Computer Love

Can you believe it’s 25 years since the humble little Sinclair ZX Spectrum first made its way onto the shelves of retailers in Great Britain? And can you believe how far we’ve come since those days when you’d be amazed after waiting for 6 minutes for the damn thing to load that you could play something so advanced like Manic Miner on your own telly?

Ahh, yes. This is not going to be any in-depth analysis of the way the world’s changed since then, this is pure nostalgia. So if you’re not used to a world of dodgy tape recorders, loose cables, loading errors, attribute clash, resetting by pulling the cable out and rubber keyboards, then move on.

Right, let’s get on then shall we?

On the 23rd April 1982 Clive Sinclair unleashed the first really affordable colour home computer onto the market. Of course, this didn’t start to filter out until the following year, as most kids my age had his previous model the black and white ZX81 in 1982. And that amazed us!

My first encounter with this little black Spectrum was in the summer of ’83 when a schoolmate of mine let me borrow his Spectrum for the weekend, whilst I loaned him my remote control Buggy. So there I was, with his purchased copy of top space game “Time-Gate” and some other copied stuff like “the Hobbit”, entering this strange new world. At Christmas I had one, and soon I learned that whilst it wasn’t the best computer around, it had a charm all of it’s own and even the faults were in retrospect, great.

So here's my memories of the 48k Speccy...

The rubber keyboard.

Other computers had sturdy proper keyboards as is the standard nowadays. Not the original ZX Spectrum. Oh no. This had a pleasing, squishy popping feel, which was good for games, even if you had to have spider-like hands for certain games where the keys weren’t user-defined (boo) and your fingers were splayed all over the keyboard. Programming? Well that was what you conned your parents into buying it you for, wasn’t it?. And after half a dozen so-called games you spent five hours typing in from listings in "Sinclair User" magazine, only to find that they either:

a) didn’t work 'cos you’d typed something wrong back on line 10460 or
b) they were shit.

You knew that programming a Spectrum was something that was for other geeks to do. Not because I couldn’t be bothered, no. The Spectrum had a strange form of BASIC all of it’s own, and all the key command program words had to be accessed using a strange combination of the Shift key and other keys… basically it was a pain in the arse.

All I needed to know was how to go LOAD “” to bung a game on.

Shitty sound.

You’d think that you’d gone prematurely deaf but no, the sound of a Spectrum in full beep wouldn’t disturb an ant. The speaker, sorry, BEEPER was housed somewhere in the computer, and was frankly an embarrassment especially to those smug bastards with their Commodore 64’s, which sounded like fucking Kraftwerk in comparison. Programmers tried to find ways to make the beeper work better, fooling you to thinking it was polyphonic but to little avail. However, the Spectrum came into it’s own in the late hours when everybody who was sensible was in bed, and suddenly it would sound very very loud indeed, and you ‘d get a bollocking from your Mum because your Dad was being kept awake by a shitty beepy version of “If I Was a Rich Man” on constant repeat. Think a wasp riddled with Parkinson’s Disease stuck in a jar, and you’re somewhere close to approximating the sound of a Spectrum.

"Bringing the Spectrum downstairs to use on the big colour family telly".

Yes, in these days of faithful monitors, it seems archaic to think that most of us played our Spectrum games on our black and white portables upstairs in our bedrooms. We didn’t know any better and it was fab, as you could watch “Countdown” whilst waiting for “Sabre Wulf” to load. But occasionally, you’d whip the cables out, shove the power pack, tape recorder and Spectrum and whizz it down to the big telly downstairs usually when everybody else was out. Games… in colour… (drools).

Well the first thing you noticed after being blinded by the colour was that some times, it looked a mess. Yep other computers had sprites which could handle multi colours. Not the Spectrum, where to save memory each character block could only deal with two colours, leading to the phenomenon of “Colour-clash” where a games character in say, yellow & black would walk in front of a red building and a big square round him would turn the building background yellow as well. It didn’t matter in black & white though. It all looked fab. Of course, sometimes this led to kids like myself commandeering the old almost knackered colour TV from the garage for upstairs, so you’ve got the bizarre sight of a creaking computer desk holding a massive 32” cathode ray tube telly with a kid sat in front of it with a little keyboard playing “Chuckie Egg”.

