Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
Authors about their games
Leslie Marwick
The story of Spaceman Willy
[Submitted by Leslie Marwick in June 2019]
Finding a map of my Spaceman Willy mod on a Czech website recently got the memories of my Speccy days, and the fun I had with it, flooding back! I had even produced my own map of Spaceman Willy for my bedroom wall back in the 80's just like that one on the website, using printouts from my ZX Printer. Unlike later printers, the Spectrum used a small thermal printer that actually burned the images onto special paper that came in rolls that were more like shop till receipts, and I had then hand-coloured each one of them using felt tipped pens before sticking them onto a large sheet of card!!
Like many, I came to the Spectrum from Sinclair's previous computer the ZX81, and to be a gamer back then you were almost forced to learn the rudiments of programming too. There were hardly any games on tape for the ZX81. If you wanted a game back then you literally typed in the code from book or magazine listings and inevitably they would rarely work first time and you would then have to debug them to find your typos in the code or even misprints in the listings! This meant that by the time the Spectrum was released there were a lot of people who had programming knowledge and many more that enjoyed modding or hacking games because they had already developed the skills necessary. I was one of these people, and being a big fan of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy I could not resist the chance of creating my own version of one of my favourite games when the first JSW Editor was released. This editor was pretty unique at the time, but it had a lot of limitations. You could change the graphics, place walls and floors wherever you liked, and link the rooms in a different order. There were some major restrictions though - you could not change the position of any of the collectables in each room, or even the paths that the sprites followed! The swinging ropes could also not be altered. I can't remember, but the conveyor belts were probably immovable too. This made designing levels that were different from the original's quite tricky to do and required a lot of thought when connecting rooms together, especially the ones above and below others. Thinking about it now, I could probably have found where the co-ordinates for the collectables and sprite paths were stored and have edited them too, but at the time it didn't occur to me and I just worked around the editor's restrictions!
When I started work on Spaceman Willy I had just read about how Matthew Smith had included personal references both in the text and graphics in his games - like "Eugene's Lair", a level in Manic Miner named after Eugene Evans, a fellow employee at Bug-Byte Software, who had told Smith that Manic Miner would never work! Eugene's head appeared as a sprite in that level, and so I decided to do the same sort of thing in my Spaceman Willy mod. "Spikey Mikey" was a tribute to my brother Mike, who had just had a 'fashionable' haircut and so, for a laugh, I put his head in the level as well!! I was always a little rebellious, and so the safety pin sprite I designed for Spaceman Willy was a reference to my love of Punk music, and "Statue To A Saint", an ironic image of Willy taking a piss!! There are a few references to TV shows I enjoyed as well - "The Final Frontier" and "Transporter Beam" were named after Star Trek, and there's a Dalek sprite as a tribute to Dr Who. Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout appears, as well as the Mr. Men, another kids programme popular at the time. There are a couple of references to other Spectrum games - the trash can sprite was a reference to Trashman, another game I loved on the Speccy, and "The Real H.E.R.O." was a little dig at an Activision game from around the same time. The boxing glove sprite I added was a personal reference to a game I had written for the Spectrum, called Boxing Manager. I had sent this game to a company hoping to get it published (it could easily have been the same company that published the magazine tape that the JSW editor came on) but I heard nothing back. Over 5 years later though, I happened to look at a Spectrum game called The Boxer in a local shop, and was amazed to see my Boxing Manager graphics on the back cover! Apparently it was released on the Spectrum, C64 and the Amstrad computer, and there's even a "thank you to L.Marwick" in the actual game, but I never received a penny for it!! Maybe that's punishment for all the games I hacked in the past, which brings me to the other part of the Spaceman Willy story.
I used to love hacking games, making minor changes for my own personal enjoyment, and also removing the protection from games - I mostly just loved the challenge, but being unemployed I often couldn't afford to buy games that often either! It was these hacking skills that allowed me to share my Spaceman Willy creation with a few of my friends. At the time of its release, Jet Set Willy came with a colour card for piracy protection where you had to enter in a code each time to play the game. It was annoying to have to do this, and being a hacker I removed this protection when I first bought the game. Later, when I created Spaceman Willy, I also changed the music by just adding random notes instead of a tune, and I created a custom loading screen. I also removed the timer that was in the original game, as I always liked to take my time in games. Being an artist, I even drew my own tape cover (a copy of a famous NASA photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon), before finally giving Spaceman Willy to 3 or 4 friends that had ZX Spectrums. I must admit, I am very surprised to find that the game made its way onto the internet decades later!! It makes me wonder now how many people those few copies eventually found their way to, because at the time there was no real way to distribute stuff like this other than copying it directly from someone who already had a copy.
It's great to see that today there is still some interest in the Spectrum and its games. It was truly a wondrous time in video gaming history. The ZX Spectrum created such an amazing leap in games improvement over the ZX81's within a time span of less than a year - I don't think we'll ever see that sort of incredible development again!!!