As readers may already be aware, my main hobby to distract myself from my day job in the profoundly depressing world of politics is to delve into retro videogaming via my Retropie. It’s an endlessly rewarding fount of discovery and entertainment for many reasons, but sometimes the two spheres collide in extremely unexpected ways.
So let’s talk about GORF.
Midway’s 1981 arcade hit was a pioneering and innovative game. It was the first game to be comprised of multiple highly distinct sub-games, boldly including direct lifts of other people’s coin-ops in the form of Space Invaders and Galaxian. And while it wasn’t the first arcade game to feature synthesised speech – it was beaten to that punch by the likes of Berzerk and Wizard Of Wor the previous year – it was famous for the extensive and iconic vocabulary with which it taunted and goaded the player.
It got numerous conversions of variable quality to various home systems, whether as contemporary licences or later homebrew ports, and that’s where we come in.
If you consult the ZXDB Spectrum database, in the 43 years of the classic Sinclair computer’s history it identifies 64 clones of Konami’s 1981 arcade hit Frogger.
Until yesterday, remarkably, this was still the best one.
It’s taken me four weeks to write this, because I barely knew where to start.
Channel 4 showed the singular and vastly wonderful The Banshees Of Inisherin at the weekend, and as brilliant as it is in its own right, it also came loaded with all sorts of resonances and finally prodded me into action.
The equally singular and wonderful Jonathan Nash, who will be known to readers of this isolated and quiet island parish under a variety of names, died last month, of death. It was sudden yet expected, and in those respects very much the opposite of the man himself.
Earlier today I happened to pop into to a ZX Spectrum forum I used to frequent to look for a bit of info about an obscure old game, and my eye was caught by a post there.
It regarded an article called “20 Indie Games That You Could Beat in the Time It Would Take You to Watch That Hbomberguy Video”, which is about an almost four-hour-long YouTube video that gamer types are currently talking about on social media, relating to plagiarism by someone or other, but which I’m not going to bother watching or linking to because (a) it’s by a monstrous arsehole, (b) it sounds really really boring and (c) it’s almost four hours long.
Like the forum poster I was disappointed that the headline didn’t mean you could beat ALL of those 20 games in less than the video’s 3h 51m 09s running time, but merely that you could beat any ONE of them, which didn’t seem much of a fun fact.
But it did seem like a bit of a challenge, so to liven up my afternoon while I listened to some lawyers also droning on tediously for hours I thought I’d try to find out how many old Speccy games you could complete, one after the other, in the same timespan.
Obviously stuff has continued to happen on the Speccy scene since then, so it’s now, in some senses, not quite so definitive. Or at least it wasn’t, until I updated it, which I’ve just done, so now it is again. Of it. Or something.
(I appear to have a debilitating compulsion to write top 100s for no very good reason. There’s also this one, and I’m currently working on yet another as a distraction from the wretched state of politics, so fans of subjectively-numbered lists of extremely old videogames should definitely stay tuned.)
I also wanted to have it all in one post rather than five, so now if you want to see the videos of the original arcade games you’ll have to click the titles of each entry – only the Speccy videos are embedded within the article, so the page SHOULD now actually load up without falling over.
There are loads of new entries, a few position adjustments – don’t get TOO excited, Bomb Jack fans – and a bit of general tidying, but I haven’t rewritten the entire thing because it’s 33,000 words and I’m not a lunatic, although those two facts are mostly unrelated. So if you haven’t seen it before, go and get a cup of tea and some biscuits, because this might take a while.
The Spectrum community is arguably more on top of the machine’s history than any other in the world of gaming, so it’s always quite noteworthy when something and/or someone escapes its notice entirely. And so it is with Lukasz Kur.
The screenshot above is of a game called a_e Adventure, or sometimes a_e in King Chrum’s Gold Mines. (According to Kur the character’s name represents “a portion of a forum member’s user name which inadvertantly looked like an emoticon of sorts – a little face with asymetrical eyes.”)
