The first time I ever played a Sinclair Spectrum game was just a few years ago. It was 1983’s British platform game Manic Miner – popular enough to still be #4 on the chart in July 1984 – and I played it on the original hardware, in a museum. It took about half an hour of perseverance for me to get past its first level. I could blame its difficulty on my unfamiliarity with the hardware and its rubbery keys, but I couldn’t blame unfamiliarity with the main character’s floaty fixed leaps, because I grew up playing its sequel Jet Set Willy.
A sequel is a great place to start in playing all of the UK’s #1 games not just because the start of charts is not the start of games, but also because we will be seeing a lot of sequels, or games otherwise boosting off something already established. #1 games aren’t necessarily the best selling over a long time and more likely those with a stronger initial peak, and what better to have people ready and waiting than to build on what they already like?
I didn’t play the Commodore 64 version of Jet Set Willy at the time of its release either, but a fair bit closer to it. The story in it is that former miner Willy, following his success in Manic Miner, is newly wealthy and living in a mansion. He now wears a top hat and walks around to a constant loop of “If I Was a Rich Man”. Plus, let’s note, he is literally 100% white, and shares a name with a slang term for a penis. And what has befallen this avatar of privilege? His housekeeper is telling him to tidy the place up before he can go to bed. Next he’ll be being told he can’t just say whatever he likes with no consequences!
Both games are the invention of one Matthew Smith, 18 years old at the time of Jet Set Willy’s release, whose own success presumably influenced the storyline and the idea of proposed sequel Miner Willy Meets the Taxman. In Jet Set Willy, the mansion is the setting for a flip-screen platform game. You walk and jump around avoiding dangers, and each time you go to the edge of a screen you move onto the opposite side of a new room. The game was infamously broken, impossible to complete due to programming and/or design errors. Which precise error depended on which version of it you played, because it turned out there were a lot of different ways it could be broken.
I didn’t know any of that when I played it in the early ‘90s. I didn’t really have a concept yet of how not-rich my family was at the time either, but back then we got computers towards the end of their life as games platforms, and almost all our games came in big cases of old cassettes or discs donated by relatives or friends. We played games outside of a lot of context in general. The idea of completing a game was generally a pretty foreign concept, but I’m not sure how much of that was personal, how much was being a child, how much was a change in games over time, and how much was this everything-at-once way we got games.
Completion was certainly a foreign concept for Jet Set Willy. To complete it, you need to collect a large number of different objects in difficult-to-reach locations. But though it keeps a tally as you collect, I had no memory of that aspect of it at all. As far as I remembered, the only aim was to make your way around the mansion and check out new rooms. Played that way, it’s both a lot easier than Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy played “properly”, and a lot more enjoyable.
Its world has some obvious influences – the game over screen has Willy flat-out crushed by a Monty Python cartoon foot – but nonetheless a chaotic, anarchic energy of its own that makes its slapdash nature part of the appeal. It goes from rooms you might reasonably find in a mansion (I think it’s where I first encountered the concept of an orangery), to ‘The nightmare room’ (within which confines Willy appears as a winged pig), to something called ‘We must perform a Quirkafleeg’, all populated by a bizarre assortment of creatures. The mansion doesn’t even sit in two easily mapped dimensions, with exits leading to completely unexpected places. And if taking all of that in and hanging out in this weird sprawling mess was exciting enough on its own, it seems obvious it was a valid approach to playing it.
