Set Willy

Jet Set Willy
Developer(s)	Software Projects
Publisher(s)	Software Projects
Designer(s)	Matthew Smith
Series	Miner Willy Series
Platform(s)	ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Commodore 64, Commodore 16, Atari 8-bit family, MSX
Release date(s)	1984
Genre(s)	Platform game
Mode(s)	Single player
Media	Cassette, Floppy disk
Input methods	Keyboard or joystick

Jet Set Willy is a computer game originally written for the ZX Spectrum home computer. Its release in 1984 was concurrent with the height of the Spectrum's popularity in the early 1980s. It was ported to most home computers of the time.

It was written by Matthew Smith, hailed at the time as a games-writing genius. Smith later moved to the Netherlands and, since his whereabouts were widely unknown, he was largely thought to have "vanished" until he returned to the UK in the late 1990s. He has since appeared on a TV programme (Thumb Candy) to discuss his early games and has attended several retrogaming conventions.

The game is a sequel to Manic Miner (1983), and is the second game in the immensely popular Miner Willy Series. It was a significant development in the platform game genre on the home micro. It was published by Software Projects.

Plot

A very tired Miner Willy has to tidy up all the items left around his house after a huge party. With this done his housekeeper Maria will allow him access to his bedroom. Willy's mansion house was bought with the wealth obtained from his adventures in Manic Miner but much of it remains unexplored and it appears to be full of strange creatures, possibly a result of the previous (missing) owner's experiments. Willy must explore the enormous mansion and its grounds (including a beach and a yacht) to fully tidy-up the house so he can get some much-needed sleep.

Gameplay

Miner Willy in the Cold Store

Jet Set Willy has a similar game engine to Manic Miner and is extremely simple to play, having only three controls: left, right and jump. Willy can climb stairs by walking into them (jumping through them to avoid them) and climb swinging ropes by pushing left or right depending on what direction the rope is swinging in. The play area itself consists of 60 flick-screen rooms (an impressively large number at the time of the game's release) containing patrolling monsters (everything from killer jellies to rolling giant eggs to enormous flies), various platforms and collectable objects. The monsters and other hazards in the game do not react to Willy's movements, instead moving along predetermined set paths. The collectable items glow to distinguish them from other items in the room.

The game has become well-known for its peculiarities: for example, Willy loses a life if he falls too far, but if his fall causes him to enter another screen before dying then the game will send Willy back to where he entered the screen. On losing a life, Willy therefore begins another fall, dies, is sent back again and will die repeatedly with no possible escape until his lives run out. Another peculiarity of the game is that the in-game music changes pitch and goes more out of tune every time Willy loses a life. (Technically: the frequency of each note is shifted rather than scaled.)

The Attic Bug

As originally released, the game could not be completed due to several bugs, the most notorious being known as the Attic Bug. After the player entered the room The Attic, various rooms would undergo corruption on all subsequent game plays, including all monsters disappearing from The Chapel, and other screens triggering instant death. This was caused by an error in the path of an arrow in The Attic, resulting in the sprite travelling past the end of the Spectrum's video memory and overwriting crucial game data instead.

Initially Software Projects attempted to pass this off as an intentional feature to make the game more difficult, claiming that the rooms in question were filled with poison gas. However, they later rescinded this claim and issued a set of POKEs (low-level memory-writing hacks) to correct the flaws^[1].

We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg

One of the more bizarrely-named rooms in the game is We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg.^[2] (The pre-release name for the screen was "The Gaping Pit".)^[3] This is a reference to the comic strip Fat Freddy's Cat, a spin-off from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; in the original comic, the quirkafleeg was an obscure ritual in a foreign country, required to be performed upon the sight of dead furry animals.

Protecting against piracy

The anti-piracy code sheet that was included with the game.

