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Ah, it's the game that everyone has at least heard of, even if they never really understood what all the fuss was about at the time. Originally appearing on the ZX Spectrum on 29th April 1984, the housebound adventures of the monochrome toff actually took over two years to make it to the Electron. It finally appeared, licensed by Geordie programmers Tynesoft, in mid June 1986 at the retail price of £9.95! In 1986, that was a serious amount of moolah for such an old game. You could pick it up second hand for the Speccy for a few quid by then and, to put it in perspective, it only cost two quid to go to the cinema. Probably because it appeared in the Electron's renaissance period though, it likely still shifted a fair amount of cassettes and, personally, I was introduced to the entrepreneurial miner-cum-snob on my Electron. Heck, because its prequel Manic Miner never got an Electron release, to me Jet Set Willy was his only set of adventures for many years after I first played it.

As you're probably well aware, you start the game wanting to take a nap in your big, comfy, four-poster bed, only to find the door to your bedroom barred by your housemaid Maria. Maria has decided that you're not allowed to go to sleep until you've cleared up all the stray bottles, glasses, champagne corks and party poppers that your friends have kindly sprayed around your mansion. I'm not sure what sort of hold this Maria has over you, but for some reason you don't tell her to shut up and pick up her cards in the morning; instead you meekly venture out into the sprawling environs of your mansion to do her bidding.

Starting in The Bathroom, the object of each screen is to collect the flashing items (which make a blip when collected) and avoid anything that moves. Some rooms feature diagonally dotted lines which act as "stairs" to a level above; if you don't want to climb or descend them you have to jump whilst at the bottom of them and you then pass through them rather than climb them. Other than that, it's all the regular flick-screen graphic adventure collect-'em-up fun you'll have experienced a dozen times before. Everything is rendered in the Electron's high resolution two colour mode and it all moves at a fair old pace (identical to the original) and showcases the talents of its original author, one Matthew Smith, to the full. Some rooms are easy to clear, some are difficult and some verge on the impossible. Every room has a name, from the self-explanatory 'Hallway' to the perplexing 'We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg'. Finally, some rooms introduce variety through a rope swing which flaps left and right and can be grabbed and climbed if need be. When you lose all your lives, there's also a quick nod to British comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus with a quick cut-scene of Willy being crushed underneath a giant foot!

Dying is, in fact, the biggest irk in Jet Set Willy. This is because the game features, and indeed was infamous for, its "repeating death loop". If you collide with one of the patrolling nasties, you may well be reincarnated in a position whereby you are immediately killed again... and again. As you can well imagine, although you are given seven lives to attempt the Big Clean, this means very little when one false move can see every last one of them wiped out.

Whether it's realistic to set yourself the goal to win Jet Set Willy, I'm not entirely sure. Personally, back in the day, I played it more to try and get just a little bit further (and see a few more rooms) in one of the directions Willy can walk in. As you have the run of the whole mansion, and because it's sometimes tempting to try and grab all the objects from one room just to see if you can, it may well take you many attempts at the game to see every room of the house. This is, naturally, the very addictive quality that kept many a schoolboy coming back to it time and time again in the early Eighties. I remember well that it took me over an hour in my youth to master the sequence needed to jump all the patrolling priests in The Forgotten Abbey. And playing the game now I can still carry it out perfectly.

I guess one of the big questions about Jet Set Willy isn't so much whether it's worth playing (Clearly it is!) but more whether the Electron version is any more or any less worthy of being played than any of the hundreds of versions that exist for all the different machines of the era. Personally, I think Andy Noble's Jet Set Willy PC is the definitive version of the game and that version is both very colourful, completely free and doesn't even need to be run via an emulator; in comparison it's therefore hard to see much benefit in firing up the Electron version now. The other big question is why Maria, if she's just a regular housekeeper, would pick a fight with the Lord of the Manor in the sort of way she does in the game anyway. Personally, I've always surmised that some past relationship between the two of them was the root cause of her dissatisfaction, with the Big Clean being a task you must complete to prove yourself as a man... Sadly, if you do manage to collect all the items, Maria doesn't adjourn to the four poster in a sexy, silk negligee... I'd have liked that ending much more than the one you actually get.

If you've nevertheless been bitten by the nostalgia bug and want your own copy, the Electron verson of Jet Set Willy does come up fairly regularly on eBay and usually sells for around £3-£5 which really isn't a bad deal at all for a true milestone of computer gaming. It was also included on the compilation Microvalue Gold (with the curious bedfellow Ian Botham's Test Match!) which goes for around the same price.