Jet Set Willy: The Definitive Review
The wine cellar bug was a feature
I was reading a particularly niche retro Discord earlier this week, following a thread on the decline in views for a particular segment of the British retrogaming YouTuber contingent. Noting that there is, in fact, a dwindling pool of retrogaming things that haven’t been exhaustively over-represented and combined with an equally dwindling audience, some commentators had black-pilled themselves into believing all was lost. But there are bridges to build with other demographic populations. I really think it depends on the narratives we wish to present and the manner in which we frame and contextualise these eras to people who didn’t experience them. On the YouTube side, I see it more as the end of a cycle. There was a gold rush which is now over, and the survivors are now collapsing into the true enthusiasts vs the opportunists vying for the attention of an oversaturated audience. The inexorable pull of vertical video shapes the direction too, though there’s plenty of proven success to be had in effectively exploiting Reels and TikTok as funnels towards longform YouTube and podcast content. But amongst all of this is a thornier problem, namely that of homogenisation towards a globalised monoculture. With regards to retrogaming, this is arguably already in place. It’s hard to escape the legend of Atari making ET and crashing the entire videogames industry until the NES saved it with Nintendo’s seals of approval. We might see the odd fightback from European perspectives via occasional broadsides like the slightly-too-lightweight Bedrooms to Billions documentary, but the US narrative gets repeated so much it prevails. As for a Japanese aspect, fucking forget about it. It’s barely mentioned, and it’s only thanks to books like John Szczepaniak's wonderful repackaging of Japansoft: An Oral History, from the equally wonderful Read Only Memory, that there’s any formal record at all.
Several years ago, I did a small assignment for Edge to talk to the legendary Bennett Foddy about his adversarial preservationist art-installation-cum-arcade-jukebox Multibowl. Back in 2016, I was already so concerned about the emergence of an homogenised monoculture for retrogaming that I posed the question to Bennett, suspicious that the grand sweep of games and platforms under Multibowl’s aegis betrayed a keen enthusiasm for a healthily diverse preservation of gaming’s past. His response left me overjoyed. For him, particularly as an academic in videogaming culture, erasure was a seriously pressing concern. Multibowl was, in some ways, an attempt at mitigating this. Being Australian, his 8-bit gaming childhood was much the same as the average UK gamer, so his innate familiarity with the bounteous diversity and wild creativity of that era connotes the same romance, the same enthusiasm. Only Bennett had dug far, far deeper. In collecting simultaneous-competitive two-player games for Multibowl, he’d been plumbing archives far more remote and obscure than World Of Spectrum or Lemon64. He’d been as far as the esoteric reaches of Korean 8-bit shareware archives, uncovering vast swathes of gaming culture hitherto unknown to the West, but brought to our attention thanks to the frankly miraculous work of the M.A.M.E. and M.E.S.S. teams, and AP Thomson’s sterling adaptation of the open-source wonder which exploits the full gamut of emulated hardware on offer and its concurrent affordance of save states. Foddy had more than admirably done his part, so I can only hope that I’m doing mine to a relatively decent degree and with that in mind, let’s cut to the chase.
Why Not Manic Miner?
Because that’s not what I played first. A wonderful aspect of those early years is the lack of a cohesive monomyth - aside from the devoted magazine-reading playerbase, 8-bit gamers would have wildly individualistic gaming histories. The print media offers a reasonable timeline to work from, but in the wild players would have little understanding of release sequences aside copyright years included in the games’ packaging. Hence many people came to Jet Set Willy before Manic Miner, sometimes because of simple timing. More people got Spectrums in Christmas 1984, when JSW was new, than 1983, when Manic Miner was released. In the contemporary account the generally accepted story of Jet Set Willy is that it’s merely a sequel to Manic Miner, which is a far more important game because it’s almost the de facto UK 8-bit icon. However Jet Set Willy is far more important in some ways, and for me personally loaded with more emotion and it was actually instrumental in shaping my gaming tastes. I first played Jet Set Willy on a 48K ZX Spectrum, just as Matthew Smith intended1. Commonly, the story of Manic Miner becomes the story of Matthew, for his status as a classic boffin-eccentric (and erstwhile bedroom billionaire) somehow overrides the compact charm and warmth of his mechanically neat but incredibly challenging platform game. A shame really, but they’re virtues that Kim Justice was able to highlight with a particularly exhaustive video on Smith’s work. But again, Manic Miner is the star and Jet Set Willy more of an afterthought.