Like most ZX Spectrum games, Jet Set Willy was stored on a cassette tape. Simply making an audio copy of the cassette allowed people to easily copy Spectrum games. Jet Set Willy was one of the first to come with a form of copy protection: a card with 180 coloured codes on it was bundled with the cassette. Upon loading, one of the codes from the card had to be entered before the game would start. Although the cassette could be duplicated, a copy of the card was also needed and at the time, home colour reproduction was hard to do. Thus copying Jet Set Willy was trickier than most Spectrum games. However, means of circumventing the card were quickly found.

Reflecting a different attitude to software piracy at the time, one method was published in a UK computer magazine.^[4]

Third-party modifications

In its original Spectrum version, Jet Set Willy has a clear separation between the game engine and the data describing the rooms. The rooms themselves are stored in a straightforward format, with no compression. It is therefore relatively easy to create customised versions of the game.

The review of JSW in issue 4 of Your Spectrum included a section entitled 'JSW - A Hacker's Guide'; remarks in this section imply that the author had successfully deduced at least some of the data structures, since he was able to remove sections of wall in the Master Bedroom^[5]. The following year, issue 13 contained a program that added an extra room ("April Showers") to the game^[6], and issue 15 described the data formats in some detail^[7].

Several third-party editing tools were published between 1984 and 1986, allowing players to design their own rooms and sprites. Since then, these and other programs have been used by fans to create many modified versions of JSW, ranging from relatively minor changes in a few rooms to completely new games. In recent years, a Windows-based JSW editor has been created.

Henry's Hoard, released by Alternative Software in 1985, was based on a modified version of the JSW game engine, apparently without the knowledge of Software Projects.^{[citation needed]}

Ports

The following ports to other computer platforms were made:

• Jet Set Willy: The Final Frontier, an expanded version for the Amstrad CPC, was later converted back to the ZX Spectrum and released as Jet Set Willy II.^{[citation needed]}
• Both the original game and Jet Set Willy II were released for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, MSX, Commodore 16 and Commodore 64. The original releases of "Jet Set Willy" for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64 also contained bugs which made it impossible to complete the game - though different bugs to the Spectrum version. In the Commodore 64 version, it was impossible to reach all of the items in the "Wine Cellar"
• A different expanded version of Jet Set Willy was released for the Dragon 32/64, with extra rooms.^[8] This version could not be completed (without cheating) as it was impossible to traverse the screen called "The Drive" in a right-to-left direction, which was necessary to return to bed after collecting all the items. The game could, however, be completed using a built-in cheat, accessed by holding down the keys M, A and X simultaneously, allowing you to start Miner Willy from any position on any screen, using the arrow keys and spacebar.
• The Dragon port was itself converted to run on the Acorn Archimedes computers. The port became colour - the Dragon version being black & white - but apart from extra colour no advantage was taken of the Archimedes' superior hardware compared to that of the Dragon, although in that sense it remained faithful to the original ZX version.^[9]
• A port of Jet Set Willy to the Atari 8-bit family of computers was released by Tynesoft in 1987. It received generally poor reviews,^[10][11] and has since been called "the lousiest version of JSW ever".^[12] However, this version features completely different music (by Rob Hubbard), which is generally held to be one of its stronger points.^[12] Like the Spectrum version, it was impossible to complete but for different reasons. Some of the legitimate items that were needed caused the player to lose a life (e.g. the bottles in the Off Licence). Krzysztof Dudek ported the original ZX Spectrum code to the 8-bit Atari in 2007, creating a much more authentic version of the game than the Tynesoft version, but kept the Rob Hubbard soundtrack.
• Software Projects made ports to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST but canceled them before they were released,^[13] although "Manic Miner"^[14] & "Jet Set Willy II"^[15] were later released on the Commodore Amiga.

See also

• Miner Willy series of games
• Roller Coaster
• Technician Ted
• Top Hat Willy

References

External links

• Jet Set Willy at MobyGames
• Jet Set Willy at World of Spectrum
• XLEAGUE.TV / ScrewAttack's video retrospective
• Jet Set Willy Series at the Open Directory Project