Jet Set Willy

Jet Set Willy is Matthew Smith’s sequel to Manic Miner, published by Software Projects for the 48K ZX Spectrum in spring 1984 at £5.95. Miner Willy has spent his fortune on a mansion, thrown a party, and now wants to go to bed. His housekeeper, Maria, stands in the doorway of the master bedroom and will not let him pass until every glass and bottle left lying around the house has been collected. There are 60 rooms, and they can be explored in any order.

CRASH called it the most eagerly awaited Spectrum program of its day, and within weeks it was at number one in Personal Computer Games’ chart. It also shipped with a bug that wrecked the game for anyone who visited one particular room too early, and the way players, magazines and the publisher dealt with that bug is as much a part of its story as the game itself.

A long wait

Readers had been voting for Jet Set Willy in CRASH’s reader chart before it existed. The magazine’s April 1984 issue ran a colour preview, taken from Smith’s own pre-production copy, and complained that it had been receiving “(illegal!) votes” for the game for two months. It called it “the most eagerly awaited program ever for any computer”.

When the game arrived, CRASH bought its review copies by mail order the day after Software Projects took delivery of the first batch. Its May issue reported the game in the reader chart at 41 after “only a very few days on sale”, still behind Manic Miner at number one. A month later Personal Computer Games had it at number one in its own chart, with Manic Miner still at four.

Sixty rooms, in any order

Manic Miner was twenty caverns played in a fixed sequence. Lose your lives in cavern fifteen and you started again from cavern one. Personal Computer Games named this as the earlier game’s main weakness, and praised the sequel for fixing it: “Jet Set Willy’s brilliance is that you can take the action any which way you like.”

The rooms join left, right, up and down to make a map of a house and its grounds: a bathroom and bedrooms, kitchens and a cold store, a chapel, a wine cellar, an attic, battlements and a watch tower, then a drive, a huge tree, a beach and a yacht. Some rooms connect in ways a player has to discover. CRASH’s map pointed out that jumping off the roof of the Watch Tower brings you out in the Off Licence. The room names are half the fun: The Nightmare Room, Entrance to Hades, Dr Jones will never believe this, I’m sure I’ve seen this before… (which pokes fun at Ocean’s Hunchback) and We must perform a Quirkafleeg.

That last name began as “The Gaping Pit” in the preview copy. Your Spectrum traced it to the underground comic The Adventures of Fat Freddy’s Cat, issue 5.

Each room is a single screen of precision platforming in the Manic Miner style: one touch from a guardian kills Willy. The air supply of the first game is gone. Willy has three controls, left, right and jump, and the reviewers singled out the ropes, which swing realistically and can be climbed. CRASH’s reviewer listed “bobbing rabbits, deadly razor blades, wobbling jellies”, “the flickering candles, the grinning heads, the leaping security guards”, and decided that “the nightmare quality of the events suggests its author should be receiving therapy. Instead, he’s probably getting rich.”

There are 83 objects in all. Your Spectrum counted 79 visible ones, two of which count double, and two that are invisible.

Fitting it in 48K

Your Spectrum looked inside the program. Each room’s data takes only 256 bytes: 128 for its layout, 32 for its name and the rest for its guardians. The top few kilobytes of the program turned out to be code from TRS-DOS, the operating system of the TRS-80 on which Smith wrote the game, carried along into the Spectrum version.

The colour code

The game would not start until you typed in a colour code from a card packed with the cassette. After loading, it showed a grid reference, and the player looked up the matching square on the card and entered its colours. CRASH warned that the card “must be looked after at all costs”. Personal Computer Games explained the thinking, “it’s harder to copy the card than to copy the program”, and foresaw the drawback: “it’s easy to imagine people buying the game, losing the card, and getting very, very annoyed.” See copy protection for how publishers of the period tried to stop tape-to-tape copying.

The Attic

Players soon found that something went wrong after they visited The Attic. From then on, entering The Kitchen, West of Kitchen, East Wall Base or We must perform a Quirkafleeg killed Willy over and over until every life was gone. Guardians in the Chapel and elsewhere moved or vanished.

The first explanation was that this was deliberate. CRASH printed it in June 1984: the effect had been “built into the game to make life more difficult, the object being to close off most of the routes back to bed”. It advised players to leave The Attic until last and to return through the Banyan Tree. The same page conceded that it was “the only mishap with JSW, and one for which Software Projects have already apologised”. Not everyone accepted the official line. Personal Computer Games’ gossip column complained in June that Software Projects were “putting it about that the fault which develops when you enter the attic is quite deliberate and all part of the game”. Your Spectrum later traced it to a faulty byte in the program’s data for its moving sprites.

A second bug made the objects on the Conservatory Roof impossible to reach by the intended route through the Banyan Tree.

There was another way to lose every life at once, and it was not a bug. When Willy dies, the next life starts him exactly as he entered the room. If he entered by falling, he falls again, and again. CRASH had little sympathy: “Such carelessness deserves a total loss of life!”

The fix, and the POKEs

Software Projects offered champagne and a helicopter ride to the first person to collect every object and put Willy to bed. The winners, Ross Holman and Cameron Else of London, collected all 83. They had also worked out how to repair the program. Software Projects let the magazines publish their fix from July 1984. You loaded the game’s first part with MERGE "", stopped the tape, entered CLEAR 32767: LOAD ""CODE to load the rest without running it, then typed four POKEs:

POKE 60231,0
POKE 42183,11
POKE 59901,82
POKE 56876,4

GOTO 40 started the repaired game, which could be saved to a blank tape. Personal Computer Games said it fixed both the Attic and the Conservatory Roof. It added that Software Projects were “clearly embarrassed”, and pointed to “enormous pressure on them and Matthew Smith to get it out without delay”.

Cheats had been circulating well before this. CRASH told readers in June that it had received “mini-progs for giving infinite lives, etc.” from “clever dicks”, and was “not publishing those yet!” Your Spectrum held back too, not wanting “to cross swords with Software Projects”. Once Software Projects gave permission, both magazines changed course. In July CRASH printed the Attic fix alongside an infinite lives POKE and a listing that emptied the mansion of monsters, and Personal Computer Games printed the “WRITETYPER” cheat for jumping between rooms. In August Your Spectrum ran a whole article by Andrew Pennell on hacking into the game.

The music

Like Manic Miner, the game plays music the whole time, through the Spectrum’s one-bit beeper. In the game it is “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. TV Gamer’s reviewer “went around for days humming it”. See beeper music for how a Spectrum plays a tune while running a game.

Reception

CRASH gave it 95% overall, with 99% for value for money and 98% for addictive qualities, and called it “to date, one of the most addictive and finest Spectrum games”. It saw that this was not more of the same: “a very different game to Manic Miner, much more of an adventure in which the player can move freely between the linking rooms and work out the structure of Willy’s strange house.” Personal Computer Games made it Game of the Month with 10 out of 10 and called it “the first game which combines the zany action of the platform games with the complexity and intrigue of an adventure”. Computer and Video Games found it “much easier to get into than Manic Miner”.

Other versions and the sequel

Software Projects released a Commodore 64 version at the end of 1984, and an Amstrad CPC version followed in 1985. Tynesoft published the game for the BBC Micro in 1986.

Jet Set Willy II appeared in 1985 at £6.95. CRASH credited it to “Messrs Smith and Lawson”. One of its reviewers decided it was not really a sequel but “more of a De-luxe version”, because so many of its screens were the same as the original’s. It later reached the MSX.

See also

• Matthew Smith, the programmer
• Manic Miner, the 1983 predecessor
• Software Projects, the publisher
• Beeper music
• Copy protection
• Cheat codes
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum