Jet Set Willy

But it was easy to be taken in due to the game's seemingly endless scope. Some scamp sent a letter into Your Spectrum magazine saying that if you stood on the bow of Willy's yacht at the strike of midnight (game time) you'd sail off to a mysterious desert island. I can only guess at how many readers were fooled by that rapture-like prediction.

Even publisher Software Projects added to the myths surrounding the game by announcing a secret 'feature'. Apparently, visiting The Attic would trigger a chain reaction where four screens would suddenly turn 'bad', instantly killing you if you tried to enter them.

It claimed that this was intended to make the game more difficult, yet hacking into the code unsurprisingly revealed that it was actually an unfortunate bug which corrupted those previously accessible screens.

There were other bugs too. Some messed up the placement of certain objects, making it impossible to collect all 83 of them and therefore complete the game. Software Projects issued a fix in the form of values which you 'poked' into memory before loading the game.

For some, this required game patch (the first one ever?) took the shine off Jet Set Willy. In contrast, Manic Miner was a really tight and polished piece of code. At the very least it had been play-tested through to completion.

Bugs seemed to infest Jet Set Willy. Following its debut on the Spectrum, the game was ported to several other machines by different programmers and most of them managed to bugger up something or other. As with the Spectrum version, the Commodore 64, Dragon 32 and BBC Micro releases couldn't be finished either.

But I was never too bothered about the bugs. For me, Jet Set Willy was never about completing the game anyway. It was more about being invited to explore Willy's vast mansion, and by extension, Matthew Smith's alien brain. Bizarre screens such as The Nightmare Room, Nomen Luni and We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg were baffling and brilliant.

As much as I love the game I don't think I'll ever try and finish it properly. Repeatedly trying (and failing) to grab objects from devious screens like The Banjan Tree or Conservatory Roof would surely drive me crazy. It would become tedious. It would become like Manic Miner.

Instead of trying to progress I'd prefer to regress; to wipe the game from my memory so that I could play it for the first time and explore afresh. From the beginning I'd head through the kitchens to the west wing, then up to the battlements on the roof before leaving the house and climbing the MegaTree. And when I'd done that, I'd probably wander over to Willy's yacht and wait until midnight. You know, just in case.