I have fond memories of this game as a child. One of the games I was truly addicted to.
I had completely forgotten about it until I saw this Kickstarter posted this morning and I'm definitely a supporter. I would suggest you do too.
Also, if you know anyone at HalfBrick, maybe you should suggest to them that the support a project that they've borrowed the name of for their wildly successful iOS title.
I don't know about you guys, but I hate the new graphics. It's not that I don't like hi-res graphics, but I just dislike the current style, tiles especially. Classic jetpack had great graphics style and everything seemed to fit together. Graphics on demos posted for the Jetpack 2 seem ackward and don't fit one into another. I hope author uses the money to hire gfx artist not only for the backgrounds, but for tiles and other bits, too.
My younger brother and I (mostly my younger brother) spent many hours as children recreating the stock levels in the level editor so we could learn how to beat them. 'Twas a very fun game.
My point was really that people often look at something and think "Oh that's easy!". But when you actually get to the real depth of the problem it's much much more complicated and fiddly and time consuming.
Off the top of my head here are a list of things you'd need to consider for developing a game: name, story/concept, title screen, credits, intro animation, implementation of gameplay/physics/loading/saving/graphics, settings / players details, user interface and GUI elements, help, input processing (mouse,joypad,joystick,touch), sound (music, ambience, effects, interface effects) ,artwork (logos, gui elements, backgrounds, sprites), repeated playability testing (is it fun, well tuned?), level creation (initial design, tweaking, testing for edge cases), utilities (level editor, sprite/animation tools), demo mode, cheats, achievements, scoreboard, installer.
I had completely forgotten about it until I saw this Kickstarter posted this morning and I'm definitely a supporter. I would suggest you do too.
Also, if you know anyone at HalfBrick, maybe you should suggest to them that the support a project that they've borrowed the name of for their wildly successful iOS title.