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.
Peter McAvoy on Seven Days Too Long: “Has the site of the fire in union street been examined to see if the buildings and roads are in…” May 1, 02:05
Young Lochinvar on Seven Days Too Long: “FFS What is up with you lot? Vote ATLS. Simple. “Independence, nothing else”. Isn’t that what we are crying out…” Apr 30, 23:49
Rob on Seven Days Too Long: “I did vote for Fergus, its not that I don’t like what the SNP used to stand for, its more…” Apr 30, 23:27
Alf Baird on Seven Days Too Long: “The Crown as relating to the Kingdom of England seems clear enough, an thars nae doubt thon Croun is whit…” Apr 30, 22:31
James on Seven Days Too Long: “Dan; I’m south Scotland and have an ATLS choice on the list so they will get my vote, sadly there…” Apr 30, 22:12
Mark Beggan on Seven Days Too Long: “I think Scotland is about to become the land that time forgot.” Apr 30, 21:17
Cynicus on Seven Days Too Long: “If you can, vote for Fergus Ewing. #No Votes SNP.” Apr 30, 21:13
Cynicus on Seven Days Too Long: “If you van, vote for Fergus Ewing. #No Votes SNP.” Apr 30, 21:12
diabloandco on Seven Days Too Long: “Please , please go and vote – spoil your ballot paper if no-one appeals – but please vote as even…” Apr 30, 21:11
Dan on Seven Days Too Long: “The trouble is James, that after 10 years and two Scottish parliament elections, there is now a choice of voting…” Apr 30, 21:06
Doug on Seven Days Too Long: “Our only hope for independence is Farage becoming PM in England.” Apr 30, 21:02
Doug on Seven Days Too Long: “A leader with any integrity would resign. So, aye, Swinney will remain as leader. The gutless memebership will probably beg…” Apr 30, 21:00
James on Seven Days Too Long: “Are you not missing the point? Agree to disagree on anything and everything except; Independence, nothing else nothing less. That’s…” Apr 30, 20:23
Confused on Seven Days Too Long: “pessimism is just playing the odds, but it makes for a dull life 1. england is swallowed beneath the waves…” Apr 30, 19:33
Potace on Seven Days Too Long: “I’m just not going to bother voting. What an utterly depressing shower they all are, and I’m left completely politically…” Apr 30, 19:06
Highland Wifie on Seven Days Too Long: “Alf says “Scots need to elect radicals.” Alliance to Liberate Scotland made a huge mistake in parachuting in Craig Murray…” Apr 30, 18:30
Sven on Seven Days Too Long: “twathater @ 17.54. “They may not be polished or grandiose” and, I’d add, not career or would be professional career…” Apr 30, 18:20
100%Yes on Seven Days Too Long: “Have you seen this below? https://neilslegalstuff.blogspot.com/2026/04/crown-of-england-post-1707-read-act.html Just wondered your thoughts?” Apr 30, 18:18
Sven on Seven Days Too Long: “Cynicus @ 17.39. I’d guess that you have missed the opportunity to waste some hours of your life which you’d…” Apr 30, 18:12
Alf Baird on Seven Days Too Long: ““a lackey for Sturgeon Don’t you mean “a lackey” for the ‘Union’?” Apr 30, 17:56
twathater on Seven Days Too Long: “FFS whats wae awe the girnin and defeatism , a canny vote for this yin or a canny vote fur…” Apr 30, 17:54
Cynicus on Seven Days Too Long: “I have not watched a single Party political broadcast or leaders’ debate.. Have I missed much?” Apr 30, 17:39
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Seven Days Too Long: “To be clear, Fergus Ewing is of course standing as an independent.” Apr 30, 17:27
Alf Baird on Seven Days Too Long: “Independence is of course ‘radical’ in terms of totally transforming our society and governance which means Scots need to elect…” Apr 30, 17:19
100%Yes on Seven Days Too Long: “The outcome of SNP election will be, Swinney failed again. He’s no Alex Salmond and why would he be, Alex…” Apr 30, 17:10
Shug on Seven Days Too Long: “He will fet my first vote but will never see the second until the perjurer is in jail” Apr 30, 17:04
100%Yes on Seven Days Too Long: “These are my predictions for the coming years:- 1 Scotland will still be in the Union in 2031 2 Peter…” Apr 30, 16:58
joe on Seven Days Too Long: “I’m happy , got eva comrie here to vote for, she will get my vote , hopefully get in on…” Apr 30, 16:54
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Seven Days Too Long: “Stu Campbell writes: “With the exception of Fergus Ewing in Inverness & Nairn, we’re struggling to think of a single…” Apr 30, 16:51
100%Yes on Seven Days Too Long: “What also is upsetting is the fact that SNP have made themselves perfectly clear how a majority has to be…” Apr 30, 16:40