Fuck’s Sake Then Just Explain Why Jet Set Willy Is So Fucking Good FFS
Expansion and exploration. Jet Set Willy is a huge advance over Manic Miner. The most important is conceptual; Manic Miner is a series of 20 discrete, mostly unrelated caverns, which we’ll call ‘screens’2. Jet Set Willy is an entire mansion of 60 screens. It’s a contiguous, cohesive place and it expands the interactive design by introducing the possibility of exploration. On top of this, Jet Set Willy introduces new challenge elements. An enigmatically charismatic rope swing mechanic and the terror-inducing arrows3, which announce themselves via the Spectrum speaker issuing a kissy noise and demand tightly-timed jumping challenges thanks to their (sometimes?) random appearances. In keeping with tradition, Jet Set WIlly names each screen, allowing players to chart the geography of the mansion, define landmarks, progress points and so on. The mansion can also be considered an open world, in the sense that the game’s formal challenge (to collect every item placed around the mansion) can be attempted in any order and the player is free to define their own path. One shortfall is that in tripling the number of screens and undergoing a rushed development, the quality of platforming puzzle design isn’t consistent across every location, with many being obvious conduits to more intricately constructed highlights. Take the simple traversal of the Kitchen and West of the Kitchen screens as a gentle road towards the rope-swinging antics of the Cold Store. Brave players will have discovered that the kitchen screens can be passed through speedily by simply holding left and not stopping. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but I like to think it is; the game has a duality where exploration sits alongside the collection task. If your urge is to simply see every screen, this demands a different path to collecting the items, and there is some value in understanding Jet Set Willy’s optimal path being a combination of both. You need rapid traversal to get to some perimeter starting point to begin the collecting challenge, as the final screen is Willy’s bedroom. This lies near the centre of the mansion, so therefore the fastest route to completion is likely one that spirals inward. Jet Set Willy is also both more charitable and more cruel than its predecessor. The player gets a whopping NINE lives (when the standard issue was three)4, but the game’s carryover of death by falling introduces unavoidable wipeouts if the player falls from one screen to another and fulfils the fall death conditions. This is thanks to post-death resets placing Willy’s next life at the exact point that he first entered the screen, dooming him to repeat the lethal fall until all his lives are exhausted. Fuck you, Dark Souls. That’s how you punish mistakes.
Is that it? Really?
