Jet Set Willy remains one of my favourite games. I spent hours on the thing at the time, with me a nd a friend co-operatively trying to beat the game and win the competition. We didn't, as we missed it by about a week. But we did pick up a few things along the way. For example, I thought the attic bug was intended as a way to stop you going all but one certain route as you can easily complete it without getting it. I still have my original maps to demonstrate it. After we finished it, I wanted to still do more and my friend immediately set down to create an editor, which again, I still have the listing of to this day. His was to my knowledge the first person that did this as it was immediately after the competition was over.
@@SebsPlaceYT Thank you. I obviously have some very fond memories of this. Especially the illicit late nights I would sneak into the front room, and use the main colour telly, keeping the lights off so parents didn't know. Then I'd play until about sunrise and get a couple of hours' kip before going to work.
"Manic Miner" brings back great memories of the early days of computer games in Britain. In 1981 for Christmas our Dad bought the family a Sinclair Spectrum+ 128 k and a portable colour TV, analogue of course in those days, to go with it. We also bought a package of magnetic tape cassettes of games on offer. This included "Manic Miner" a classic platform game. People today will not appreciate the slow, tedious process of loading a game programme from magnetic tape. It was not always reliable either. We teens had lots of fun, but my middle-aged mother, who had showed little interest in the computer revolution discovered "Manic Miner" and became addicted. I always remember getting up in the morning during the Christmas holidays, and discovering that my mother had been up all night playing the game!
@neilj8224 I'm not sure because I am old and I may have remembered a year or two out, but I definitely know it was before Summer 1981 because of a family incident and we definitely had "Manic Miner" with it. This was in the UK, so I don't know if it was exported later than this. There was a Spectrum 2 which was later, but I'm not really sure about these details.
@@bhangrafan4480 Sorry, but you have something wrong. The ZX80 came out in 1980 and the ZX81 in 1981 (easy to remember). The original Spectrum was 23rd April 1982, and the Spectrum+ in October 1984. I had a (Spanish!) pre-production Spectrum+ fractionally before this through the software company I was working for at the time, but only a month or so early.
My god me and my friend at the time poured hours into Jet Set Willy, not to collect the items but to see all the rooms in the game. This used to be our thing regardless of the games, like Chuckie Egg 2 exploration was the main thing as i always found these games difficult to complete. Never knew these bugs existed to be honest, the only one we knew about was the endless drop death from one screen to another, groundhog day bug as i call it these days. This video makes me feel extremely old as i brought this on release, good to hear the game has been patched for todays players. Jet Set Willy is a classic and burned into our retro history for all sort of reasons. Great subject again mate 🙂
A note on the release date of Jetset Willy: I first saw this game running on multiple Spectrums as a release promotion in WH Smiths in Edinburgh on the Saturday after my 11th birthday, which turns out to be (after some research) 10th March 1984, when I bought one. I have been unable to find record of a release date for this important game but it must have been, I assume, between Monday 5th to Friday 9th March 1984. It was certainly available to buy on the 10th March 1984. (In case you were wondering, my other birthday purchases that day were Valhalla and Scuba Dive - a classic haul that has never been rivalled!)
Fantastic, thank you! It's actually so hard to pinpoint exactly, and the weekly magazines are often the closest you can get. So, thanks for that. Super interesting 👌
Was it not John Menzies back then? My mum used to divert around the whole block rather than deal with me trying to drag her in to John Menzies and down stairs
Jet Set Willy was the first home computer game I ever saw and played back in the mid eighties at my cousins house one Saturday afternoon. I was hooked immediately and wanted my own Speccy home computer as soon as possible. It's what got me into programming, game playing and loving computers full stop! 😎💻💯
WRITETYPER teleporting was my favoured way to play this, I just loved exploring the mansion, what an iconic video game location! The Your Spectrum article featuring the map and a roundup of all the pokes and oddities was one of my favourite reads when I was a kid.
One of the main games that I loved playing the most precisely because of that magical sense of adventure. Even today, I often hum a song from JSW and Manic Miner when I walk...
What memories. Back in the day there was a friend's cousin's brother who knew someone who had the fabled map of the entire house who wanted to charge anyone that desired to look at it. Then there was a friend that said at a certain time the boat would sail off to an island where you could collect more items. It took me ages to work out what pokes were! The myths of JSW!
Fun fact: the attic bug doesn't (initially) stop the game from being completable (unlike the inaccessible First Landing and Conservatory Roof items, and the unclimbable Banyan Tree). By saving the East Wall for last you can collect all the items before you have to visit the Attic, and from there you can go Under the Roof > Conservatory Roof > Orangery > Swimming Pool > Banyan Tree > Nightmare Room > First Landing > Top Landing > Master Bedroom and finish the game. The game is still corrupted afterwards though, so you can't beat it a second time unless you reload it again.
Yeah this was the spin they put on it. Poison gas was even mentioned I believe as a way of describing why some rooms were insta death and needed to be avoided. I guess if they lowered the amount of items needed to complete the game they might have gotten away with it. Cheers for the comment.
