Thank you to all the JSWMM community!

[MikeH]

I just discovered the Jet Set Willy homebrew scene about 2 months ago and have been steadily ploughing my way through the back catalogue. Wow! I am so impressed with what people have achieved and the scene that has grown up around JSW and Manic Miner over the last forty years.

I remember playing Jet Set Willy on my older cousin's Spectrum 48k with him when I was very young. I remember that it was hard, that it had an incredible atmosphere and that it sparked something in the imagination. I don't think either of us were very good at it, but we loved playing it nonetheless. Fast forward to a couple of years ago and I got into retro gaming handhelds. This was a huge nostalgia blast, and let me re-live some of my favourites from the Speccy, C64 and Amiga. Just before Christmas I gave Manic Miner a go. It was a game I had never played back in the day, but with the advantage of save states I was able to really get into it. Then I thought to have another look at JSW and noticed there was at least a dozen remakes included in the rom pack I had found. This was intriguing to me, as some of the best games I had recently played on other platforms (such as NES) had been homebrew games. I started dipping my toe in and I got hooked!

Now I'm playing a JSW remake every day. I load it up on my handheld with my morning coffee. I bring it with me in the car when I take the kids to activities. And after they're finished their homework I delve in again. They say "Dad, you're always playing Jet Set Willy!".

One of the "problems" of the retro gaming handheld thing is that with almost every title ever published available at your fingertips it can be quite hard sometimes to choose what to play. At the moment I'm loving the idea of playing a series of games with the same mechanics, but different concepts. I am absolutely loving the experience of exploring Middle Earth, Egyptian pyramids, the life of Doc Shiels, space stations and lairs of dominatrix vampires. I think there's something really special about the ability to name each room that acts as a kind of springboard for the imagination.

I want to say a huge thanks to the people that have been involved in the scene down through the years. To have something to fill the idle hours of the day that is not served to me by a social media algorithm but has instead emerged from the dedication of an individual artist who loves their subject is priceless.

And I'd like to say a special thanks to the people who have been involved in efforts to preserve and present this body of work. I have consulted Danny's JSW Central and his YouTube channel many, many times when I've been stuck on a game, or need inspiration for what to play next. Without this I would be lost, literally!

[jetsetdanny]

Hi Mike,

Thank you so much for posting here and for your kind words! 😊

Your post is really exceptional, because it’s not often that we get this kind of elaborate testimony related to the MM and JSW games. I am particularly thrilled to learn that you appreciate the homebrew games that have kept the scene going, as I have spent a lot of time and effort over the years emphasising their value and fighting the concept — sometimes found outside the MM/JSW community — that a game is “just another MM/JSW clone” and, for that reason, not even worth taking a look at. I have always argued that there are many *new games*, made using the exquisite game mechanics and some concepts of the original games, but new titles in their own right, to which their authors dedicated a great deal of time, effort and skill — in many cases probably hundreds of hours of work — with excellent results.

I am also very pleased, of course, that you have found JSW Central and the related YouTube channel useful 😁.

Your post reminds me of that time back in the early 2000s when I first discovered the existence of ZX Spectrum emulators for PC computers, and then the existence of numerous fan-made MM and JSW games. It was still a couple of years before I started playing them one by one, and before I started work on my first JSW game, but the seed of interest had already been sown by then, and I had it at the back of my mind that I should check out those games that seemed to compensate “with interest” for the earlier lack of more rooms in JSW and JSW II.

In case you might be interested, my personal testimony about my involvement with the MM and JSW games is available here.

If your trajectory should happen to be similar to mine, the next stage of it will be a desire to actually design some new JSW rooms… or an entire new JSW game! JSWED makes this very easy (v. 2.3.7 is recommended; John Elliott’s calling it the “Latest Unstable Version” is false modesty). CAUTION: It’s addictive! 😉

And meanwhile, it will be a pleasure to hear more from you, or to discuss any aspect of the MM and JSW games you may be interested in 🙂.

[andrewbroad]

On 1/17/2026 at 5:54 PM, MikeH said:

I think there's something really special about the ability to name each room that acts as a kind of springboard for the imagination.

Absolutely! 😀