No, for Jet Set Willy carries a surprisingly resonant and perhaps prophetic cultural message. The narrative continuation states that after successfully escaping the caverns of Manic Miner with all the baubles he collected to activate level exits, Willy is now rich and has hence bought a fucking huge mansion. He has joined the Jet Set, an affluent social microclass coined in the 1960s, based on its ability to trivially afford travel by the then-novel (and hence expensive) jet airliner. But by the tape inlay card’s own admission, Willy is also one of the nouveau-riche, a pejorative term for those who change social class by acquiring money instead of occupying a class niche by dint of inherited, familial wealth. It’s worth noting that in the game’s cover artwork, Willy is seen head-first in a toilet while wearing a coat-tailed jacket but also sporting his National Coal Board boots. To a degree, those boots are a symbol for Miner Willy’s character, having been seen as a single leg on the iconic second edition Manic Miner artwork, sporting the same NCB logo. The cultural context here is far darker; the NCB was initially a legacy of post-WW2 nationalisation but by the 1970s had become more associated with a governmental push for the de-industrialisation of northern England. In March 1983, union leader Arthur Scargill stated that the Conservative government of the day had a clear plan to destroy not only the coal-worker’s union, but the complete destruction of the UK’s coal mining industry. The implication being that the NCB was nothing more than a figurehead, being the Tory’s instrument for this destruction instead of the industry’s guardian. Manic Miner, itself a product of northern England being developed and published in Merseyside, was released in August 1983. That NCB logo loads Willy with a particular political weight. The serendipitous discovery of Manic Miner’s caves in Surbiton (a commuter-belt satellite of the very southern London, obviously chosen as a parody) means Willy escapes the scythe of the NCB’s impending disposal of the mining industry. This is almost a direct political barb against the Conservative government, but also perhaps a deeper jab at the nascent idea of Thatcherism, which was a coalescence of steadfastly hyper-capitalist and hyper-individualistic, socially conservative political philosophies that would come to dominate the 1980s. The de-industrialisation and de-nationalisation of public assets and industries was a key part of this transformative thrust, the destructive, profiteering legacy of which echoes with extreme profundity to the modern day. Jet Set Willy and its overt placement of a materialistic fantasy (miraculously finding riches, owning a mansion) as the game’s backdrop should perhaps be seen as a sharply satirical act rather than a simple accident or attempt at mere wacky absurdity. If we take the extremely bourgeois Monty Python’s Flying Circus and its unspoken undercurrents as an absurdist subversion of the UK’s moral, social and political norms of an establishment-dominated 1960s, then its obvious inspiration for the absurdities of Manic Miner’s locales, the extremely bourgeois Jet Set Willy mansion (being purchasable, it cannot be upper class after all) and both games’ surreal enemies can be seen as carrying that subversion onward. It’s not just idle reference, such as the Gillliam-aping foot crushing a defeated Willy at Game Over. The narrative needle seems more deliberate if you consider that this is in the face of a Conservative government emboldened by military success in the Falklands, which allowed its client media to triumphantly overwrite the social strife of the 1981 riots, notably taking place in Brixton, London and Toxteth, Liverpool. Can we draw a tenuous thread between London, Surbiton, Brixton, Toxteth and Liverpool for Matthew Smith’s smuggling (conscious or otherwise) of political satire into early videogame design? Perhaps not, but understanding that all cultural artefacts bear traces of the political culture in which they are created offers us some credibility to Smith’s explicit references. Perhaps his own flavour of divine providence for the downtrodden industrial worker, of Willy’s transition to affluent, home-owning hedonist, should perhaps be seen as a potent satire seeing as Jet Set Willy was released the same year as Scargil spearheaded the 1984 miner’s strike. Where work was grim and doomed, play was offering an escapist fantasy more potent then than we’d likely notice today.
So what’s your fucking point?
