Jet Set Willy

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Description

Cult hero Matthew Smith followed up Manic Miner with a seminal platform game. Having struck it lucky in the first game, Willy now owns a lavish mansion with over 60 rooms linked in a 3D plane, and must tidy it all before his housekeeper will let him sleep.

Each room has its own hazards, such as spikes, revolving razors and ropes. The route through the house must be navigated carefully, due to the multiple entrances to some rooms - this is perhaps the first action game where mapping is an advantage. Another innovation, to the chagrin of players everywhere, is manual protection - a sheet of colour-coded numbers.

Screenshots

Promo Images

There are no promo images for this game

Alternate Titles

• "La Casa de Jack" -- Spanish title
• "Jetset Willie" -- Alternate title (C64 media)

Part of the Following Group

• Miner Willy series

User Reviews

The quintessential ZX Spectrum game	ZX Spectrum	Jamie Mann (19)
A fun but hard game	Amstrad CPC	makky (11)
Its JSW, lovingly converted with extra screens on less memory	Dragon 32/64	drmarkb (39)

Critic Reviews

Crash!	ZX Spectrum	May, 1984	95 out of 100	95
Computer and Video Games (CVG)	Commodore 64	Dec, 1984	9 out of 10	90
GamesCollection	ZX Spectrum	Mar 03, 2011	9 out of 10	90
Eurogamer.net (UK)	ZX Spectrum	Oct 25, 2007	9 out of 10	90
Computer and Video Games (CVG)	ZX Spectrum	May, 1984	8 out of 10	80
Amtix!	Amstrad CPC	Nov, 1985	79 out of 100	79
TeleMatch	ZX Spectrum	Dec, 1984	2 out of 3	67
The One for ST Games	Atari ST	Feb, 1992		60
Atari Gamer - XL-XE Game Review Edition	Atari 8-bit	Dec, 2013	5 out of 10	50
Commodore User	Commodore 16, Plus/4	Jul, 1986	4 out of 10	40

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Trivia

1001 Video Games

Jet Set Willy appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Amstrad version

The Amstrad version of Jet Set Willy was the original official expansion of Jet Set Willy by Software Projects. This expansion was written by Derrick P. Rowson and Steve Wetheril, and contains 132 rooms. This expanded version is the basis of Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier.

Author

The author of Jet Set Willy wrote the game and its predecessor Manic Miner before he was 18.

Copy protection

As ZX Spectrum games were distributed on audio cassettes, piracy was a major concern. Jet Set Willy was the first game in the world to feature copy protection, in the shape of codes (printed on a coloured card) which had to be typed in after loading the game.

Game patches

The original release of Jet Set Willy was buggy - entering The Attic led to memory corruption, and the game would crash if the player subsequently entered The Kitchen! Initially, the publisher claimed that this was a feature, but later released a fix, making Jet Set Willy one of the first commercial games to have a patch produced.

Mods

Approximately a year after Jet Set Willy was released, the computer magazine Your Spectrum published a type-in which added an extra room to the game. This was perhaps the first third-party mod ever released for a commercial game.

Music

The music playing in the background is If I were a Rich Man from the US Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, first performed in 1964.

Ports

Circa 1989, Paul Taylor and Carl Whitwell worked on an Atari ST conversion of this game for Software Projects -- late enough in the title's life that the painstaking port (disassembled code read off the Spectrum's monitor and typed into the Atari's keyboard, screen data dumped as hex and dictated to a typist) was never released to the commercial market. During the same period Shahid Ahmad worked on an Amiga port that met a similar fate of obscurity.

Awards

• ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)
  • February 1991 (issue #41) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time, section Platform-based Games (editorial staff choice)
• Happy Computer
  • Issue 04/1985 - #3 Best Game in 1984 (Readers' Vote) (Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum version)
• Retro Gamer
  • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #7 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • May 2007 (Issue 37) - #6 in the "Top 25 Platformers of All Time" (poll)
• Zzap!
  • May 1985 (Issue 1) - #5 'Ten tackiest top-sellers'

Information also contributed by PCGamer77 and Pseudo_Intellectual.

Related Web Sites

• Game Map (A screenshot map of the game (Atari 8-bit))
• Jet Set Willy for Atari ST (archiived) (Original developer Paul Taylor tells the story of the development of the 16-bit versions and offers the ST version for download.)