Always a treat to see this game. Nice dive into the bugs, Seb! I played this game a LOT as a kid, but never with the intention of completing it; I just liked to explore. I went back to it in 2017 and decided to complete it plus Manic Miner and JSW II. I succeeded in doing all three and it was so much fun to do. I recorded them (and Andy Noble's fantastic PC remakes) for my channel as well, so they are there for ever! As a kid I only recollect seeing the Banyan Tree bug. I had no idea that block wasn't supposed to be there. It didn't really click even after playing later versions.
After all these years, I've never heard of the First Landing bug 😯 With regards to the Attic bug - mine never did any of those weird things that happened in the video, all I remember is going into The Kitchen and then multiple insta-deaths - nothing as odd or as humourous as the things in the video! 😁 Great video, by the way 😀🤘
I came across Matt Smith on a Forum several years ago. It was an interesting experience as he was a new user of the software package that I was working on, he was building a CNC machine. As a kid I wanted to be Matt. As an adult I was glad that our paths had diverged. I was a much less successful "bedroom coder" of pretty much exactly the same age. My game (Johnny Reb) only sold 20,000 copies, netting me enough to buy a motorcycle, but not enough to mess my life up.
Oh my God! I spent hours, no, DAYS, WEEKS(!) on this game and experienced the arrow bugs. I didn't know they were bugs until this video. I remember thinking I just had a corrupt copy. The heady days of loading games via cassette... Halcyon days.
This brings back memories! I created one of the first modded Willy games... Spaceman Willy, back in 1985 using the first editor available (and some code hacking!) Unfortunately, sprite paths could not be changed back then, so I had to design all the levels using the original sprite paths, which was quite limiting, and challenging! I only gave a copy to 3 or 4 friends, so I was very surprised to find Spaceman Willy mentioned online and available for download, decades later!!
This is a classic speccy game, not one of my favourites, but have great memories of me and my mates playing it back in the 80s 😊 Brilliant content, and thanks for sharing dude 👍
I ran a computer shop after dropping out of Uni... I was the software buyer, particularly the games buyer, and after Manic Miner's success I figured I needed to buy plenty of these to meet demand... ordered probably 100 copies of this and still ran out the first weekend.
Same here mate. One of first 4 games we got Xmas 84 for our new c64. It also blew our minds and the exploration- which took MONTHS, was a highlight for us too
Ahhh Matt Smith meteoric rise and fall. Yeah ..the Attic bug was hilarious but frustrating as well. I poked it out in the end. Christ. Has it really been 40 years?! Ugg. Love these retrospectives and makes me smile when I learn something new and adult about a game I loved a kid. Did you know for example, Design Design (them of the Hall of Things and Dark Star) didn't actually own a spectrum? They compiled it all on another machine, which is why they managed to get some super efficient code and even managed to figure a way to draw graphics in the border of the screen!!? The little jabs at Sinclair User and Ultimate in the high score prompts were hilarious. Ahh... so much endorphins from remembering the good old days. Cheers!
Nice. I did manage to complete JSW back in the day, on a real Speccy. Was expecting Willy to just go to bed and have a nice happy ending, so it frit the bejabbers out of me when instead he suddenly took off to the right on autopilot at double-speed. After all that work, I was convinced it had bugged-out and was going to run me into the penknife sprite and there was nothing I could do to stop it... Swearing soon turned to laughter, though, when I got the joke and realised it was an urgent trip to the loo to puke his guts up after collecting all of those alcofrolic pick-ups. Quality trolling from Mr Smith there. Yep, I remember the rumours and nonsense in the magazines of the time, claiming that visiting The Attic released some kind of gas into the mansion that caused all those weird effects. We didn't have the internet back then, so people would believe pretty much anything. This was around the same time that rumours were going around about the mysterious trailer attachment that you could get in Lunar Jetman, and some magazine even published photographic "proof" of that one ... presumably just a screenshot that had been doctored in an art package. Seemed legit, though 😆 People don't know how lucky they are these days, being able to just go online and find out pretty much instantly whether things are bugs or features, and whether there's any truth to videogame rumours...
I had this one on an Amstrad, and it was pretty close to a direct port. Slightly better music, but the graphics where *very* similar, including the "xor flip" style of monochrome sprite blitting (The amstrad had better ways of doing it, but it was kind of standard with a lot of ZX stuff, and I suspect a lot of ports from ZX to Amstrad just took the code and made the minimum changes needed to get it to work) Whatever the case , I loved this game.
Interesting, do see it a lot with some CPC games and it's such a shame. When they made games actually for the system it knocks the socks off the other 8 bit micros. I was playing smash tv today and it's crazy good on the CPC.
As a yank, it sucks we never got this game. But then again the US Spectrum, the Timex 2068, was a commercial failure and was pulled from shelves before Jet Set Willy was even finished. At least there are easy ways to emulate the Spectrum, even on the 2068 itself.