An old telly sunbathing earlier today.

Game trading.

Long before "World of Warcraft", a similar age of trading and fighting existed... amongst schoolkids. Namely in the mid 80's, trading games. But of course, you had to have something in the first place that the other person wanted in order to prise the games you wanted out of them. So, say someone had “Knight Lore” or some new game on the block and it was a must have! Usually in order to get this you’d have to either be really pally with him to get it copied for nowt, or have either some game of equal value to him or several lesser games which he might not have got already, like “Winter Sports” or some other rubbish. And this is how it went on. And on. You’d usually have about 20 actual bought in the shop games in your collection, as opposed to about 20 C-60 cassettes crammed with 12 games on each. The ratio of pirated to bought would always be about 20 to 1.


Which leads us on to…

Dodgy copies. The bane of my life. Never more so than when the software companies cottoned on to the fact that they were losing 20 sales for every game sold, and started putting anti-copying measures on their games from about 1984 onwards. Ahh, but we had a way round that. We kids were had ingenious ways of getting round such trivial countermeasures. Their first stupid idea was to have a colour code security device - you got a sheet of colours and numbers with the bought game like "Jet Set Willy"; on loading you'd be asked to input a sequence of numbers which corresponded to the colours on the sheet. They didn't reckon on the young teenager with access to a colour photocopier, or even better, enough time to painstakingly write out all the combinations by hand. Ha! Sticking it to the man.

Protection? Ha.

When that wasn't seen to be working they introduced the "Hyperloader" - loads inhalf the time but was pretty hard to copy be traditional methods, though it meant if yout tapedesk was a shed it was hit and miss loading. "Easy" say we, the kids, who if we actually applied such vigour and determination to our careers, would be running the country now. We'd get access to someone with twin tape decks so we could make copies of the games. Failing that, the painful method of playing the tape through a hi-fi speaker and recording the awful (but strangely comforting) computer program noise onto another tape recorder. All of which meant that it was touch and go whether you’d actually be able to load the game. How many hours I wasted watching a game load only to be greeted by a blank screen at the end with the painful legend “1982 Sinclair Research Ltd”. Sob. And it always happened if you’d nipped next door for a piss.

"Crash” magazine.

This was our bible. You can stick your "Computer and Video Games", "Your Sinclair" or "Sinclair User" up your arse mate, "Crash" was da bomb. Never less than jam-packed every month, this mag lovingly produced from the small town of Ludlow gave it to you straight about the latest games, and whether they were any good or not. It's reviews were great as they'd tell you which keys you had to use to play the game, which was a godsend for us kids with our copied games without instructions. Each game would get reviewed by the panel of experts, whose likes and dislikes you'd get to know over time and so you'd know whether to take notice of their critique or not. One thing was for sure - anything that was a "Crash Smash" (in the 90% or above rating) had to be obtained somehow. Also tons of tips and cheats were published every month, and the magazine was brilliantly single handedly illustrated by Mr Oliver Frey. It was one of the few magazines that featured the programmers behind the games, and what an odd bunch they could turn out to be (Matthew "Jet Set Willy" Smith especiallly). This seemed like our magazine - it felt like you were in a club. Absolutely brilliant.

Film/TV/Celebrity tie-in games.
In the early days of the Spectrum, most software companies were run from someone’s shed, and they didn’t give a monkeys about trying to apply for a license to use a particular image or name. Hence we got very thinly veiled Pac-man rip-off games, and helicopter games called “Blue Thunder” which had nothing to do with the film of the same name but used the name anyway without permission to help it sell. However, in 1984 we started to get familiar names cropping up in the forthcoming game adverts in the mags. First “Mr Wimpy” a thinly veiled Donkey Kong rip off featuring Mr Wimpy (what a surprise) and Hamburgler.

Then in 1984 came Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. This game was singularly responsible for the destruction of many a poor teenager’s rubber keyboard and possibly in the future found to be the cause of much repetitive strain injury in 40 something’s:

“Well Doc, what’s the damage?”

