LEN WIRMILY LIVES!

Bohemian programming

■ “He was the most untidy person I’ve ever met, apart from me,” grins Chris, when asked about his memories of Matthew Smith. “The first time I went to his house, this big old Victorian place, and saw his computer room… well, it was something else. It had this big fireplace and the mantelpiece was lined with tins of rice pudding with spoons sticking out the tops. He was chatty and friendly and we talked a lot about how he’d written Manic Miner. This was before I’d started on it. I mentioned some of the techniques I was going to use and he was really interested. He even said, ‘Ah I can use that and fit more levels in.’ This was when he was starting to think about Jet Set Willy.” Chris may indeed have been partly responsible for the compression techniques Matthew used to cram Jet Set Willy’s 60 rooms into the Spectrum’s memory, something he hadn’t done for Manic Miner. Chris’ connection with Miner Willy didn’t end there, as his unreleased C64 version of Jet Set Willy eventually morphed into Boing, which casts the player as Len Wirmley, tasked with ‘collecting his royalties from the unscrupulous Ron Bammotty’. No prizes for working out those anagrams. There are many other nods to Boing’s beginnings with references to Software Projects and Willy’s mansion scattered through the game and the original Jet Set Willy room names are still visible in the code though not displayed on screen, obviously. See Frank Gasking’s excellent Gamesthatwerent.com entry on Jet Set Willy V1 for the full story.