The 16K ZX Spectrum was definitely the ginger stepchild of the family of micros that defined home computing in the UK in the 1980s. With far less memory available to coders (just 9K) than a 16K ZX81, the £125 cost of the entry-level model – shockingly the equivalent of £416 now – didn’t get you all that much bang for your buck when it launched, even by the standards of April 1982.
The vast majority of purchasers wisely chose to save up the extra £50 for the 48K version (£175, or a hefty £582 in 2023 money, although still peanuts compared to the Commodore 64’s launch price of £1,327 equivalent), and the 16K Speccy very quickly fell out of favour. In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.
(There are no official figures for how many of the 5 million Spectrums sold were 16Ks, but Home Computing Weekly reported in May 1983 that 300,000 machines in total were sold in the first year, and in August 1983 Popular Computing Weekly reported that the 48K had outsold the 16K by two to one, so we can make a reasonable guess at somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 units of the 16K in the year and a bit it was on sale, or roughly 3% of all Spectrums.)
But even in its very brief life (the vast bulk of these titles were released in 1983), the 16K machine amassed a library of fun games that left the catalogues of many better-specced computers in the dust. And for no particular reason other than that 40 years have passed since it abruptly met its fate, we’re here to celebrate them.
So sit yourself down with one of the last cans of Lilt (or don’t, because it’s full of poisonous artificial-sweetener chemicals now), get ready to fondly remember a few old favourites, and hopefully also discover some lost gems for the first time.
In the modern world, presentation and packaging is absolutely central to how we experience (and sell) everything. When videogame arcades tried to break that rule, it almost led them to disaster.
If you went to a shop to buy the latest blockbuster videogame, handed over your £50 and were given in return a blank unboxed disc with the name scrawled on it in marker pen, you’d be really unhappy about it – even though the disc would contain the exact same game code and play exactly the way it does when it comes in a pretty case.
It’d be like ordering a cup of tea in a cafe and have them bring you a cup of cold water, a teabag and a kettle – you’ve technically got everything that you need, but it’s not the experience you were hoping for.
And yet, for many years – and to some extent even today – that’s exactly the way we treated arcade games.
Super-veteran readers may recall the story of Scorpion Software, the amateur games development collective I formed with a pal in the early 1980s to create largely rubbish games mostly written in BASIC for the ZX Spectrum and the Dragon 32.
If you read the 2008 retrospective linked in that paragraph, you’ll note that it offers a bit of constructive self-critique on some of the games we produced, and the other day I accidentally stumbled into following my own advice.
My Retropie setup is my favourite physical thing I’ve ever owned. For a total cost of under £200 (the Retropie box itself, plus a monitor and a double arcade joystick), I have instant access to just about the entire history of videogaming up to and including the original Playstation (plus some later stuff too, like the Nintendo DS).
But the physicality of it makes a huge difference. It’s hard to overstate what a complete revelation switching the Pi from a little box under my living-room TV controlled with Playstation joypads to a stand-up machine with proper joysticks was. It changed from something that was nice to have a little play on once in a while to something I use for pleasure every single day.
