Jetpac was the first game from Ultimate Play the Game, and the one that made its name. You fly a spaceman with a jet pack around a single screen with three floating ledges. You pick up the three sections of a rocket and stack them, then collect fuel pods and drop them in until the tank is full, and all the while aliens stream in from the sides of the screen. Fill the tank, climb aboard, and the rocket blasts off to the next planet, where the whole job starts again.
It fitted into a 16K ZX Spectrum and sold for £5.50. Computer & Video Games reviewed it in July 1983, it was near the top of the Spectrum charts that summer and autumn, and early in 1984 C&VG’s readers voted it Game of the Year for 1983, the first time the magazine’s Golden Joystick Awards had given that prize.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Ultimate Play the Game, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire.
- Made by: Tim and Chris Stamper. Later accounts credit Chris with the programming and Tim with the graphics.
- Released: summer 1983, for the 16K or 48K Spectrum on cassette, £5.50.
- Other versions: ZX Interface 2 ROM cartridge (£14.95, by the end of 1983); VIC-20 with 8K expansion (£5.50, by the end of 1983); BBC Micro (£7.95, late 1984).
- Award: Game of the Year 1983, Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick Awards.
A new name from Leicestershire
C&VG’s news pages for July 1983 introduced “a team of ex-arcade game designers from Leicestershire” who had “come together to form a brand new computer games software house called Ultimate Play the Game”. “The company’s first offering for the Sinclair Spectrum is a game called Jet Pac.” The same issue carried the magazine’s review. Its reviewer found the tape “loaded successfully first time” to “an impressive title screen”, and called Jetpac a “very playable, addictive and original arcade type game”. The graphics were “superb”, but “the sound effects bore a striking similarity to a pan of frying eggs and bacon. By the time I reached the fourth planet I was starving!” The review also noted a detail that tells you how new home software still was: the cassette came “complete with a five year unconditional guarantee”.
The game was selling as that issue appeared. W. H. Smith picked it for the “Spectrum Top Ten” in its July 1983 advertisement in Your Computer, alongside The Hobbit and Flight Simulation. In Sinclair User’s Spectrum chart for August 1983 “Jet Pack” stood at number 2, behind Psion’s Flight Simulation, and it was at number 2 again in the December issue. When CRASH printed a chart of the fifty best-selling mail-order programs from September to the end of November 1983, Jetpac was fourth.
Build, fuel, launch
Jetman walks along the ground or flies with his jet pack, and fires a laser left or right. Reviewing the sequel, CRASH set out Jetpac’s keys: left and right on alternate keys along the bottom row, fire on the second row, thrust on the third. It also took a Kempston joystick and offered one- or two-player games. Aliens kill on contact, and they come in waves. Personal Computer Games, reviewing the later BBC version, described meteors zipping in from either side on the first screen, then aliens “constantly zooming, wriggling or bouncing in from side to side”. C&VG noticed that on later planets they “become more intelligent and are able to track you with ever increasing accuracy”. Gems and gold drop on to the screen as well, for extra points.
The rocket gives the game its shape. On the first planet you assemble it from three parts. On the next few you only refuel it, and then a new rocket arrives in pieces and has to be built again. It is a small idea, but it gives a single screen a sense of progress, and it turns shooting into a job of work: every alien you avoid is time spent not carrying fuel.
The manual had a surprise for owners who found the Spectrum’s beeper too quiet. A reader told Personal Computer News in August 1983 that a paragraph “deep within the weighty documentation” of Jet-Pac suggested plugging the Spectrum’s MIC socket into a tape recorder and turning up the volume. The magazine confirmed that it worked, and not only for Jetpac.
16K
Jetpac ran on the 16K Spectrum, the cheaper model. Ultimate’s next three games, Pssst, Cookie and Tranz Am, did too. Looking back over 1983 in its first issue, CRASH wrote that “no company has made such an auspicious start as Ultimate”, with “four excellent and playable games that astonished everyone by how much they managed to pack into 16K”. Its short review of Jetpac in the same issue said the graphics and presentation were “of the highest standard” and ended “Highly recommended.”
All four 16K games also came out as ROM cartridges for Sinclair’s ZX Interface 2, at £14.95 instead of £5.50 on cassette. Sinclair’s own advertisements for the cartridges described the game in a new way: “As Chief Test Pilot of the Acme Inter-Stellar Transport Company, your task is to deliver and assemble spaceship kits.”
