Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship

About Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship

Solar Jetman (1990) is Zippo Games and Rare's NES gravity shooter, the third Jetman game, in which a tiny pod hauls pieces of a legendary starship and fuel out of caverns on twelve planets, each with its own gravity.

Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship in Depth

Set after Lunar Jetman, it follows Jetman's quest for the pieces of the Golden Warpship, a mythical starship capable of interstellar travel. Viewed from the side, the player rotates Jetman's pod clockwise or anticlockwise and thrusts, subject to inertia but not drag, under a pull of gravity that changes from planet to planet and makes stable flight harder as the game goes on. Each of the twelve planets, plus a hidden one, has its own system of enemy-infested caverns explored in small pods launched from an immobile mothership, and the goal on each is to bring back a piece of the Warpship and enough fuel to reach the next.

Items are dragged with a tow cable that makes flying harder, and are dropped over the mothership or into small wormholes deeper in the caverns. Points from valuables and destroyed enemies buy power-ups for the pod after every other stage. If the pod is destroyed, Jetman ejects in an agile but vulnerable space suit and may be able to return to the mothership for a new pod, but dying outside the pod costs a life.

Making Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship

Zippo Games, founded by Ste and John Pickford and known for Ironsword, was bought by Rare after that game's success, which Ste Pickford disliked because he wanted to work independently. The brothers started Iota on 1 June 1989, and after the switch to Jetman they received little input from Rare, which Pickford took as a sign the Stamper brothers trusted them with their most "revered" series. Development took about a year, growing from two people to several. Tradewest released it in North America in September 1990 and Nintendo in Europe in September 1991, and Nintendo also put it on the PlayChoice-10. Despite poor sales, reviews were positive: Mean Machines called its playability "second-to-none" and its graphics "simply brilliant", Computer and Video Games' Richard Leadbetter compared it to Thrust, and Total! said exploring its twelve planets would "set the player at it for weeks", though its difficulty drew criticism.