Jet Set Willy 3

[Spider]

It does seem a legal minefield as mentioned.

[Sendy The Endless]

Modern law and corporate culture feels like walls caving in on us. I've noticed this in the music scene - copyright suits over chord sequences, snippets of music from passing cars in casual videos getting censored. Zooming out we have large companies like Disney and big record labels scooping up entire catalogs of artists' works and prolonging copyright laws... And more recently, we have in I.T. and A.I. the entire works of the human race being used as training data for algorythms (which are, to be fair, genius and terrifying at the same time) - similarly to how when Big Blue beat chess master Kasperov, IBM had all access to Kasparov's prior games, openings and stategies. It was an asymmetric battle designed to boost IBM's stocks.

And all these artists' hard work is being used so that they can be made obsolete. I mean, even more obsolete than they are in this age of micro attention spans and overworked/stressed/gaslit populaces.

Sorry, bit of a rant, and probably not very helpful to the O.P. I just find the way corporate and legal strata are growing WAY beyond their remit, into our culture, our minds and memories a bit Orwellian, or perhaps even Kafka-esque. Mods, feel free to move this to the general chat... but this does remind me a bit of that whole Jester Interactive debacle that happened on the Yahoo forums. THAT turned out to be a nothingburger, but times are different now.

To the O.P; the only thing I can suggest is to change the name and appearance of the main character. Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner aren't exactly juggernaut I.Ps these days, so I don't know why that would be needed, but there you go.

Edited February 7, 2023 by Sendy The Endless
Spelled "Kasperov" wrong

[Jet Set Willie]

On 2/17/2022 at 11:10 PM, MtM said:

In truth, is anyone really going to try and sue anyone these days over such an old game? No one is going to make any money really. How much would you make from a new official jsw game? Very difficult to see more than a few thousand pounds to me, not really life changing sums, not in the long term. I would just publish and see what happens, worst case scenario make a donation to a charity to offset any legal challenges.

I would say "The big N", if this was about their copyright. They even were nasty enough to make money with the other guys´ work, the guys´ who started to steal their money with Great Giana Sisters, as some years ago "the big N" published a Giana Sisters based game..... sounds like a revenge.

Also, Big Five is still making money (at least they were few years ago) with their old game character Bounty Bob. They had published a cell game based on their Miner 2049'er. 🙂 This "such an old game" is even older than Jet Set Willy or Manic Miner. 🙂 😉

 

On 2/18/2022 at 9:21 AM, Pixel Stonk said:

Things were going well and we had almost reache d an agreement when, about a year ago, he decided to back out due to the dispute with Matthew Smith over ownership. Although I suggested bringing Matthew Smith into the conversation and perhaps trying to come to a mutual arrangement that would benefit us all, Steve Wilcox was not interested and insisted that I do not release the game.

I don´t know the truth, but to me it sounds like Mr. Wilcox may not own all the rights or at all, as he suddenly backed out after there should have been a dispute about Matthew´s ownership. I can´t say anything about this, but there are cases people acting that way when they are claiming to own something but are actually lying.

I will bring in my own suggestion now. Why not publish the game as "A highly enhanced version based on Matthew Smith´s original Bug-Byte®️ game Manic Miner®️"? 🙂 If Matthew owns the rights to Bug-Byte®️ version of Manic Miner®️ and if you can make him to allow you to publish your game as a highly enhanced (Bug-Byte®️) Manic Miner®️ game with a new "Free-walkies™️®️" system what allows Miner Willy®️ to freely walk from room to room, this would make things much more easier. 🙂 I wrote the name "Bug-Byte" there, but you shouldn´t use the words "Bug-Byte", unless you ask a permission from somebody who owns rights to Bug-Byte or make an agreement to pay royalty or something to use their "Bug-Byte" name. Please re-design some of the graphics to be more Bug-Byte Miner Williesque, at least Willy´s hat. 🙂 Just my thoughts.

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by Jet Set Willie

[Jet Set Willie]

I don´t know enough about legal things, but if you can´t get a permission or rights to use words "Bug-Byte" in your game, maybe you could get around that problem by simply calling your game as an "enhanced version of Matthew Smith´s first version of Manic Miner" or something like that. I´ll suggest you to use some lawyer even just to get few answers what is possible. Depending on your salary, you might get free lawyer services if your income is small enough? Try to find and ask where and how you might get free advice. But this probably depends on where you live.

[Jet Set Willie]

I don´t know either, if Pixel Stonk will continue to get his game published as an official sequel, but I thought that maybe my suggestion might help anybody else who has similar thoughts.

If you really want to know the answer who owns the rights to Miner Willy games, maybe you could arrange a fund-raising campaign to get the money to hire a lawyer to find out the real right owners and to know what rights they really own. Of course, the copyright owners (or possibly the ones who falsely claim that) might then hire their own lawyer to show they have the rights. That may mean that you still can´t know the truth. But with such fund-raising to hire a lawyer you may not lose anything, except your time. At least if you can get enough money to pay the expenses if you go to the court and lose the case. But just having the lawyer to find out things is "cheaper" and you don´t have to go to the court if you don´t want to. That is, in the more democratic countries, at least.

Pixel Stonk, if you are still reading this, I was very interested about your Willy sequel! Only problem was, that it was not made for 1/2-1Mb Amiga 500s. 😉 🥺

Edited February 9, 2023 by Jet Set Willie

[Pixel Stonk]

Thanks everyone. I've decided that it is too much hassle to pursue making this an official release. As such, for now, I have setup a website that will allow anyone to play an HTML version of JSW3. You can simply visit this website on any modern browser and play the game here:

jsw3.co.uk

No downloading is required as the game is entirely in the page. It takes a while to load for the first time (it is quite a big game), but once it does it is all fully playable in the browser.

Controls are simple. Left and right arrow moves Willy, up or spacebar makes him jump. The game does not play 100% like the original games. Certain quality of life changes have been made to make things a little smoother. One of these changes is in how ropes work, as left and right make Willy climb based on different rules than in the original JSW games.

Please bear in mind that this although it  has been tested quite extensively, it was never completely finished and tested, so there may some small bugs.

I hope you enjoy JSW3. All feedback is appreciated. 🙂

Thanks again.

[Pixel Stonk]

Also, note that although the game should load ok on mobile devices, it requires a keyboard to play so it may not be practical. As such it is probably best played on a desktop computer or laptop.

[Sendy The Endless]

Played on both my computer and (newer) laptop, and while this really does feel like JSW3 and I love what I'm seeing, I'm getting lag spikes, tiny ones at first that don't bother me, but as I continue to play, they evolve into 10-second long pauses. Memory leak perhaps?

Your approach to room design really captures the original, though, and that is no mean feat! More to come later...

 

[Pixel Stonk]

Thanks for trying it out Sendy and thanks for the feedback!

Yes, it may not run as smoothly as it could as it is a browser-based version of the game. I haven't encountered any serious lag problems myself when testing, and I have had to make a few updates today which may have caused some slowdown while the new files were uploading. Hopefully it will run better from now on.

[CPL]

@Pixel Stonk - Thanks for releasing that!

I've had a quick play. Some really nice touches in there. You've clearly put a huge amount of work into it. I like the idea of the Music Room a lot. When I get a bit more time I'll sit and have a proper explore of the new mansion.

I'm hitting the lag problem occasionally too. Maybe release an excecutable build on Itch.io?

Edited February 11, 2023 by CPL