Jet Set Willy (Xbox 360)

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Description

Cult hero Matthew Smith followed up Manic Miner with a seminal platform game. Having struck it lucky in the first game, Willy now owns a lavish mansion with over 60 rooms linked in a 3D plane, and must tidy it all before his housekeeper will let him sleep.

Each room has its own hazards, such as spikes, revolving razors and ropes. The route through the house must be navigated carefully, due to the multiple entrances to some rooms - this is perhaps the first action game where mapping is an advantage. Another innovation, to the chagrin of players everywhere, is manual protection - a sheet of colour-coded numbers.

Screenshots

There are no Xbox 360 screenshots for this game.

There are 96 other screenshots on file for other versions of this game.

Alternate Titles

• "La Casa de Jack" -- Spanish title
• "Jetset Willie" -- Alternate title (C64 media)

Part of the Following Group

• Miner Willy series

User Reviews

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Trivia

1001 Video Games

Jet Set Willy appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Amstrad version

The Amstrad version of Jet Set Willy was the original official expansion of Jet Set Willy by Software Projects. This expansion was written by Derrick P. Rowson and Steve Wetheril, and contains 132 rooms. This expanded version is the basis of Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier.

Author

The author of Jet Set Willy wrote the game and its predecessor Manic Miner before he was 18.

Music

The music playing in the background is If I were a Rich Man from the US Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, first performed in 1964.

Ports

Circa 1989, Paul Taylor and Carl Whitwell worked on an Atari ST conversion of this game for Software Projects -- late enough in the title's life that the painstaking port (disassembled code read off the Spectrum's monitor and typed into the Atari's keyboard, screen data dumped as hex and dictated to a typist) was never released to the commercial market. During the same period Shahid Ahmad worked on an Amiga port that met a similar fate of obscurity.

Awards

• ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)
  • February 1991 (issue #41) - Included in the list Greatest Games of all Time, section Platform-based Games (editorial staff choice)
• Happy Computer
  • Issue 04/1985 - #3 Best Game in 1984 (Readers' Vote) (Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum version)
• Retro Gamer
  • October 2004 (Issue #9) – #7 Best Game Of All Time (Readers' Vote)
  • May 2007 (Issue 37) - #6 in the "Top 25 Platformers of All Time" (poll)

Information also contributed by PCGamer77 and Pseudo_Intellectual.

Related Web Sites

• Jet Set Willy for Atari ST (archiived) (Original developer Paul Taylor tells the story of the development of the 16-bit versions and offers the ST version for download.)