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If you’re a British retro gamer, you’ll almost certainly know Jet Set Willy as Matthew Smith’s sequel to his seminal 8-bit platform game Manic Miner, but if you’re not, maybe you won’t know that Jet Set Willy was originally released for the 8-bit ZX Spectrum home computer back in 1984, and that it is regarded as one of the greatest games ever released for the ZX Spectrum.
And now, a homebrew coder by the name of Steve McCrea has ported Jet Set Willy to an 8-bit home computer that’s even older, and even less powerful than the 48K ZX Spectrum: the Commodore VIC-20, which, in its unexpanded form, has a mere 5KB of RAM.
Steve McCrea’s VIC-20 port of Jet Set Willy can run on an unexpanded VIC-20, impressively, and it can be downloaded now for free, along with its source code, via GitHub.
Jet Set Willy was originally developed by Matthew Smith, and published by Software Projects for the ZX Spectrum, way back in 1984, before receiving ports to a number of other formats, even making it onto the Xbox 360, back in 2012, but it never made it onto the VIC-20, until this fan port, some 42 years after the game’s original release.
