Manic Miner wowed reviewers and players with its sheer scale. Its solo developer Matthew Smith aimed to create sixteen rooms for it, and successfully landed at twenty, four more than the goal. When he worked on its sequel immediately afterwards, he went much further still. Jet Set Willy didn’t just double that twenty, but tripled it. Smith packed his new game with sixty unique named rooms, all achieved with the Spectrum’s 48KB of memory. It was a spectacular achievement, and another runaway success. There is a catch though, something which offers a glimpse at why making Jet Set Willy was a very different experience. Smith didn’t plan for it to have sixty rooms. It was meant to have sixty-four.

Matthew Smith started work on Jet Set Willy very soon after Manic Miner was finished. At the same time, he was setting up a new company, Software Projects, with Alan Maton, Soo Maton, and Tommy Barton. Smith was fed up with Manic Miner’s publishers Bug-Byte. They were slow to pay royalties and he felt that his game had succeeded despite their input rather than because of it. He resented their adverts putting it alongside less exceptional games, and disliked the cover art that they’d given it. So it was a happy discovery when he realised that the wording of his contract allowed him to withdraw Manic Miner and take it with him to Software Projects. They gave it new, more distinctive, cover art, with a mutant telephone taking centre stage. In February 1984, the same month as Matthew Smith turned 18 and was therefore allowed to take up his position as co-director of Software Projects, their version went to #1 in the UK charts.

By this time, Jet Set Willy was two months overdue, having been intended for release by Christmas 1983. Some of this reflected additional programming challenges brought about by its structure as well as its scale. Player character Willy’s movement is the same as in Manic Miner, and the basic platforming and nature of the things he interacts with are much the same, give or take some swinging ropes and clever stairs which can be walked up but jumped through. Instead of a series of individual challenges, though, Jet Set Willy is a single inter-linked challenge. The game is set in a big house which you can walk around, entering a new room each time you reach the edge of the screen. The task set for players is to collect dozens of flashing objects around the house, and return to a screen adjacent to your starting point. It is structured like one enormous level of Manic Miner.

To go with that complexity, it has a slightly more developed story than that of Manic Miner. Willy, following his successful expedition to the mines of Surbiton, is newly wealthy and living in a mansion. He now wears a top hat and walks around to a constant loop of “If I Were a Rich Man”. This adds to the existing fact that he is, per the colour names written on the Spectrum keyboard, 100% white, and he shares a name with a slang term for a penis. He has become a veritable avatar of privilege. This is not exactly presented in an entirely positive light on the game’s cassette inlay, which describes him as “nouveau-riche socialite” with “hundreds of new found friends who REALLY know how to enjoy themselves at a party”.

Despite this satirical element, you are meant to help him out. I mentioned that Manic Miner was free from the damsel-in-distress narrative of Donkey Kong and its many followers, but it achieved this through not having a woman in the narrative at all. Jet Set Willy has one as the antagonist, in the form of Willy’s housekeeper Maria, who is forcing him to tidy the entire mansion up before he can go to bed. She stands blocking the way, her touch deadly to Willy. There is a room called The Nightmare Room which is filled with versions of Maria, wagging her finger. Jet Set Willy is a game about a man who has amassed great riches through impressive feats, and yet is still being told to tidy up by a woman. Given that Matthew Smith designed it while still living at his mum’s house in Wallasey, it’s not hard to make an autobiographical reading there. Even before you get to the fact he started work on a follow-up called Willy and the Tax Man.

It was that house that Alan Maton would visit to check up on Smith’s progress, as well as making sure that he was eating properly. Another programmer who joined the new Software Projects, Steve Wetherill, has said that Matthew Smith seemed shrouded in mystery to him, someone in awe of Smith’s previous achievements. The weight of expectation from a lot of people who thought that way was getting to Smith. In the run-up to Jet Set Willy’s release, new Spectrum magazine Crash wrote about it in each of their first three issues. They trailed that it would have 64 rooms and called it “the most eagerly awaited program ever for any computer”, which would be hard for anyone to live up to. 

In an interview from the end of 1984, Smith described Atic Atac as “closer to what Jet Set Willy should have been than Jet Set Willy as it is”. That just sounds like a way of expressing admiration for fellow developers, until you consider that Atic Atac came out halfway through the development of Jet Set Willy. It seems that Smith may have lost faith in his game before he had even finished it. No wonder he described the experience of making it as “seven shades of hell”. In the end, it was pushed out before he’d figured out why the final four rooms kept disappearing, and with other, more critical, issues besides.

The packaging of Jet Set Willy set out a competition for players. If you could complete the game first, you would win “a case of Don Perignon champagne” [sic], a helicopter ride, and the chance to meet Matthew Smith himself. Smith had not got as far as playtesting the entire game in one go, and had therefore not noticed that there was a problem lurking in The Attic. Entering that room would affect the programming of several others. Soon after release, a letter-writer to Home Computing Weekly helpfully explained the necessity of taking a special route to counter the attic attack. They also ended their letter with a plea: “If anyone knows how to collect the items in the conservatory – help!”. 

In July, Crash announced the winners of the champagne, Ross Holman and Cameron Else. They had worked out that it was necessary to reprogram Jet Set Willy to fix the attic bug and make several other items accessible, including in the conservatory roof. Crash published those fixes, four separate bits of code modification, alongside the announcement. Software Projects changed later releases of the game to solve those issues, as well as changing the music, because “If I Were a Rich Man” was under copyright and they had failed to pick up on that, too.

