Silks Invisible Control

Jet Set Willy

Plot

A 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.

Gameplay

Miner Willy in the Cold Store

Jet Set Willy is a platform game in which the player moves the protagonist, Willy, from room to room in his mansion collecting objects. The room's exits may be in any direction, and the objects may be collected in any order. Willy is controlled using only left, right and jump. He 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 containing hazards (static killer objects), patrolling monsters (killer guardians which move along predetermined paths), various platforms and collectable objects. The collectable items glow to distinguish them from other items in the room.

Willy loses a life if he touches an enemy or falls too far, and he is returned to the point at which he entered the room. This may lead to a game-ending situation in which Willy repeatedly falls from a height, losing all eight lives in succession.

Bugs

As originally released, the game could not be completed due to several bugs. Although actually four completely unrelated issues, they became known collectively as "The Attic Bug".

Initially Software Projects attempted to pass off the most severe - The Attic bug itself - 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 However, they later rescinded this claim and issued a set of POKEs to correct the flaws.

The most notorious bug was the 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. This bears similarities to a buffer overflow, and as such is an early example of such an error - and the problems it can cause.

An item under The Conservatory Roof was placed too close to both the screen entrance and a killer object making it impossible to collect. The Software Projects fix removed the killer object.

There was an invisible and impossible to reach item in First Landing. The Software Projects fix relocated the item to The Hall - although some fixes relocated the object to The Bathroom where it became visible as another tap item. (By poking value 33, instead of 11.)

The Banyan Tree was impassable in an upward direction - the Software Projects fix changed the status of an essential block from solid to passable.

The Quirkafleeg

One of the more bizarrely named rooms in the game is We Must Perform 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.

Protecting against piracy

The anti-piracy code sheet that was included with the game.

Like most ZX Spectrum games, Jet Set Willy was stored on a cassette tape. Simply making an audio copy of the cassette allowed people to easily copy Spectrum games. Jet Set Willy was one of the first to come with a form of copy protection: a card with 180 coloured codes on it was bundled with the cassette. Upon loading, one of the codes from the card had to be entered before the game would start. Although the cassette could be duplicated, a copy of the card was also needed and at the time, home colour reproduction was hard to do. Thus copying Jet Set Willy was trickier than most Spectrum games. However, means of circumventing the card were quickly found.

Reflecting a different attitude to software piracy at the time, one method was published in a UK computer magazine.

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.

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. The following year, issue 13 contained a program that added an extra room ("April Showers") to the game, and issue 15 described the data formats in some detail.

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.

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.[citation needed]

Ports

The following ports to other computer platforms were made.

Jet Set Willy: The Final Frontier, an expanded version for the Amstrad CPC, was later converted back to the ZX Spectrum and released as Jet Set Willy II.[citation needed]

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 releases of Jet Set Willy for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64 also contained bugs which made it impossible to complete the game - though different bugs to the Spectrum version. In the Commodore 64 version, it was impossible to reach all of the items in the Wine Cellar

A different expanded version of Jet Set Willy was released for the Dragon 32/64, with extra rooms. 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. The Dragon port (and therefore also the Archimedes port) is also missing ropes. All screens previously containing a rope now have platforms added to enable safe passage.

The Dragon port was itself converted to run on the Acorn Archimedes computers. The port became colour - the Dragon version being black & white - but apart from extra colour no advantage was taken of the Archimedes' superior hardware compared to that of the Dragon, although in that sense it remained faithful to the original ZX version.

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 which criticised inferior graphics and animation, with Rob Hubbard's theme music the only highlight. 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, although Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy II were later released on the Commodore Amiga.

See also

Miner Willy series of games

Roller Coaster

Technician Ted

Top Hat Willy

References

^ JSW FAQ

^ The word perform is spelled peform in Jet Set Willy 2. (Juckes, Russ. "Fat Freddy's Cat #5 - The Quirkafleeg". http://www.russandem.co.uk/quirk/. Retrieved 2006-09-07. )

^ Fat Freddy's Cat #5 - The Quirkafleeg

^ Your Computer, Issue 6, June 1984

^ "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"

^ Archimedes port based on Dragon 32 code"

^ "Jet Set Willy game review". Atari User. March 1987. 

^ Page 6 magazine (26). March/April 1987. http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_26/page_61c.htm. 

^ Taylor, Paul. "The Home of Jet-Set Willy for the Atari ST". http://www.penelope.demon.co.uk/jsw/. 

^ "Manic Miner". Hall of Light Amiga Game Database. http://hol.abime.net/2407. 

^ "Jet Set Willy II". Hall of Light Amiga Game Database. http://hol.abime.net/790. 

External links

XLEAGUE.TV / TGWTG's video retrospective

Jet Set Willy Series at the Open Directory Project

Jet Set Willy at MobyGames

Jet Set Willy at World of Spectrum

Categories: Platform games | 1984 video games | Software Projects games | Amstrad CPC games | Atari 8-bit family games | Commodore 16 and Plus/4 games | Commodore 64 games | MSX games | ZX Spectrum games | BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games | Mobile phone games | Video games developed in the United KingdomHidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements from September 2008
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