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Ah the humble Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

This sleek, rubber-keyed, simple looking creation held my first close up interraction with personal computers, and the deep game-playing chasm into which I threw myself really began in earnest here.  Sure i'd played arcade games, loads of them, but never at home, and never for free.  So here, with this little monster, I first properly ventured into the proverbial rabbit hole, the bottom of which I have yet to discover.

I never actually owned one of these but friends Tony, David and Marie did which is what started my near decade long-trips down the road to annoy them.  My mum knew what 'down the road' meant, she also knew that if I wasn't at home then I was probably at David and Marie's place.  As time went on, and I got my own home computers (an 800XL and later Atari ST), i'd lug them down the road on a very regular basis and we would at times have 2-3 computers all going and playing different things.  Good times.

But yes, the origin, and the basis of all of this was their mighty yet meek 48k ZX Spectrum and we did have some excellent nights waiting for the tinny screech of the spectrum tape drive to finish so we could play games.

The ZX Spectrum had a wonderful habit of crashing back to the boot up screen seemingly at random.  Part of this was due to the dodgy connection between a joystick interface and the computer so I'd have to be bloody careful not to nudge it once it was all up and going.  Some of the first spectrum emulators for other computers even built random crashing into the code just to keep it authentic.

In New Zealand, the 48k Spectrum was kind of around at the same time as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 800XL.  So it was seen as a bit of a poor cousin to those more colour-capable and RAMified machines.  But here's the thing.  It's limitations were its strength.  Spectrum games couldn't look or sound as good as their 8-bit counterparts so what they excelled at was gameplay, amazingly inventive gameplay.

Anyway, the games:

I first played Elite (above) on the Spectrum.  That's a game with over 2000 space stations to dock at and traders to trade with.  Granted Elite wasn't made originally for the speccy but it still held up bloody well, and the hours and hours I put into it are a testement to that.

Then there were titles like Firelord (top pic) and Starquake (bottom) which both used the same kind of map scheme except that Firelord was almost top-down and Starquake was and updownleftright scroller.

I played early games like Colony and later ones like The Armageddon Man for hours at a time, and together we played Trivial Pursuit on it and Formula One where we'd each kit out a racing team, change the tires of our cars and bet on each race. 

Quazatron and Rana Rama (below) were also favourites.  While essentially the same game, each took a different tack (in Q I was a robot, and in RR a frog magician), and had a different view which made them individually appealing and absorbing.

I'll post more about individual games later, but this is more to just remind you/me about this most excellent bit of kit, and the times where it reigned for some of us as the focus of our video gaming universe.


Here's a link to an online Spectrum Game Emulator!

...oh and here's Stephen Fry doing a thing about the Speccy:

Stadium Arcadium Pt.1

Video game arcades are really a thing of the past aren't they.  When I die and go to Heaven to meet Jebus i'd like to see a meter showing me how many 20c pieces I stuck into games in the video arcades and fish n'chip shops of New Zealand...i'd also like to know the total weight.

In 1997 I worked part time at Timeout in Dunedin for Phil Rasmussen.  I think it was there that I played Gauntlet Legends (the 3rd gauntlet game).

Now Gauntlet Legends let me save my progress through a system of entering my initials and birthdate in I think and after I beat it, it displayed various stats including how much money i'd spent (not that I'd actually spent any because I worked there).  I was kind of appalled to see that i'd theoretically stuck about $80 into it!  It was a $1 game but still thats a hell of a lot of bread on a video game...actually it's less than a new game for your xbox I guess.

This post however is not about Gauntlet Legends, or Gauntlet II, or even the groundbreaking Gauntlet...i'll post about my experiences with them another time...it's about the early arcades where I spent ludicrous amounts of both time and coins, especially in the school holidays.

The first arcade I hung out in was called 8-ball on the corner of Princess Street and Police Street in Dunedin.  They even had 10 cent machines there, and it was in this building.


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This was way early on eh, think I was probably 9 or 10.  They had a game there which was like the front of a vending machine with a cushioned surface and a picture of a martial arts guy on it.  The idea was to punch where it lit up and it would score the hits, but it was often broken.  I don't remember much about this place, there were gun games that pointed at screens, and primitive driving games but all up it was sort of a mix of mechanical carny attractions and early video games, and I was the kid who would go round the coin slots looking for free games.

About a block away was Video Village in Manse Street, Dunedin and this really was my first spiritual video game home. 


