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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: