Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier

Development

Jet Set Willy for Spectrum had a much smaller mansion of 60 rooms, but when ported to Amstrad CPC the designers (Derrick P. Rowson and Steve Wetherill) decided to expand the game, more than doubling the number of rooms to 132. Later, the expanded version was ported back to Spectrum, and from then on was considered Jet Set Willy II.

References

In this game there are numerous rooms that are parodies of other games and people:

• "Macarroni Ted" was named after Technician Ted who worked for Marconi
• "Alienate" was named after all the alien films and is meant to sound like Alien 8
• "Captain Slog"/"Beam me down Spotty" are just corruptions on the appropriate sayings
• "Dumb Waiter" is a tribute to Eugene Evans and his program wacky waiters
• "Flower Power Source" is a tribute to the flower Power movement of the 60's
• "Galaxic Invasion" is a tribute to the Galaxians and space invaders of the early 80's
• "Holt Road" was a residence owned by the software house and was used to house some programmers
• "Loony Jet Set" is a tribute to lunar jet pac a game that was release in the early 80's
• "Megaron" is an ancient Greek word for hall
• "Money Bags" is a tribute to Mathew Smith and all the monies he was going to make
• "NCC 1501" is a tribute to Star Trek and the ship NCC 1701" Enterprise"
• "Someone else" is named after Cameron Else who phoned up the programmer and announced that one note was wrong in the title tune.
• "Star drive early brick version" derives its name from a skit at old technology being not up the job
• "The trouble with Tibbles is.." is a tribute to one episode of Star Trek that featured tribbles.
• The well appears 3 times in order to say "Well, well, well" as a remark to indicate your pending demise.
• In the central map area an homage to the game Hunchback is effected with the parapet-running, rope-swinging, pit-jumping rooms (from left to right) On the Roof, Up On the Battlements, We must peform a Quirkafleeg (its peculiar name a reference to a Fat Freddy's Cat comic strip), I'm sure I've seen this before, and Rescue Esmerelda, with Belfry atop it.

Awards

• Retro Gamer
  • September 2004 (Issue #8) – #79 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by Derrick P Rowson and Technocrat