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While it wasn't too pretty inside it was chock full of games, and a guy in a window at the back would have piles of 5 20c pieces sitting on top of each other like some kind of 2 dimensional pyramid.  There was a backward L-shaped ground level and a raised mezzanine on the left which had maybe 6 or 7 more games up a small flight of stairs.  One of these was, and still is a favourite: 10 Yard Fight. 

During the school holidays if i'd gone into my mum's work for the day i'd try to spend most of it either in 8-Ball or here. 

Video Village got a game in called MACH 3 that had superimposed CG planes and explosions over real vision of landscapes.  You could play as a bomber (top down view) or shooter (forward view).  It was fun to try but more expensive than all the others, oh and it was broken a lot of the time. 

The place was the first to get in the laserdisc games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.

I think I even beat Space Ace and while it looked great it was actually a bit of a gimmick because I only got to select directions or buttons when prompted.  Both games were really glorified reaction testers, but they were new and I threw small buckets of 20s into them.

I didn't really know what wrestling was but I loved playing games like Big Pro Wrestling, Main Event, eventually WWF Superstars of Wrestling, and my favourite: Wrestlefest, all at Video Village over nearly ten years.  The fighting games like Streetfighter didn't grab me but the wrestling ones sure did, even though I didn't know what most of the controls were.

I really wish I could remember the final time I went into Video Village, i'd have liked to say goodbye before, just like 8-Ball had, it shuffled off into the video game night as another bright new arcade stole it's thunder in Moray Place: Wizards.

Getaway!

My first computer was an Atari 800 XL with 64kb of pure power (well, RAM), the first XE tape drive in Dunedin (it was grey and didn't match the computer), an Atari Joystick and most importantly, the game Getaway!

CLOAD anyone?

It all cost $310NZD, which i'm pretty sure was a lot of moolah in 1983, especially for us: mum, my older sister and little old me, and think I gave my mum every excuse why it would help this poor 10 year old with school work but really it was about the games...i'm sure she knew this and over Christmas i'll have a chat to her about that time and post her thoughts on encouraging my early video game addiction.

Now I wasn't new to video games.  I'd been playing in the Arcades for 3-4 years, and hogging my mates 48k ZX Spectrum as much as I could but this monster was different, because this monster was my monster!

Getaway! is an excellent game.  I still boot it up using an emulator with my best mate Bob in Dunedin sometimes and it's really fun for a run through.

Think of it as the very first version of the original Grand Theft Auto, actually sort of a cross between GTA and Pacman, where the ghosts are cops and the dots are dollar symbols.  Its most impressive statistic was that the map covered 35 TV screens!  35! this blew my funny young mind...Here it is in all it's glory.

The premise was simple.  I drove my car over dollar signs (robberies) and the more cash I got, the more the 3 differently-coloured cops would hunt me down, I could hune after a white van for more money and there were bonuses like Chalices and diamonds on the map too, which once all gathered would advance you to a harder level where the colour tones would change (to me) pretty ominously, and the cops were more angry.

The key was that my ill-gotten gains weren't secure until I got them back to my hideout (the 'H' in the middle of the shot below), so you can see from the shot above that my cash is $30 but my stash is zero because I haven't gotten back to safety yet.

The other limiting factor was gas.  My car would run out so i'd have to stop on one of the few 'G' icons on the road to fill up, all the while the cops got closer...also the car would only stop on gas stations and at my hideout so there was always pressure to work out ahead where you were going.  In the shot above, that criss-cross section immediately north-west of my dark green car was always difficult to negotiate, especially when under pressure of cops on my tail trying to get back to my hideout.

This was the only game I had for my 800XL for a wee while and I played the bloody life out of it...but strangely I don't remember a high score which suggests that the gameplay was what I enjoyed the most.

Here's a good background interview with Mark Reid, the guy who made Getaway!

From Ultima IV to Skyrim

It'd be more more accurate to say: From Space Invaders at the Elgin Road Dairy in Dunedin around 7-8 years old to Skyrim in an apartment building in Wellington some 30 years later, but Ultima is certainly a spiritual ancestor to Skyrim, and close enough to my video game origins to make a fair distance comparison.

For me Ultima IV was deeper in some ways than Skyrim is for all of its excellent gameplay, stunning visuals and character enhancements.  In Ultima IV I really felt close to the characters who joined me because I quested and spent time upping stats just to become worthy enough for them coming on board, and once they finally agreed I did my best to kit them out in order to protect them against the dangers I was leading them towards.  I bloody hated it when they died (i'd reload), and guys like Iolo the Bard were with me for most of the time I was playing.  That sort of connection is pretty difficult to endow in a real person, especially from 8-bit icons plopping their way round an 8-bit landscape, and it's a real tribute to the thought that went into Ultima IV.

