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Jet Set Willy

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computer & Video games

                              Jet Set Willy
    Developer(s)   Software Projects
    Publisher(s)   Software Projects
     Designer(s)   Matthew Smith
       Series      Miner Willy Series
   Release date(s) 1984
      Genre(s)     Platform game
       Mode(s)     Single player
     Platform(s)   ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron,
                   Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, MSX
        Media      Cassette, Floppy disk
        Input      Keyboard or joystick

   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.

   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.

   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.

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.

Gameplay

   Miner Willy in the Cold Store

   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.

   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.

We Must Perform A 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 was characteristic of Matthew Smith's "off the wall" sense
   of humour, and was in fact 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.

   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 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.
     * The original in-game music is taken from " If I Were a Rich Man",
       itself from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. 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. The magazine Computer and Video Games, published a letter
       detailing one such POKE in 1984.

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.

Ports

   The following ports to other computer platforms were made:
     * 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 13 extra rooms.
     * 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,
       and has since been called "the lousiest version of JSW ever".
       However, this version features completely different music (by Rob
       Hubbard), which is generally held to be one of its stronger points.
       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).
     * Software Projects made ports to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST
       but canceled them before they were released.
     * Unofficial ports exist for the Acorn Archimedes, DOS, Microsoft
       Windows, PlayStation, Gameboy, Cambridge Z88 and the Java platform.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_Set_Willy"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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