01 You had to time your swing carefully if you didn’t
want to meet your end via the Cold Store’s deadly ice
cream cones(!) or penguins(!!).
02 According to the plot, Willy bought his mansion with
his gains from his previous mining exploits.Venturing off in a new direction and seeing one more
room before dying was as much as the average
gamer could hope for, and it was actually pretty cool.
Unless you accidentally entered the new room from
high up on the screen, in which case you’d repeatedly
fall to your death until all your lives were gone.
CLASSIC MOMENT
Because the game was so large and difficult, when
playground rumours started about hidden features
such as a secret island you could travel to by boat,
nobody could conclusively disprove them. The island
was actually added to the sequel, which was made
without the involvement of Matthew Smith.
CLASSIC LEVEL
03
W
hat Miner Willy did
next. Having found huge
success with Manic Miner,
Matthew Smith took
his signature character (and, thanks
to an astonishingly lax contract, the
entire previously published game) to a
different software house, where he set
about designing a suitably ambitious
sequel. Jet Set Willy abandoned the
more usual linear progression of levels
in favour of free-form exploration of
Miner Willy’s large and unsurprisingly
hazardous mansion. Having wrecked
the joint during a riotous party, Willy is
forced by his housekeeper to pick up
trash from all 61 rooms before she’ll
allow him into his bedroom for some
much needed sleep.
Her command is effectively a death
sentence, since it wasn’t actually
possible to complete the game. An
array of bugs meant that certain items
weren’t collectible, and visiting the attic
would corrupt other rooms, turning
them into death traps. Code was
created for players to manually edit the
game files to fix the error, but unless
you bought the particular Spectrum
mag these were printed in, you wouldn’t
have known they existed.
Such was the game’s ball-shrivelling
difficulty though, most players never
noticed it was broken.