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Jet Set Willy is a computer game for the ZX Spectrum home computer. Its release in 1984 was concurrent with the height of the Spectrum's popularity in the early 1980s. Image File history File links JetSet. ...
A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. ...
Software Projects was the name of a computer game development company run by Manic Miner developer Matthew Smith. ...
Software Projects was the name of a computer game development company run by Manic Miner developer Matthew Smith. ...
A game designer is a person who designs games. ...
Matthew Smith (born 1966) is a British computer game programmer. ...
Miner Willy is the hero of a series of platform games for the ZX Spectrum home computer written by Matthew Smith in the 1980s. ...
1984 1984 in games 1983 in video gaming 1985 in video gaming Notable events of 1984 in video gaming. ...
Video games are categorized into genres based on their gameplay. ...
A simple platform sequence from the game Wonder Boy Platform game, or platformer, is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles. ...
In computer games and video games, single-player refers to the variant of a particular game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. ...
In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ...
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. ...
The Amstrad CPC was a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad during the 1980s and early 1990s. ...
The BBC Microcomputer System was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers Ltd for the BBC Computer Literacy Project operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation. ...
An original press advertisement for the Acorn Electron The Acorn Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. ...
C-64 redirects here. ...
An Atari 800XL, one of the most popular machines in the series. ...
Sony MSX 1, Model HitBit-10-P MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s. ...
Typical 60-minute Compact Cassette. ...
A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a disk of thin, flexible (floppy) magnetic storage medium encased in a square or rectangular plastic shell. ...
A 104-key PC US English QWERTY keyboard layout The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout A standard Hebrew keyboard showing both Hebrew and QWERTY. A computer keyboard is a peripheral partially modelled after the typewriter keyboard. ...
For other uses, see Joystick (disambiguation). ...
A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ...
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. ...
Children playing on a Amstrad CPC 464 in the 1980s. ...
1984 1984 in games 1983 in video gaming 1985 in video gaming Notable events of 1984 in video gaming. ...
The 1980s refers to the years from 1980 to 1989. ...
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. Matthew Smith (born 1966) is a British computer game programmer. ...
Thumb Candy Doumentary made in 2000 about games history. ...
This does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
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. Manic Miner is a classic platform game originally written for the ZX Spectrum by Matthew Smith and released by Bug-Byte in 1983 (later re-released by Software Projects). ...
1983 1983 in games 1982 in video gaming 1984 in video gaming Notable events of 1983 in computer and video games. ...
Miner Willy is the hero of a series of platform games for the ZX Spectrum home computer written by Matthew Smith in the 1980s. ...
A simple platform sequence from the game Wonder Boy Platform game, or platformer, is a video game genre characterized by jumping to and from suspended platforms or over obstacles. ...
Children playing on a Amstrad CPC 464 in the 1980s. ...
Software Projects was the name of a computer game development company run by Manic Miner developer Matthew Smith. ...
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. Miner Willy is the hero of a series of platform games for the ZX Spectrum home computer written by Matthew Smith in the 1980s. ...
Gameplay
 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 collectable items glow to distinguish them from other items in the room. Image File history File links JetSetWilly-ColdStore. ...
In computer and video games, the term flip-screen (sometimes also known as flick-screen) refers to games in which the playing environment is divided up into single screen portions (usually viewed from above, though sometimes from the side, or, more seldom, via an isometric view). ...
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]. In computing, PEEK is a BASIC programming language function used for reading the contents of a memory cell at a specified address. ...
We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg
We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg One of the more bizarrely-named rooms in the game is We Must Perform[2] A Quirkafleeg. (The pre-release name for the screen was "The Gaping Pit".) 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. Image File history File links Jet_set_willy_we_must_perform_a_quirkafleeg. ...
Image File history File links Jet_set_willy_we_must_perform_a_quirkafleeg. ...
Fat Freddys Cat (aka Fat Freddy Scat) is an orange tabby tomcat nominally belonging to Fat Freddy Freekowtski, one of the Freak Brothers, a trio of hippies who are featured in Gilbert Sheltons underground comix. ...
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, 1st issue, 1971, by Gilbert Shelton The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are a trio of underground comic strip characters created by the U.S. artist Gilbert Shelton. ...
