Jet Set Willy turns 40 years old this month

[Steve]

If you're an old bastard UKer like me, when you were a kid you might have had one of several available home computers, the most popular for a time being the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, due to its low price. For many kids, it became their first time playing games that weren't on a console such as the Atari 2600, but it also opened up the doors for anyone to make and publish their own games.

At the time, most games were produced by a single programmer over the course of a few weeks/months. Jet Set Willy was created by a guy called Matthew Smith, who had made a couple of games previously, including the legendary Manic Miner, which was the first game on the Spectrum to have in-game music; something once deemed impossible due to the hardware limitations.

I remember Jet Set Willy fondly, but it was STUPIDLY hard, as almost all games of that era were. It was an action/adventure platformer, but to me it was more about discovering new rooms that your mates hadn't discovered than actually finishing the game, cos the latter felt so out of reach.

Here's a good video about it: -

 

[djdiggla]

I never heard of that game. This is the first game I remember playing on a computer. We had an amber screen which was interesting since most people had green ones. 

 

[Steve]

IIRC, the first one I played was Super ZX80 Invasion, which was a clone of Space Invaders for the ZX80. It was shite, due to the hardware being so weak; a 3MHz CPU with 1KB of RAM and no sound chip!

 

[Deft]

Jesus that video brings back some memories. I don’t recall those game breaking bugs but the weird arrow thing feels familiar. Absolutely bastard hard, sure I used some pokes to help.