“Mr Smith, you’re suffering from RSI and arthritis in the fingers, probably caused by too much Daley Thompson on the Spectrum in the 80’s.”

“Blimey, and all that wanking I did back then wouldn’t have helped either”

"No, Mr Smith. By the way, I’m over here. You’re actually talking to the pot plant”.

Badumm-tish.

My keyboard wasn’t helped by the release the following year of the follow up “Daley Thompson’s SuperTest”, and the rival “Hypersports”, and it gave up the ghost towards the end of that year. Of course, other software companies thought getting sports-stars to endorse games was a good idea, and joined in, with mixed results. I mean, "Jonah Barrington's Squash"? " Or this nugget below?

Jesus.

It seemed to us you couldn’t go a month without software companies like US Gold, Ocean, Elite or Imagine advertising some bloody tie-in or other like "The Dukes Of Hazzard", "Street Hawk"," A View To A Kill", "Max Headroom" or some other 80s nightmare. Most of the time it semed like they made the deal, commissioned the artwork and put out the ad, and then sat back and thought “what are we going to do with this one then?” Which is why most of the time you ended up with some shitty platform game with the most tenuous link to the series or star in question. I can't really remember one tie-in that was any good until Jon Ritman's "Batman" in 1986, and that was a rip off of the work from software legends "ULTIMATE Play The Game". Of which more later. Shitty tie-in's lead me to...

Samantha Fox Strip Poker.

We wanted:
We got:
What a con.

POKEs.
The original cheat mode. Whilst some games programmers made it so that if you pressed a combination of keys you could get a cheat unlimited lives mode or whatever, others were not so helpful and it was left to a breed of nerdy hackers to get into the games and find out what POKE command you could type in before loading to get unlimited lives or access to any level.

ULTIMATE Play The Game.

The software house you always looked out for. They released the seminal "JetPac" (my first ever game, readers) and then the insanely hard "Lunar Jetman" before bringing out the superb haunted house arcade adventure "Atic Atac" which was genius - they managed to get really superb graphics out of this little machine, so each time there was a release coming we'd wonder what the next step up would be. "Sabre Wulf" came next, an arcade adventure in the jungle. You see that was the thing about Ultimate - they'd get the advert in the mags but no screenshots - you wouldn't know what you were getting until you loaded it, as the box didn't give anything away either. Enigmatic wasn't even close - all we knew is that they were based in Ashby De La Zouch... and that was it. You would never get an interview out of them.


They then released the game which seemed to push the Spectrum to the limit of what it was capable of... "Knight Lore".

"Knight Lore" and it's follow ups "Alien8" (below) and "NightShade" used a technique that UPTG called "Filmation" - basically the gameplay was in a 3D environment and rocked. Of course we now know in these enlightened internet days that ULTIMATE were basically just two brothers Tim & Chris Stamper, who went on years later to create "Goldeneye 007" for the Nintendo 64. Stars, the pair of them.

The ZX Spectrum +2.
The end. Clive Sinclair's business sense was a bit crap really. Look at the C5. So it was no surprise when his follow up computers flopped (the QL? Oh dear). He's already tried to boost sales by equipping the existing Spectrum with a proper keyboard (4 years too late) and boosting the memory to 128k but it was to no avail. Alan Sugar's fledgling computer branch of Amstrad took over and revamped the Spectrum to look like his computers. The result was this:

I had one of these. The tape recorder was built in. It had a sound chip. A decent proper keyboard. It was backwards compatible with the 48k. Christ it even had a reset button for heaven's sake, as opposed to pulling the cable out of the back and putting it back in. It fixed most of the faults the old Spectrum had. And you know what? It was boring.

That's right. Boring. Take the little niggles away like dodgy loading and the squashy keyboard, and the fun's gone. Or maybe I'd grown out of the old Speccy. Who knows? All I know is I haven't had as much fun on a computer or games console as I used to on my battered old ZX Spectrum.

Sir Clive Sinclair - we salute you!

Ahhh... shit.