To negotiate the room, the player must first wait a few seconds (after entering the screen from the left), then jump the arrow that flies in from the right (pictured). Now is the player's chance to get over the pit in one piece, jump right as the rope is at the lowest point of its swing (right to left), and keep moving right once on the rope (this will let you climb up the rope a bit) - Climbing too far up the rope will result in the player entering another room. Just enough to avoid the spikes at the bottom of the pit. Now jump right at the highest point of the swing. If the player did this right the bird should be on the left, and should present no problem to the player's safe passage on to the next screen.
Trivia
In the Pythonesque ending of the game, Willy gets squashed by a large foot. - In the 1980s, Matthew Smith suggested that he was working on a further Miner Willy game possibly to be titled either The Megatree or Miner Willy Meets the Taxman. However, neither game has yet appeared.
- On the Spectrum, the in-game music is taken from "If I Were a Rich Man", itself from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. On the Commodore 64, the in-game music is taken from J.S. Bach's "Invention No.1 in C Major". The title music was adapted from the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
- There is an in-game cheat mode, which involves typing the phrase WRITETYPER whilst standing between the stairs and hole in the floor on the First Landing, (after which the player can travel to any room in the game by holding down combinations of the number keys 9, and 1-5).
- Software Projects announced a competition with the original release of Jet Set Willy, stating that the first person to complete the game would win a case of champagne and a helicopter ride over London, to be piloted by Tommy Barton, a director of Software Projects. The competition was won by two Londoners; Ross Holman and Cameron Else. The pair opted for cash in place of the chopper ride, but they did get the champagne. (Ross & Cam hacked Jet Set Willy when they realized that it couldn't be completed as it stood because of 4 major bugs, they produced the necessary fixes which then became the official Software Projects pokes. On completing the game they phoned up Software Projects, told them that "Willy went to commune with the Great White Telephone", and that there were a total of 83 objects.)
- Ross Holman consequently became a writer for the magazine Your Spectrum which later changed its name to Your Sinclair.
- Cameron Else coded the MSX conversion of the game.
- In a jibe at Imagine Software with their motto "The Name of The Game", the room Nomen Luni is a pun on the Latin for Name of the Game Nomen Ludi. An aeroplane from the game Zzoom has crashed into the roof and is visible in both Nomen Luni and Under the roof.
- The game was one of the first for the Spectrum to feature copy protection. A card containing a grid of colour codes came with the cassette; once the game loaded, the user was asked to type in one of the codes randomly selected by the game. This was done in the days when colour reproduction was hard. Solutions to work around the protection scheme included simply copying out the grid; additionally, a number of POKEs were devised to bypass the code system.
Image File history File links Broom_icon. ...
Image File history File links Pythonesque ending to Jet Set Willy. ...
Image File history File links Pythonesque ending to Jet Set Willy. ...
Monty Python, or The Pythons,[2][3] is the collective name of the creators of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. ...
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. ...
If I Were a Rich Man is the original song for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. ...
For the film, see Fiddler on the Roof (film) Fiddler on the Roof is a well-known Tony Award-winning musical with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein, set in Tsarist Russia in 1905. ...
C-64 redirects here. ...
“Bach†redirects here. ...
“Beethoven†redirects here. ...
“Piano Sonata No. ...
Your Sinclair magazine logo Your Sinclair Issue 1, January 1986 Your Sinclair or YS as it was affectionately known, was a British computer magazine for the Sinclair range of computers, specifically the ZX Spectrum. ...
In computing, PEEK is a BASIC programming language function used for reading the contents of a memory cell at a specified address. ...
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. A game engine is the core software component of a computer video game or other interactive application with real-time graphics. ...
Source coding redirects here. ...
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[3]. The following year, issue 13 contained a program that added an extra room ("April Showers") to the game[4], and issue 15 described the data formats in some detail[5].
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. Windows redirects here. ...
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.
Ports The following ports to other computer platforms were made: In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed (e. ...
- Jet Set Willy II, an expanded version for the Amstrad CPC, was later converted back to the ZX Spectrum.
