Jet Set Willy 3

[Pixel Stonk]

Hello fellow fans of Willy!

I have created what I am hoping to be the first official sequel to Jet Set Willy since The Final Frontier. It is a PC game and has been written from scratch and so is entirely stand-alone. Like JSW2 was an expansion of JSW, this is a further expansion of JSW2, it is set 35 years after that game, and it is virtually finished. It contains nearly 500 rooms, 6 difficulty levels, achievements, and a whole host of other new features, while still retaining the look and feel and, most importantly, gameplay of the original games.

I am having some legal issues with getting the game released, however, which I am hoping may be resolved with the help of Matthew Smith. I have attached a trailer for the game to provide a glimpse of it, as I am hoping if someone here is interested in this and knows how to contact Mr Smith, or knows someone who knows how to contact him, that they might let him know about this project and perhaps ask him to get in touch with me about it.

I have many more videos, screenshots, maps and other assets that I can share if necessary too.

Thank you.

[Spider]

Welcome! 🙂

That looks very good. Lots of features!

I've seen the (MSDOS then Windows) PC remake of the original JSW by Andy Noble and they were and still are very good all-in-all.

I wonder as its JSW2 you may be perhaps best to try to contact say Derrick Rowson and/or Steve Wetherill. I'm not 100% if the latter author was involved in the Spectrum version of JSW2 or not. Certainly afaik the Amstrad CPC version which was ported over (sort of)

It is certainly worth looking here and checking that page as well as the main JSW2 page and the 'About Author' page. I do not know how accurate or up to date the contact details are but there's no harm in a pleasant email I guess. 🙂

 

[Pixel Stonk]

Thank you for your quick response, Spider. I appreciate your feedback.

I believed Derrick Rowson made JSW2 for Software Projects and so does not own the copyright to it, but maybe I am wrong about this so I will certainly look into it. Either way, JSW2 takes a great deal from JSW and so I am sure the original game's copyright ownership would still be of importance. I have done quite a bit of digging and there is some dispute over who does own the rights to the game, but I am hoping that if I can get in touch with Matthew Smith (or if he can get in touch with me) there may be a way to reach a resolution.

Again, thank you very much for your help.

[Spider]

You're very welcome @Pixel Stonk 🙂

I'm hoping a few other members of our community may be able to perhaps provide some ideas / thoughts on this matter.

I think the whole (c) issue may be not that clear really. To be honest I've heard various versions aka 'hearsay' so I honestly do not know what is fact or fiction on it...

[CPL]

As Spider said - it's not particularly clear. Sadly, I don't think Matthew Smith owns any of the rights to it so wouldn't be able to help.

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00003081930

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/jet-set-willy-zx-spectrum/id418193849

The registered trademark appears to be owned by Elite Systems and they also released the iOS version - so I'd say they're your best bet.

[jetsetdanny]

 

Welcome to the forum, Pixel Stonk 🙂 

Your project looks VERY impressive, it's great stuff really! 👍

I don't quite understand why you want to make it an "official" sequel to JSW and JSW II. Such an ambition makes you an obvious target for those who claim to be (or indeed are) the current owners of the copyright. From this point of view it would be much easier to release the game as a free, non-profit offering and abstain from any claims of anything "official".

Still, if you do want to make it official, I wish you the best of luck in negotiating with the current copyright owners.

I can't tell you anything with any degree of certainty, but when I last investigated this issue a little bit more than two years ago, I came to the conclusion that the current copyright owner for both Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner is:

Andrews UK Limited

Suite 112, Crystal House, New Bedford Road, Luton, Bedfordshire, LU1 1HS, United Kingdom

The details for JSW are here and for MM here.

Look at all the tabs there. The copyright clearly refers to retro computer games. Interestingly, in the graphic, Willy's hat is different, it looks more like from "Willy's New Hat" than from the original.

Interestingly, this is a different copyright owner than the one that CPL has indicated. So perhaps that's the beginning of a legal dilemma for you...

In any case, I don't believe Matthew Smith owns the copyright (or any part thereof) any more, from a strictly legal point of view. Nevertheless, if you want to contact him, try contacting Paul Drury of Retro Gamer fame (pauldrury64 at hotmail.com) - I have reasons to believe he may be in touch with Matthew, at least from time to time.

[Spider]

I agree with Danny's post above.

However (sorry) to further add to the mix itself, copyright and trademarks are not the same thing...

Plenty of information online (maybe best to make sure you're looking at a UK site not a US or elsewhere one as there are going to be differences I suspect)

From here for an example, there are more it is merely the first one I saw.

To my mind at least (rightly or wrongly) a trademark is more about protecting a name/brand/images and copyright is more about protecting works, ie: written or otherwise.

 

 

[Pixel Stonk]

Wow! Thank you everyone for your information and suggestions. I greatly appreciate it.

It does appear as I feared, that this won't be an easy problem to solve, if indeed it even has a solution.

I shall continue to investigate and let you know what I find.

Thanks again to all for your time and effort.

[jetsetdanny]

Andy (Spider), thank you for the link, it's very interesting. I wasn't aware of the difference between copyright and trademark.

Pixel Stonk, do let us know once you have more information about the current legal situation of JSW - it's always good to know.

And good luck with your project - it's really impressive and it will be great if you manage to complete it successfully! 🙂

P.S. I have one maths problem with the info you've given:

In the ad, it says that the game includes "all classic rooms from the original games" "plus over 200 never seen before".

In your post, you say that the game contains "nearly 500 rooms".

The "classic rooms from the original games" would be 134 rooms from "Jet Set Willy II" (that also include the 60 rooms from the original "JSW") plus possibly 20 rooms from "Manic Miner" (if they are included). So the addition of "over 200" rooms never seen before brings the total number up to some 350. That's still a long way from the nearly 500 you've mentioned.

Any comment on this?

[Spider]

To my mind, and this I should say is just my completely personal opinion and has no weight at all:

The 'trademarks' which on the pages that Danny linked to, contain the titles and a few graphics, I'd (again my invalid opinion) suspect what you can see is all that is trademarked. As previous, copyright is a different matter.

It is interesting as noted previously the sprites for the player sprites (aka: "Willy" and/or "Miner Willy") are not identical that I see to -any- original 8bit or even 16bit (ST/Amiga) release, the 'headgear' specially.

The JSW 'written' text looks vaguely similar to iirc the Amstrad CPC title screen and the block version of the same appears to match the ZX and other variants, obviously no flash effect and the two colour choices vary between JSW1 and JSW2.

The MM 'Chunky' two colour letters look like an inlay title text, I've not researched how close they are, and the "multicoloured per character" text matches the ZX version, apart from the colours being wrong. It should be 2/6/4/5/3 then 5/3/2/6/4