Other machines
Ultimate’s advertisements at the end of 1983 offered Jet Pac for the “16/48K ZX Spectrum or 8K Expanded VIC 20”. Commodore User reviewed the VIC-20 version, at £5.50, in February 1984.
The BBC Micro version came late in 1984, at £7.95. Personal Computer Games reviewed it in December 1984, and Steve Cooke was not entirely sure about it. “Jet Pac is now over a year old on the Spectrum, and no new features have been added”, he wrote, and he thought the graphics “not quite as good on the BBC”. The sound, “obviously, is a vast improvement”, and “once that familiar display flashes onto the screen and the pace hots up, it’s really rather hard to disagree”. It sold well on both machines. In Personal Computer Games’ list of the best-selling games of 1984, Jet Pac was number 8 on the BBC Micro and number 6 on the VIC-20.
Game of the Year
C&VG announced the winners of its first Golden Joystick Awards in March 1984. Jetpac was Game of the Year 1983, ahead of The Hobbit, Manic Miner and Imagine’s Arcadia. Ultimate was also voted Software House of the Year, and Pssst came second for Best Original Game. The Best Arcade-style Game award went to Manic Miner, not Jetpac. At the dinner in London, Carol Ward accepted the Game of the Year award for Ultimate.
Later
Jetman came back at the end of 1983 in Lunar Jetman, one of Ultimate’s first two 48K games. CRASH’s review picked up the story: “It seems none of us was quite good enough at assembling his rocket in Jetpac”, and now its various stages were “disintegrating in warp space”.
The Stampers went on to found Rare, and Jetpac has stayed with it. It can be unlocked and played in Cranky Kong’s laboratory in Rare’s Donkey Kong 64 (1999). An enhanced remake, Jetpac Refuelled, came out on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007, and the original is one of the thirty games in the 2015 compilation Rare Replay.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games, issue 21 (July 1983), news pages: Ultimate Play the Game introduced, “a team of ex-arcade game designers from Leicestershire”, “a game called Jet Pac”. Same issue, p. 196: review (“very playable, addictive and original”, “frying eggs and bacon”, “five year unconditional guarantee”, £5.50).
- Your Computer, July 1983, p. 7: W. H. Smith advertisement, “Spectrum Top Ten” (“JetPac Ultimate 16 £5.50”).
- Sinclair User, issue 17 (August 1983), p. 14: Spectrum Top Ten (“Jet Pack”, number 2). Issue 21 (December 1983), p. 18: Spectrum Top Ten (“Jet Pak”, number 2); Ultimate advertisement in the same issue (“16/48 K ZX Spectrum or 8K Expanded VIC 20”).
- Personal Computer News, 4-10 August 1983, letters: the MIC-socket tip in the Jet-Pac documentation.
- Your Computer, December 1983: Sinclair Research’s ZX Interface 2 advertisement (“Chief Test Pilot of the Acme Inter-Stellar Transport Company”; JetPac cartridge, £14.95).
- CRASH, issue 1 (February 1984): p. 23, the Ultimate cartridges at £14.95 against £5.50; p. 47, Jetpac review (“Ultimate, 16K £5.50”, Kempston joystick, one or two players, re-assembling the ship after several planets, “Highly recommended”); p. 66, mail-order top 50 for September to November 1983 (Jetpac fourth); p. 87, review of 1983 (“pack into 16K”); p. 88, Lunar Jetman review (the keys “follow the pattern of Jetpac”, “disintegrating in warp space”).
- Commodore User, February 1984: VIC-20 (+8K) Jetpac review, £5.50.
- Personal Computer Games, issue 13 (December 1984), pp. 90-91: Steve Cooke’s review of the BBC Micro version, £7.95 (waves of aliens, “over a year old on the Spectrum”).
- Personal Computer Games, issue 15 (February 1985), p. 8: best-selling games of 1984, compiled by RAM/C (Jet Pac number 8 on the BBC Micro, number 6 on the VIC-20).
- Acorn User, December 1984: BBC Micro chart (Jet Pac, Ultimate, £7.95).
- Computer & Video Games, issue 29 (March 1984), p. 15: “The Golden Joystick Awards”, the 1983 winners and placings. Issue 30 (April 1984), p. 81: the awards dinner and Carol Ward.
- Wikipedia, “Jetpac” (web, secondary): programming and graphics credits; Donkey Kong 64; Jetpac Refuelled (Xbox Live Arcade, 2007); Rare Replay (2015). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetpac