JSW Central - Resource Centre for ZX Spectrum games based on Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines

Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines

II. Jet Set Willy (JSW48)

A. New games using Matthew Smith's original Jet Set Willy game engine for the 48K Spectrum and its modifications

58. GhoST oF WiLLY

Author: Carl Paterson

Publisher: CnP Projectz

Year: 2025 (v. 2)

Language: English

GhoST oF WiLLY is the fourth JSW game created by Carl Paterson. It was designed using JSWED 2.3.7. The game was released in June 2025 (v. 2; v. 1 was an unreleased development file) after some "postproduction" by Daniel Gromann.

The story: Jet Set Willy, the legendary adventurer, must come out of retirement after a curse originally meant for his descendant, Jet Set Junior, falls upon him. Stripped of his physical body and trapped in spirit form, Willy must return to his old mansion — now transformed into a surreal reflection of his own subconscious — to collect sacred relics and break the curse at Queen Maria’s altar. As he navigates twisted echoes of his past, the fate of the entire Jet Set family line hangs in the balance. The player must collect all the sacred relics — the Spirit Itemz — needed to reunite Willy’s mind with his body and lift the curse once and for all.

GhoST oF WiLLY features entirely new rooms and predominantly new guardian sprites. The game showcases specially crafted loading and title screens, as well as a unique font (called "Dead Forest", designed by Damien Guard). Furthermore, it features a superlong in-game tune, 1,536 bytes long, i.e. 24 times as long as the tune in the original JSW (actually composed of a series of shorter tunes, all in ternary time signatures, which is a first for JSW48 games).

Number of edited rooms: 61

Number of rooms accessible without cheating: 61

Number of rooms which need to be visited to complete the game: 61

Number of items to collect: 256

Bugfix needed after original release? NO

Spare lives at the start: 7

Completable without loss of life? NO

Lives which need to be sacrificed to complete the game: 3

(Three lives have to be sacrificed in "FrEE SuICiDe PoDZz" [14] in order to collect the three items there.)

Starting time: 7:00 am

Best documented completion time with no unnecessary loss of life: 9:53 am

Download links

Homepage	The game's home page on JSW Corner

Original release	The ZIP file of the original release of v. 2, including the game in TAP and TZX format, the Readme and info about the game's credits

Direct game download	Game file in TAP and TZX formats

Spectrum Computing	The game's page on Spectrum Computing

JSW Central	RZX walkthrough of the game showing the best documented completion time