Jet Set Willy

After conquering the mines in Manic Miner, miner Willy faced a task many consider even more devilish: to tidy up his own gigantic mansion before the housekeeper lets him go to bed. So begins Jet Set Willy, one of the most ambitious adventures of the ZX Spectrum era.

Unlike its single-screen predecessor, Jet Set Willy is a huge interconnected world - dozens of adjoining rooms that you roam freely and that form one great explorable labyrinth. Your task is to collect all the scattered items strewn across the entire estate, from the roof through the wine cellar to the surrounding grounds. It is one of the early examples of an open, non-linear structure where you choose your own path and gradually map out where you can and cannot go.

Behind the game once again stands Matthew Smith, who here developed everything he had hinted at in Manic Miner: precise jumping mechanics, deadly timing and a distinctive humor full of absurd enemies. The mansion is full of traps, moving platforms and spots where a single mistimed jump means the loss of a life. The game also became famous for its notorious difficulty and, in its original release, for bugs that in some versions made completion impossible - which turned it into a topic of endless debate among players.

Working with space is essential here. Instead of memorizing a single screen, you must build a map of the whole house in your head, plan routes and go back for items you could not reach before. In this way Jet Set Willy foreshadowed the style of games where discovery and orientation within the world are just as important as reflexes.

Culturally it belongs among the absolute icons of the British 8-bit. Together with Manic Miner it forms a pair on which the entire home computer scene grew up, and Willy became one of the first true video game characters that British players knew by name. The game inspired countless sequels, clones and fan modifications.

Why play: For the feeling of standing at the birth of the open game world - a giant, demanding and idiosyncratically funny mansion that defined how far an 8-bit platformer could go.