This and manic miner drove me insane Thanks for the earworm Im going to go outside and kick my own arse in memory of the hours i spent on my spectrum. Thank fuck i moved to holland in 86. Didnt need a computer they had other things i could enjoy ,old amsterdam cheese obviously. Thanks for the sleepless night. Greetings 🇱🇺🍺🍺🇬🇧
@@SebsPlaceYT I found some code on Github by Rob Robin that makes an animated map of JSW2. You need an old version of Love 2 to run it, but it is very cool. I made a screen recording of it running.(I think RU-vid ate the first post of this comment, as I put links in it...)
It's been a few years since I went in my insane "I'm going to finish this bloody thing if it kills me" hyperfixation run, and I'd forgotten how incessant "if I were a rich man" is. I'll be hearing that in my sleep again.
I'm not sure if it was Jet Set Willy or Jet Set Willy II which came with a colour sheet of paper with hundreds of different colours and numbers on it which you had to input the corresponding colour and number at the start of the game in order to play it. In those days no one had colour printers. A friend of mine in school made an a4 sheet with every colour and number wrote out and photocopied he was a hero in the local nerd community lol
I vividly remember when this came out that the word went round the primary school playground that there was a colour-coded anti-piracy thing that the game had. To my ten year old mind this seemed like some kind of witchcraft. As for the game, I just used to wander round trying to visit as many rooms a possible.
Thank you for the great video. I started as a kid on the Speccy with Manic Miner and still play it today. I admit being fascinated back than with Jet Set Willy, but never came far in this game, so that was my way of bugfixing. Is there a fixed version of JSW? I would give it another try. ❤
I couldn't play this game when it was initially released as only had a 16k spectrum at the time (this ran on the 48k) Also remember getting a tape copy and then trying to find somewhere with a colour photocopier as the security code to make the game start was based on a grid of colours on a card. I do remember actually paying for Jet Set Willy 2 though
I never completed that bloody game, or manic miner for that matter. Could never get the jumps right and didn't have the patience to try. My friend Paul and I wrote a letter to Software Projects and got a list of Pokes back from them which made the game more bearable to me.
Hell would be the beeper version of If I were a rich man on repeat forever. I'd want to forcibly remove my ears after an hour. After a week I would be too far gone to recover and would be fit for a rubber room. After a month...
The guy who won the competition to complete the game programmed a very nice MSX version. Hudson soft release it in Japan and it was received very negatively and is remembered as one of the platforms worst games. It was considered too difficult and unfair even though the player was given twice as many lives
It's not a bug, it's a feature! 🤨Considering the strain poor Matthew Smith was under making the game, it's perhaps not surprising these "features" crept into the game. Nice overview.
I remember playing what I was sure was this when I was a kid with my Dad, and you had to wait for a boat to come and pick you up, you had to wait until like midnight on the game clock. Does anyone have any ideas what game it could be? Been racking my brains forever trying to find it..
Can anyone explain what the PEEK and POKE codes did and how they worked? I used to have a big list to remove monsters, give infinite life, go invisible in one of the rooms, fall through rooms, loads of odd things.
As for pokes, my basic understanding was that most speccy games loaded a bit of basic first for loading screen etc and then the machine code bit after. If you intercepted the loading between the basic loader and the machine code, you could POKE around at the machine code and alter the bits that changed lives etc... PEEK was basically peeking at the Values of the machine code if you wanted to see what values where that you could change. That's a very basic explanation. Anymore in depth would be up to someone else to give 🙃
I rang the software company in '84 and asked when it would be released... They didn't know and gave me Matthew's phone number. I called him and had a chat.. he didn't know exactly when anyhow..😮😮
Anyone remember the secret area that was suppose to unlock if you waited on the boat for over 10 hours,left my speccy on all night a few times hoping to unlock it but was just a hoax,unless its true and i did something wrong🤔
Yep it did loads of different things in lots of rooms. It was pretty hard to move around honestly once the chain reaction was set off. Even with invicibility you still got stuck in places. They tried to make out all the nasties from the Chapel etc had moved to thwart your exit.....
No this is that exact attic bug, it does a lot of things. I have a copy with it and a copy without it. The Chapel bit is just the bit retrogaming youtubers focus on because the Crash page mentions it. But its not even the weirdest or most notable thing the bug does but I guess missing enemies is easy to demonstrate. .
@@medes5597 I played this from new and remember it well, perhaps there are later releases that alters what you see, but that in the video is not what happened back in 1984
@@Zaph0dThis isn't what you saw in 1984 because you didn't have invincibility POKEd in. This is what the attic bug does but you don't normally see it because you die as soon as you enter these rooms. The game normally kills Willy whenever a guardian collides with anything, including level terrain, so corrupted rooms become instant deathtraps.
Now I know why I could never finish that game. I tried, for hours. Being driven mad by the music. Searching for ways to get to the items I could see. Fffffffff!!!
