Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship

The Golden Rule

Your ship has no brakes — every thrust is a debt you pay back later. Plan the burn that stops you before the burn that gets you moving.
Console Released1990 DeveloperZippo Games (published by Rare/Tradewest/Nintendo) Genre, ,

Level Objectives

  • Planet 1 (Braveheart Plains): Tutorial gravity. Find the 4 Warpship pieces above ground. Practice the stop-thrust before anything else.
  • Planet 2 (Loneliness Cavern): First serious cave descent. Watch oxygen — the pickups are stingy.
  • Planet 3 (Dharma Crater): Mole-creature ambushes from cave walls. Floating sentry posts respawn — don’t camp.
  • Planets 4–8: Increasingly tight cave geometry; reverse gravity zones appear from Planet 6.
  • Planets 9–11: Multi-piece nested caves. The Warpship piece itself can plug you into walls if you misalign.
  • Planet 12 (Final Encounter): Boss arena. The Golden Warpship is fully assembled in your hold — bring it home intact.
Show Pro Strategies

Pro Strategies

  • Buy the Asteroid Shield first. Every other upgrade is optional. The Shield converts hostile encounters from “instant death” to “annoying” — it pays for itself within one planet.
  • Thrust pulses, not holds. Tap A in short bursts to drift through corridors with the engine off. Fuel lasts ~3x longer this way.
  • Drop heavy pieces on the way up. If you’re going to die carrying a piece, jettison it onto a known platform first. The piece persists; you respawn.
  • The towline is bidirectional. You can tow yourself toward an anchored piece — useful in tight caves where you can’t maneuver a ship-plus-piece combo.
  • Inverted-gravity zones reset on entry. If a flip catches you off-guard, exit and re-enter — your ship is re-oriented with full control.

Released in 1990 by Zippo Games (published by Tradewest in NA, Nintendo in Europe), Solar Jetman is a cult cousin to Rare’s earlier Jetpac. It dropped late in the NES lifecycle and slipped past most players — which is a shame, because once the controls click, almost nothing on the system feels quite like it.

The conceit: a Jetman is dispatched in a small Jetpod to scour twelve dangerous planets for the dismembered pieces of a Golden Warpship. Each piece is heavy. Each planet has gravity. Each piece you carry changes how your ship moves. Your ship has no brakes.

Below: the Golden Rule, the per-planet objectives, and (hidden) the techniques that turn a frustrating game into a rewarding one.