Jet Set Willy

Rich from his mining exploits, Willy has bought a mansion and thrown a legendary party. Now it's the morning after, and his housekeeper Maria stands guard at the bedroom door: not one wink of sleep until every glass and bottle littering the house has been tidied away. So begins Jet Set Willy, Matthew Smith's 1984 sequel to Manic Miner — and one of the most influential games of the 8-bit era.

Where Manic Miner marched you through its caverns one by one, Jet Set Willy handed you a whole mansion — around sixty interconnected rooms, from the wine cellar to the roof, plus a beach and a yacht — and let you wander freely. This open, exploratory structure made it an early ancestor of what players now call the Metroidvania.

The game is also famous for its bugs: the original release could not actually be finished (the notorious Attic bug corrupted other rooms), and Software Projects had to publish official POKEs to fix it. It shipped with a colour-code card as copy protection, sold enormously anyway, and its surreal humour — nuns in the chapel, a razor-toothed Monty Python foot — has never been matched.

The version linked here is our own remake, built on the same custom svision engine as our Manic Miner, reproducing the original room by room in any modern browser — with the game-breaking bugs mercifully fixed. The About page tells the remake's full story.