One of the most fondly remembered early ZX spectrum games was Jetpac, the star of which was a little space man called Lunar Jet Man. Funnily enough, he was equipped with a jet pack to enable him to fly around, and also a laser which shot out in front of him in a simple yet astonishingly beautiful (given the hardware limitations) burst of coloured lines. The game was created by Ultimate Play The Game, the company which would later become Rare.

As with most 8-bit era games, the gameplay was pretty repetitive, but back then that didn’t matter, as the main draw was to try and beat your high score. The game screen was very simple, with three platforms floating in the air. Aliens would bounce around the screen for you to shoot, whilst you reassembled and fueled your spaceship. Parts of the spaceship would drop from random positions at the top of the screen, and you would have to fly over, pick them up, then deposit them one on top of the other on the launch pad. Once the rocket was assembled, fuel pods would drop down and you would have to repeat the same mechanism as for building the ship with the pods. Once enough fuel pods had been collected, the spaceship would flash, signalling it was time for you to enter and move on to the next level, where the process began again.

Lunar Jet Man returned in a sequel, also called Lunar Jet Man. The graphics were much larger and you now had a moon rover vehicle to drive around the horizontally scrolling levels. I remember playing this game once only in the local branch of WH Smiths, and not being able to fathom what it was you were supposed to be doing. Obviously nobody else could work the game out either, as it failed to make as much of an impact as Jetpac did. The idea was to blow up an alien base by transporting a giant bomb on the moon rover to it. To do this, craters had to be filled in along the way in order to let the moon rover continue it’s journey.

The character made one more appearance in Solar Jet Man on the NES. This game was again a horizontal scroller, with you having to collect objects and return them to your mothership. The game was set to appear on the home computers of the day as well, but the game performed badly on the NES and plans to release it were shelved, despite most of the different versions being complete! If you’re interested in emulation though, the C64 version has been rediscovered by the Games That Weren’t C64 website.

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