As we discovered last time when we examined Manic Miner, Miner Willy’s working life was arduous, risky, and set to royalty-free classical music on an endless loop. So, like anyone in the 1980’s, his chosen method of relaxation was to have a massive house party, which, if the popular cinema of the time is to be believed, would have been generously populated by nerds, dorks, dweebs, babes, jocks, frat boys, and mutant humans riding motorcycles up and down the stairs.

This kind of thing does require a bit of clearing up after, however. In this, the second in the hugely popular Miner Willy series, our partied-out subterranean robot dodger has to get his Marigolds on and tidy up his entire house before his housekeeper, Maria, will let him go to sleep. This is a slightly strange premise, as tidying up is presumably the sort of thing he is paying a housekeeper for in the first place, not to mention how an entire mansion can be purchased on a miner’s salary. But let’s leave hair-splitting to one side for now. Prepare to join Willy in his unfeasibly large house with its just-sack-me housekeeper and start chucking Domestos about.

Jet Set Willy is, as you might expect, a platform game. In essence, it is very similar to Manic Miner. The player controls Willy as he leaps about the place, collecting stuff, and as his house has sixty rooms in it, there is plenty of leaping and collecting to be done. The game keeps up a frantic pace by utilising the novel flip-screen method of going about things, which saves processor space by ‘flipping’ one background for another as soon as the controllable character (or ‘vehicle’, as it is more properly known) leaves a particular screen. You can’t be half in and half out of a room, basically.

Jet Set Willy also continued the series’ reputation for groundbreakingness by being one of the first games to attempt an anti-piracy defence. Pirating a computer game in the 1980’s was simple: you just copied the cassette. Easy. You could even copy it through air, negating the need for a swanky twin deck cassette player. Included with Jet Set Willy, however, was a card containing 180 colour codes, one of which had to be entered before the game would start. This didn’t stop the cassette iteself being copied, of course, but as quality full colour home reproduction was almost impossible in 1983, it doubtless enabled much more paper round money to be spent on original copies of the game than might otherwise have been expected.

We’ve observed before that the platform genre is by nature very limited, and requires genuinely good gameplay to maintain interest. Jet Set Willy has plenty of this. Many of the rooms require a mindbending degree of solvation, including the oddly named ‘We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg’ room, which is a reference to unfunny Eighties cartoon strip, Freddy’s Cat. For all the game’s laudable innovation, though, Jet Set Willy was a success simply because it is extremely engaging, and great fun. We’ll be following our favourite manual worker and party animal next time, in the Perils Of Willy. Heaven knows what scrapes the little tinker will be getting himself into.