Jet Set Willy is more complex than a surface analysis or nostalgia-bating celebration can convey. Perhaps I have over-egged my political interpretation somewhat, but because it works in series with Manic Miner, it forms a joint narrative that supports a deeper analysis that may or may not betray some pretension on my part, but also bears cultural value beyond the idea of this game being a mere commercial asset. Personally, Jet Set Willy’s scale absolutely inspired my love of exploration within videogame spaces and it’s perhaps that which I most value. I fondly remember the thrill of discovering a new screen, of having your suspicions and desire to push further rewarded with novel content, of filling in the space of possibility with valuable certainties. Jet Set Willy also sits within a family of similar games that offer explorational spaces. In the same year as Manic Miner, Ultimate releases Atic Atac, a frantic romp with a top-down perspective instead of side-on, but along with 1984’s Sabre Wulf, offering a large space for exploration. These come without the specific contextualisation of Jet Set Willy’s mansion but as a small group of founding games, inspire a rich seam of explorative platformers. If you look at the 8-bit platformer in 19855, we get Dynamite Dan and Starquake, both of which dramatically expand on ideas from Smith and the Stampers. We also get David Jones’ Finders Keepers, which is a wonderful expansion of Jet Set Willy into richer adventure-oriented puzzling that matures via Spellbound and Knight Tyme. Most notable is Wanted: Monty Mole, the inaugural game from Gremlin Graphics6 and platformer directly inspired by the miner’s strike. The legacy all these games carry is not just mechanical, but cultural - they uphold the humour and inventiveness that powers Manic Miner’s charm and charisma. Smith’s seemingly effortless candour defines the mood of the UK 8-bit industry in some ways, setting a particularly irreverent, decidedly British tone that many, many games follow. Later still, at the transition boundary to 16-bit, we find Rick Dangerous, Mayhem in Monsterland, Zool, Gods et al, all upholding the British platforming legacy. Whilst so much of the platform adventure genre springs from Manic Miner’s inspiration, it’s the expanded concepts of Jet Set Willy that define the scope and set the distance of the horizon. Jet Set Willy’s personal legacy explodes in the 1990s, coinciding with the PC as the democratic platform and the rise of practically complete ZX Spectrum emulation. Modified variants come together with PC remakes, unofficial tributes and fan-made sequels, perhaps culminating in 2007’s Jet Set Willy Online, a 16-player recreation of the original map that allows for simultaneous competitive play. It allows a seasoned pro to show the way for 15 debutantes, and that’s precisely what I’d love to see. Jet Set Willy complete runs are on YouTube, and clock in at under an hour, meaning they’d fit perfectly in any given Games Done Quick. It’s a tragedy that there’ll always be some crushingly dull NES title that the organisers deem more valuable. Perhaps we’ll never get to see a Jet Set Willy run pushed to the real limits of biology as we do for Super Mario Bros. Perhaps the world needs reminding that Jet Set Willy predates Nintendo’s utterly dominating definition of the platformer. Perhaps I need to stop being such a fucking whining dick and just do it myself. But the real burning question is how could I get Tomatoanus to narrate it?
[21]
I actually played it as part of Ocean's first They Sold A Million compilation, which also included Beach Head, Sabre Wulf and Daley Thompson's Decathlon. Fucking bangers.
This term is chosen because 'screens' rapidly become a cultural currency in platform games and action adventures. The card inlays for tapes would include marketing boasts about how many screens that game has as a selling point.
A source of one of Jet Set Willy's game-killing bugs from the initial release. One the Attic screen corrupts RAM so that other screens become impossible to complete. The bugs were initially presented as features until magazines began to carry POKEs that fixed the issue. Community in action, marking an unbroken golden braid that runs from JSW to Starfield. Awwwww.
Co-playing with friends in the 8-bit era often meant 'having a go' being defined by using up all your lives. This meant that the nine lives of JSW offered longer playtimes between switchovers. Sometimes control would be swapped on a per-life basis, but these were so often lost in JSW on forgivable mistakes that swapping after a single death was more of a pain in the arse than swapping after all lives were exhausted. Such are the physical demands of playing games on a Spectrum keyboard, meaning you had to be sat within reach of the machine, or the surprisingly short leads of contemporary joysticks (and desperately uncertain Kempston interface connections, wherein an unlucky wobble could crash the machine).
Bearing in mind that in the 8-bit days, development times could be as short as two weeks for trash and six weeks for genuinely good games, the maturation of platformers by 1985 (in the absence of Nintendo) is a fascinating bubble of videogame culture, sitting alongside the isometric adventure as a rich seam filled with explorations and refinements.
Gremlin Graphics was a wonderful publisher based in Sheffield that ran with Monty Mole as its main character for several sequels, including the pinnacle 8-bit platformer Monty On The Run. Like so many high-end UK publishers, it lasted until the PlayStation era, whereupon it became subsumed into the Infogrames behemoth.