Also the world of Britannia was probably on a par with Skyrim, in terms of size, the amount of towns, and the number of meaningful NPCs, and it was the first world I was happy to just spend time wandering through, as dangerous as it was.

I obtained Ultima IV on 2 double-sided 5'14" Floppy disks.  One side was the program, one the cities and towns, one the dungeons, and I can't remember what the other side would've been.  We'd buy single-sided floppies and use a leather hole-punch to stick another timing hole opposite the first near the centre of the disk.  God knows how we knew to do this but it worked and made the discs double-sided.

I don't remember the first time I booted up Ultima IV, but I remember the firm hold it had on me.  The title screen showed in-game graphic sprites (don't know if they were sprites or not) plopping around in and out of the city icons around a lake, while live gargoyles strained to escape their bounds in the top corners of the screen.

Next was character creation which was decided by answering a number of moral questions posed in text form by a gypsy met along the road in 'real life'.  This was unique and more fun for me than assigning values to stats. 

Ultima IV was the first game I remember playing which used my own sense of imagination to draw me in by beginning in the real world and then, after working out where my moral compass lay, sending me from there through a moongate to the mystical world of Britannia which was full of medieval towns with names like Skara Brae, Yew, and Moonglow.  The runic element was fantastic and I deciphered the alphabet to aid me in my questing.  The game also came with a cloth map which I got when I bought it secondhand shortly after discovering it.

I really knew none of the rules of this world and learned through trial and error that saying (typing) 'heal' to someone was saying Hello to them.  I figured out the 'join' command to ask someone to join my party, and I learned to pick out keywords of their responses to encourage them to reveal more to me.  I discovered that there were secret passageways inside castles that I would push through walls to get to, so spent hours and hours and hours quite happily pushing against every wall in a town or castle to sneak into somewhere I wasn't necessarily supposed to be.  I'd already been playing the game for a long time, months i'd guess before I discovered quite by accident that there were these secrets. So locations that I was pretty familiar with suddenly gained a new and exciting dimension.  The most common secret places were treasuries, the doors of which were locked but hidden passages could sometimes get you in to raid the chests inside.  Although in saying this you had to be pretty careful because some treasure chests were possessed and would attack if you tried to open them haha.

The premise of Ultima IV was that I was trying to become the Avatar: a morally upright hero of the people, questing to attain enlightenment in 8 virtues -Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality and Humility to prove myself worthy to descend into the Stygian Abyss and locate the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. 

I'd gain standing in these virtues in different ways for example the Herb/ingredients trader was a blind woman who you could pay whatever you wanted for her wares but of course if you short changed her, your Honesty stat would go down.  If you showed promise in any of these virtues, and if you found the right person, they'd join your party bolstering your attack force against the numerous monsters and enemies lurking all over Britannia.

The game was full of hotkeys which I learnt by pressing every key on the keyboard of my Atari 800XL and writing down what they did...'e' for 'enter' a town, dungeon or shrine, 'k' for 'klimb' a ladder, 'c' for 'cast' a spell...that sort of thing.

Original Ultima IV reference card

Combat was turn-based, could be pulled off by melee, ranged and magical hits, and I had as many hits per turn as members of my party. Movement was per person per square so I could flank my enemies (slowly) or run away (also slowly)...I did this quite a lot.

I could travel by foot, horse, boat, I even found a hot air balloon, and on both boat and Balloon i'd be continually casting spells to change the wind direction in my favour.

Then there were the Dungeons which shifted the view from top-down to first-person frames.  I was never very good at these so tended to stay out of them if I could. Ultima IV was the first game I saw that had fog of war, and hidden views around corners, so you really had to pop your head out to see how many skeletons were waiting for you.

The morning birds chirping outside my bedroom drew me back into the dumb real world, so after living inside Ultima IV all night while hunched awkwardly over my 10 inch black and white TV, my backbones would crick as I sat up straight, saved the game and went to sleep until mum yelled at me that it was lunchtime.

Sadly I never got to the Stygian Abyss because I could never work out how to gain enlightenment in one of the virtues...I think it was Sacrifice.  So yes after all of that, and one the deepest game experiences of my life I never beat Ultima IV...did you?