- 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 BBC Micro release also contained a bug which made it impossible to complete the game - though not the same bug as the Spectrum version.
- A different expanded version of Jet Set Willy was released for the Dragon 32/64, with extra rooms.[6] 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.
- 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,[7][8] and has since been called "the lousiest version of JSW ever".[9] However, this version features completely different music (by Rob Hubbard), which is generally held to be one of its stronger points.[9] 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.[10]
- Unofficial ports exist for the Acorn Archimedes, DOS, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation, Gameboy, Cambridge Z88 and the Java platform.
This article needs to be wikified. ...
The Amstrad CPC was a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad during the 1980s and early 1990s. ...
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. ...
The BBC Microcomputer System was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers Ltd for the BBC Computer Literacy Project operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation. ...
An original press advertisement for the Acorn Electron The Acorn Electron was a budget version of the BBC Micro educational/home computer made by Acorn Computers Ltd. ...
Sony MSX 1, Model HitBit-10-P MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s. ...
The Commodore 16 was a home computer made by Commodore with a 6502-compatible 7501 CPU, released in 1984. ...
C-64 redirects here. ...
The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 were home computers built in the 1980s. ...
An Atari 800XL, one of the most popular machines in the series. ...
Tynesoft Computer Software was a software developer of educational software founded in 1983. ...
Year 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link displays 1987 Gregorian calendar). ...
Rob Hubbard (born 1956?, Kingston upon Hull, England) is a music composer best known for his composition of computer game theme music, especially for microcomputers of the 1980s such as the Commodore 64. ...
Amiga is the name of a range of home/personal computers using the Motorola 68000 processor family, whose development started in 1982. ...
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially popular from 1985 to the early 1990s. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
This article is about the family of closely related operating systems for the IBM PC compatible platform. ...
Windows redirects here. ...
The Sony PlayStation ) is a video game console of the 32/64-bit era, first produced by Sony Computer Entertainment in the mid-1990s. ...
The Game Boy ) line is a line of battery-powered handheld game consoles sold by Nintendo. ...
The Cambridge Z88 was an A4-size, lightweight, portable Z80-based computer with a built-in combined word processing/spreadsheet/database application called Pipedream, along with several other apps/utilities, such as a Z80-version of BBC BASIC. The machine was designed by Sir Clive Sinclair and released by his...
The Java platform is the name for a bundle of related programs, or platform, from Sun Microsystems which allow for developing and running programs written in the Java programming language. ...
See also Miner Willy is the hero of a series of platform games for the ZX Spectrum home computer written by Matthew Smith in the 1980s. ...
Roller Coaster is a platform-based action adventure console game which contains some fairly difficult strategy and puzzle elements. ...
Technician Ted, also known as The Chip Factory: Featuring Technician Ted, is a platform computer game for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum home computers that was published in 1984 by Hewson Consultants. ...
Top Hat Willy is a platform computer game created by Tero Heikkinen for the Commodore Amiga and was realeased in 1994. ...
References - ^ JSW FAQ
- ^ The word perform is spelt peform in Jet Set Willy 2. (Juckes, Russ. Fat Freddy's Cat #5 - The Quirkafleeg. Retrieved on 2006-09-07.)
- ^ "Join The Jetset", Your Spectrum, Issue 4, June 1984
- ^ "April Showers", Your Spectrum, Issue 13, April 1985
- ^ "Interior Decorating", Your Spectrum, Issue 15, June 1985
- ^ "Jet Set Willy Remakes : Dragon 32/64"
- ^ Jet Set Willy game review, Atari User, March 1987
- ^ Jet Set Willy review, Page 6 magazine, Mar/Apr 1987, Issue 26, retrieved 27 Oct 2006
- ^ a b "Jet Set Willy Remakes: Atari ST and Atari 800XL"
- ^ "The Home of Jet-Set Willy for the Atari ST"
Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
is the 250th day of the year (251st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Atari User was a British magazine aimed at users of Atari computers, and published by Database Publications (later known as Europress) between 1985 and 1988. ...
Cover of Page 6 magazine from May/June 1987 Page 6 (subtitled Atari Users Magazine, and later known as New Atari User) was an independent British publication aimed at users of Atari home computers. ...
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