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

 

V. Jet Set Willy 64 (JSW64)

Games using John Elliott's JSW64 family of game engines for the 128K Spectrum

 

21. Willy Meets The Beatles

Authors: Simon D. Lee and Paolo Arus

Year: 2012

Language: English

 

Willy Meets the Beatles was the second JSW game gamma-released by Simon D. Lee (TechnicianSi), in collaboration with Paolo Arus (DarkHorace) who created the music. It was originally released in January 2012, followed by a bug-fixed revision in April 2012.

The game, an obvious tribute to the legendary band of the 1960s, lacks a background story. The premise displayed in the scrolling title-screen message is actually an unmodified text from Simon's first game, Vampire Hunter Willy, and is apparently unrelated to this particular adventure of Willy's. The music — "Back in the USSR" on the title screen and "Lady Madonna" as the in-game tune — is played using SoundTracker. Willy Meets the Beatles was the first JSW64 game to utilise this solution. In fact, the game's development inspired John Elliott to release version 2.3.5 of JSWED, which introduced the option to replace Ian Collier's default JSW64 music player with the SoundTracker player by BZYK (Piotr Baczkiewicz).

The last officially released bug-fixed revision still contained one critical bug that went unnoticed for over a decade, even though an RZX recording of the game was published by Pavel Plíva (Pavero) on the RZX Archive immediately after the revision's release. The issue occurred with the right exit from the room "End of an Era" (59), where the toilet run begins. This exit was mistakenly set to loop back to the same room. As a result, during the toilet run, Willy would repeatedly re-enter the room on the left after exiting on the right, instead of proceeding to the intended final room, "Free as a Bird" (60). This room was clearly meant to serve as the ending, as evidenced by its content — "The End" and "Thank You For Playing" — and by the author's comment on WoS, where he referred to "Free as a Bird" as "the final screen". A bug-fixed version of the game, correcting this problem, created by Daniel Gromann in November 2024, is available for download below.

The game uses Variant Y, Hacklevel 12 of the JSW64 game engine.

 

Number of edited rooms: 64

Number of rooms accessible without cheating: 64

Number of rooms which need to be visited to complete the game: 60

(The rooms "A Dolls House" [39] and "I am the Walrus" [61] can be omitted without affecting the game completion time; the rooms "All the Lonely People" [27] and "(She's So Heavy)" [49] could be omitted, but an unnecessarily complicated route would have to be taken in order to complete the game.)

Number of items to collect: 176

 

Bugfix needed after original release? YES

Official bugfix released? YES

Further bugfix needed? YES

Third-party bugfix released? YES

Spare lives at the start: 7

Bonus lives awarded? NO

Completable? YES (Bed-completable only)

(The game is not toilet-completable because — by conscious design — during the toilet run Willy does not go to the 'toilet', but remains in the room "Free as a Bird" [60], which he keeps leaving on the right and re-entering from the left.)

Completable without loss of life? NO

Lives which need to be sacrificed to complete the game: 1

(A life has to be sacrificed to collect the lowermost item in "The Morecambe & Wise Show" [11].)

 

Starting time: 7:00 am

Best documented completion time with no unnecessary loss of life: 8:02 am

(The game is considered to be completed once Willy reaches the room "Free as a Bird".)

 

Download links

Direct game download	Game files of both the official release and the third-party bug-fixed version in TZX and Z80 format
JSW Central	Game files of the bug-fixed version in TZX and Z80 format plus a Readme
World of Spectrum	The game's page on WoS
Spectrum Computing	The game's page on Spectrum Computing
Speccy Screenshot Maps	The game's map on Speccy Screenshot Maps
JSW Central	RZX walkthrough of the bug-fixed version of the game showing the best documented completion time
RZX Archive	RZX walkthrough of the game on the RZX Archive (erroneously ending in "End of an Era", with one life unnecessarily lost in "Candlestick Park" [28] and with a completion time which is inferior to the best publicly available recording)

 

 

Video

 

A walkthrough of the bug-fixed version of the game on the JSW Central YouTube channel

 

 

A complete screenshot gallery will be presented on this page in the future.

 

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