Washing-Up Software Projects
(1983, Ultimate, ZX Spectrum)
Some images you can hear
If you owned a ZX Spectrum in the 80s then you undoubtedly knew the name "Ultimate: Play The Game" and associated it with titles that were a cut above their peers. It's less well known that founders Tim and Chris Stamper worked on arcade machines before forming Ultimate (actually just the trading name of the less snappy-sounding "Ashby Computers and Graphics"), but it should come as no great surprise to anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at their debut title JetPac. The multicoloured laser that your character fires is a direct lift from Defender. That the gameplay takes place on a single screen dotted with floating platforms invokes another Williams' hit, Joust. And while I think claims of "it wouldn't look out of place in an arcade" are overselling it somewhat, it's as instantly accessible as the best of them. You could mosey up to it at any time and quickly grasp the gameplay loop: fly around the screen, avoid or shoot the baddies, pick up the rocket parts and fuel until the spaceship starts flashing, then jump in to blast off to the next level. Easy.
JetPac wasn't the first video game I ever played - that honor belongs to a generic Pong console, probably made by Binatone or Grandstand - but it might well be the first I played on a ZX Spectrum. When my dad brought that machine into the house I quickly became obsessed, and it set me down a path of computer geekery that shaped the rest of my life. But I don't think it's just nostalgia that keeps me coming back to JetPac. There are lots of games from that period that I remember fondly but which don't hold up when revisited. But when I set up a Spectrum emulator on a new device - most recently the Anbernic 405m I purchased a few months ago - it's usually the first game I try, more than 40 years after its release in May 1983.
Pew pew, etc...
It's a simple game, and you can probably come up with a dozen things you'd add to it off the top of your head right now. Changing the platform layout across different levels is maybe the most obvious, given that the planets that Jetman visits differ only in the type of enemies that reside there. Maybe you'd throw in some power-ups or a two-player competitive mode. But when you realize that this is one of the few games compatible with the short-lived, lower-cost 16k Spectrum, it's impressive that they managed to squeeze so many enemy types and spaceships to build into a memory footprint smaller than most web pages. A tight scope was an inevitability when cramming a game into just 16k, and while there aren't many moving parts to JetPac, they mesh perfectly. The fuel tanks keep the player moving around the screen, the aliens provide danger, the platforms a degree of solace, the bonus items encourage risk-taking in return for higher scores, and the different spaceships grant a sense of progression to the skillful.
Ultimate were always good at working around the Speccy's limitations and playing to its strengths. Colour-clash (a symptom of its inability to display more than two colours within one 8x8 pixel square) is kept to a minimum by careful arrangement of the scenery. And while the original Spectrum wasn't known for its sonic capabilities I do actually like the sound effects, such as they are. Enemies explode not with a boom but with a kind of wet squelch which works with the puffy little cloud that they disappear into. Rose-tinted headphones on my part, perhaps, but effective.
JetPac's simplicity is its strength and why it's a game I keep returning to almost exactly 40 years later. Maybe the controls and many of the enemy patterns - the little fighter jets that hang out at the edge of the screen then dive bomb you are my favourites - are burned into my memory from having played it as a spongy-brained youth. But I can put it down for months... years... and playing it again is immediately enjoyable, like a visit from a childhood friend, without feeling like I have to relearn anything.
Lunar Jetman. Not as good.
A sequel, Lunar Jetman, followed later in 1983. Targeted at 48k Spectrums, it featured a scrolling landscape, a drivable "lunar rover", teleporters, and enemy missile bases that Jetman had to locate and destroy... and wasn't nearly as much fun.
The Stampers sold the Ultimate name in 1985, founded Rare, and abandoned the Spectrum for the more lucrative world of home consoles. I haven't spent enough time with 1990's NES-exclusive Solar Jetman to form an opinion on it, though it has more in common with games like Thrust or Oids than its predecessors.
Solar Jetman. On the NES, so obviously not as good.
JetPac may not have spawned a franchise to rival the Marios and Sonics of this world, but it has remained oddly tenacious, thanks to both its fanbase and the Stampers, who throughout the successes of the following decades never forgot their humble origins on that tiny 8-bit computer with the mushy rubber keyboard.
The titular Jetman got his own comic strip in Crash magazine for a while (recently reprinted by Fusion Retro Books.). Donkey Kong 64 (1999) had a Spectrum emulator and a copy of the game hidden in it. Various homebrewed remakes and homages have surfaced over the years, such as Super Jetpak (sic) DX for the GameBoy Color and Jetpac RX which adds to the original Spectrum version.
Finally, 2007 saw the release of Jetpac Refuelled. This Rare-developed reimagining didn't set the world alight, but was good fun, got respectable review scores, and it was rather lovely to see that old Ultimate logo pop up on a game for a modern system. It's just a shame it's still an XBox-exclusive after all these years. Backwards compatibility means that it's still playing on your XBox Series-whatevers even though the 360's online store is closing down, but it would still be nice to see a PC version one of these days. With Microsoft still in possession of Rare and all its IP though, I won't hold my breath.
If you want to play the original JetPac however, and you can't be arsed faffing about with a Spectrum emulator and finding a tape image, you can do so in your browser RIGHT NOW thanks to the Internet Archive!