One Crash reader explained their reaction to the competition news in a letter later that year, saying that they were “utterly disgusted and appalled”. They explained that they had also found their way to the end of the game by altering the code, but “didn’t claim the prize through honesty”. The disgust has some echoes of modern game difficulty discourse, but also Software Projects had blithely set a task with no idea of the unusual means needed to complete it. Crash’s Lloyd Mangram (in reality a pseudonym to disguise how small their staff was) could only respond to that letter by basically saying fair enough. He also pointed out that “despite its problems, [Jet Set Willy] has been one of the most played and enduringly popular games ever released for the Spectrum”. Indeed, it spent months at #1 in PCS’s ‘arcade’-focused chart and returned there again that September.

That success is an important point to come back to among all the problems, and it makes sense because Jet Set Willy is brilliant. It’s basic platforming challenges expand very nicely on its predecessor. More than that, though, Manic Miner took power from the joy of discovering which weird new thing was coming next with each room, and Jet Set Willy ramps up that aspect even further. Having all of the weird rooms loosely linked in a house adds an extra layer of pleasure in finding the sometimes-unconventional ways in which they join together. It may not have been as flexible or polished as Atic Atic, but in bringing some of the same freedom to an experience with so many more fine details, it was just as much a preview of a future for games.

Jet Set Willy’s new structure also allowed for some themes to be developed across multiple screens, like the set of rooms at the top of the building which act as a superior parody of Hunchback. Re-using assets was a necessity to fit so much in, but seeing the same things pop up in different contexts can be a positive too. Like seeing Willy become a winged pig in The Nightmare Room and then the same pig eventually reappearing in Emergency Generator, flying over a mini Battersea Power Station in tribute to the album cover for Pink Floyd’s Animals. The game’s map is much more than the sum of its parts.

The new approach makes for fewer frustrating barriers to exploring all of that, as well. Collecting the item in The Nightmare Room is indeed a nightmare, but you can walk through it to the next room with relative ease. The name The Banyan Tree will conjure absurd difficulty to most people familiar with the game, but you can get around that room by other routes instead of tackling it head-on. I would be surprised if that many Manic Miner players ever saw the rooms in the back half of the game, and likewise there must have been hordes of people who got enjoyment from Jet Set Willy without ever being accomplished enough to be concerned by its impossibility.

I know they were around, because I was one of them. I played it as a child in the ‘90s and got a kick out of exploring the mansion in all directions and finding its weird secrets. I could remember details of many of the rooms, from the Orangery stairs to the swinging rope of We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg to the weird moon in Nomen Luni, but until I revisited the game, I didn’t even remember that there were objects to collect. Trying to complete Jet Set Willy was totally outside of my conception of what it existed for. 

Well, I say I played Jet Set Willy. That’s what I had remembered. In fact, I realised, I played the Commodore 64 version of Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier. This was not a sequel as you might typically picture it. With the Spectrum version of Jet Set Willy a big commercial success, Software Projects ported it to many other computers. They got different people to make different ones, including Cameron Else, one of those competition winners who had figured out the game’s secrets, who was tasked with programming the MSX version. Where it wasn’t possible to port to less powerful machines, they came up with simpler alternatives, like the Commodore VIC-20 release which was called, genuinely, Perils of Willy.

Among the programmers working away at different machines were Derrick P. Rowson and Steve Wetherill, in charge of the Amstrad CPC version. They had so much fun that they decided to extend the game by adding many more screens of their own, hugely enlarging the map at the edges of the original layout. Wetherill later commented that they were the first Jet Set Willy modders. The first of many; there are now dozens of sets of levels made by people inspired by the possibilities of the original. It also defined a style of game which others took up in a big way on 8-bit computers. The appeal of those games lived on, including informing the centre of Terry Cavanagh’s celebrated retro indie game VVVVVV in 2010. Cavanagh located the action in space, just as Rowson and Wetherill did for many of the additional rooms in their port, where Willy gains a spacesuit.

  • Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier (Software Projects, 1985, Amstrad CPC)
  • VVVVVV (Terry Cavanagh, 2010, PC)

With no proper follow-up forthcoming, Software Projects decided to label Rowson and Wetherill’s work not as a version with added bonuses, but as a sequel. They then ported their version onto other computers, including back to the Spectrum. Jet Set Willy II was a decent commercial success in its own right, making the top 10 of the chart in 1985. Matthew Smith did not gain any additional benefit from this beyond continuing to be a director of the company which was heavily reliant on versions of his work. (Software Projects would have one other big hit two years later, which I will write about). He did not manage to complete and release any further games. Whatever had allowed Manic Miner to come so quickly and easily to him had been well and truly broken.

In December 1984, Matthew Smith talked about wanting to live in a commune. Eventually he did just that for a while, in the Netherlands. In 2012, he gave an interview for a book by the people behind Retro Gamer magazine, talking to Paul Drury back in that same house in Wallasey. He talked about the period after Jet Set Willy and having felt like he was property of Software Projects. His mum (who goes weirdly un-named in the article) was there alongside him for the interview. At one point she says that he has nothing. “You’d think somewhere, in all these websites and talks about him, he should have some money”.

  • PCS individual formats chart for fortnight ending 23 March 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 28 April 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 05 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 12 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 19 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 26 May 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 02 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 16 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 30 June 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 15 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly
  • ASP individual formats (arcade), week ending 22 September 1984, Home Computing Weekly

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