Hatey McHateface on Two Men Unalike: “It’s the F16s wot done it, Geri.” Mar 1, 10:06
Hatey McHateface on The Tactics Of Suicide: ““there is no point engaging with whatever psychotic rant you’ve decided to treat us all to” Ah, c’moan noo, Aidan.…” Mar 1, 10:00
Northcode on Two Men Unalike: “Guid mornyng aw ye wha wander this place. May ye aw hae a guid Sabbath Sunday day the day. And…” Mar 1, 09:53
Geri on Two Men Unalike: “You really are unhinged to come out with something as pathetic & slanderous as that statement. Seek help, ya pathetic…” Mar 1, 09:52
Hatey McHateface on Two Men Unalike: “Ach, Andy. This time next year there will likely be a puckle of IRGC fanatics living in Houses of Multiple…” Mar 1, 09:24
Hatey McHateface on Two Men Unalike: “I hear they’re working on fusing the bunker busters with AI. They intelligently blow all routes into the bunkers but…” Mar 1, 09:14
Hatey McHateface on The Tactics Of Suicide: “4. I demand to be taken seriously. I self identify as a thousand year old, space travelling, fictitious language posting,…” Mar 1, 09:02
Andy Ellis on Two Men Unalike: “Indeed: I’m sure there are lots of nervous Jockistinians and their ideological allies elsewhere who are intensely nervous right about…” Mar 1, 09:02
Hatey McHateface on Two Men Unalike: “I’ve got a gross of black armbands I’m willing to donate to the usual suspects as an act of Christian…” Mar 1, 08:55
Andy Ellis on The Tactics Of Suicide: “@Geri It’s hardly exceptional to point out that you personally are just not that bright, as well as being an…” Mar 1, 08:40
Aidan on The Tactics Of Suicide: “@Geri – there is no point engaging with whatever psychotic rant you’ve decided to treat us all to. I and…” Mar 1, 07:11
Aidan on Two Men Unalike: “Just a shame these principled, capable characters aren’t capable of campaigning for themselves, so need us all to go out…” Mar 1, 07:02
sarah on Two Men Unalike: “As the Rev has been saying for many years, we need to get rid of the existing politicians. We need…” Feb 28, 23:58
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Two Men Unalike: “JENNIFER BILEK | Who is Behind the TRANS AGENDA? (2023) Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, a feminist and a…” Feb 28, 23:42
Geri on The Tactics Of Suicide: “Oi Fandan That’ll be eight of yours too then trying desperately to look relevant with zero point but word salad…we…” Feb 28, 20:56
Geri on The Tactics Of Suicide: “*scans Franchise fannies mutterings for any deep & meaningful insight, rebuttal or even a quality counter argument* FAIL! FAIL! FAIL!…” Feb 28, 20:46
lorncal on Two Men Unalike: “Three strands at work here: 1. the big corporates (all male) which have invested billions in the ‘trans’ industry -…” Feb 28, 20:30
Mark Beggan on Two Men Unalike: “Pedophile Apologists. Friends of Groomers. Corrupt to the core. Makes the SNP look like a community project with missing raffle…” Feb 28, 20:22
Aidan on The Tactics Of Suicide: “That’s 8 posts from you Alf, all of which say basically the same thing. You might get beyond rhetoric to…” Feb 28, 20:16
Cynicus on Two Men Unalike: “Don’t expect Parliament to do anything about this in a hurry. It too is virtually captured. Almost 12 % of…” Feb 28, 20:05
Mark Beggan on Two Men Unalike: “They have cut off the head of the snake. The Iranian supreme leader is no longer.” Feb 28, 19:55
Alf Baird on The Tactics Of Suicide: “For the “hard of thinking” colonialists BTL – an ye aw ken wha ye are, an so dae we -…” Feb 28, 19:45
Sven on Two Men Unalike: “Lends a whole new meaning to the term, “Labour of love”, Mark B.” Feb 28, 19:03
Mark Beggan on Two Men Unalike: “God help those who help themselves. Korea next? Why not. Zap the bastards.” Feb 28, 18:36
Young Lochinvar on Two Men Unalike: “Strike Hebes, should have read camel jockeys.” Feb 28, 18:32
Mark Beggan on Two Men Unalike: “Pride in the workplace. Does that include Rent Boys.” Feb 28, 18:32
Young Lochinvar on Two Men Unalike: “Hi tech long range warfare unleashed yet again. God help the Americans if the Hebes and Mullahs get their hands…” Feb 28, 18:28
Northcode on The Tactics Of Suicide: “Correct, Geri. I don’t think most folk will need as many as three guesses… one will probably be enough.” Feb 28, 18:18
Aidan on The Tactics Of Suicide: “Of course no mildly educated person in reasonable control of their own faculties and with a balanced state of mind…” Feb 28, 18:04
