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 In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.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.
This one was quite hard to place. It’s almost certainly the slimmest game in this entire chart, offering just five stages of perhaps the simplest sport in existence without even the superficial novelty of different opponents.
On the other hand, if you’re going to execute something as exquisitely as this, how much does that matter?
60. PANG Arcade: 1989, Mitchell Corporation Spectrum: 1990, Ocean
Look, nobody’s more surprised than me.
I was expecting this to be challenging for the top 10. The triumphant Arkanoid-style updated return to the Speccy of the arcade game that started out years earlier as Bubble Buster/Cannon Ball has it all – the graphics, the music, all the levels, even a decent splash of colour.
80. CRYSTAL CASTLES Arcade: 1983, Atari Spectrum: 1986, US Gold
On first glance, Crystal Castles looks like an awfully big ask for the Spectrum.
A fast-moving, colourful, trackball-controlled game in a diagonal 3D perspective looks like an obviously impossible feat, so when you see what a mostly-fine job Andromeda Software made of it, it just makes it more annoying that the ship was substantially spoiled for a ha’porth of tar, in the shape of the almost total absence of sound.
Recently, just for fun and to pass the time now that I’ve retired from political journalism, I thought I’d compile a totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100, also compiled and written by me, was published in 1991.
(Phew, made it with eight hours of 2021 to spare.)
There’s a whole torrid story attached to the undertaking, but meh, some other time. Here’s the entirety of the chart in one place. It takes about a thousand years to load as a single page because YouTube is such a big whiny baby, so I’ve split it into five.
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 about £300 (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.
I was as pleased as a big fat walrus with a free bucket of haddock today to be able to contribute to the week-long one-off revival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the start of the majestic Digitiser.
Especially when I got a lovely new Panel 4 picture from Mr Biffo (instead of money). But I got a bit distracted in the column, and forgot to talk about the thing I meant to talk about, so I'm going to talk about it now.
[This piece was originally titled "Why Piracy Is Good" when I wrote it in August of 2004. I figured I'd make it gratuitously offensive clickbait this time, just for teh funz. If you don't understand the new title, start here.]
It's weird how the simplest games can have the longest stories. Today we're going to talk (well, I'm going to, anyway) about a couple of games (well, four games, but we'll get to that) that are about as Zen-basic as it's possible for electronic entertainment to be.
They're a pair of games which could be played by the one-armed dishwasher from Robin's Nest (one for the mums and dads, there), a duo that require all the brainpower of a starving dog pondering the best course of action to take with a pound of sausages that's just fallen out of an old lady's shopping bag right under his nose.
And yet, by the time we're done we'll have covered inspiration, plagiarism, moral flexibility, flagrant copyright infringement, public-spiritedness, cultural history, corporate pragmatism, collective short-sightedness and the proudest moment in your correspondent's career to date. Which is a lot of stuff, so let's get on or we'll be here all day.
Hatey McHateface on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Nailed it. Both sides consider the cost of keeping up the fight both bearable and worth while. Let me just…” Jun 2, 14:23
robertkknight on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Don’t think I’ve ever read such a telling response, shedding so much light on an individual’s psyche, as that. I…” Jun 2, 14:14
Hatey McHateface on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “I blame the Romans for chucking the Jews out of Judea. Some of the Indy supporters here are forever asserting…” Jun 2, 14:07
Alf Baird on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Yes Robert, this is rather like asking a people who have been subject to colonisation if they think they are…” Jun 2, 14:04
Northcode on The Flip: “I don’t have any faith in Alba or the NSP and I certainly have no faith in the honesty and…” Jun 2, 14:00
Mark Beggan on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “I’m amazed the Useless brown boy has time for such things. One would think he/she/it would be busy with their…” Jun 2, 13:57
Hatey McHateface on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “1946 – long before I was born. Jerusalem – a place I’ve never visited and never will. Manchester Arena -…” Jun 2, 13:47
Jennifer Livingston on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Now I want to try making a frosting out of midsummer nights dream and putting it on a vanilla cupcake.?…” Jun 2, 13:46
Mark Beggan on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “For some Scots the Muslim Terrorists fill the void left by the IRAs complete and utter defeat at the hands…” Jun 2, 13:42
Robert on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “It really doesn’t matter who started it, though if was probably Britain with Balfour. What matters is ending it now.” Jun 2, 13:33
James on The Flip: “Aye, and now Frog Face is hinting at scrapping the Barnett formula. Get voting, lemmings!” Jun 2, 13:27
Geri on The Flip: “Yessers need to get out of their permanent fixation with the SNP. They’re a Britnat unionist party. They already have…” Jun 2, 13:25
Rev. Stuart Campbell on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “For there to be peace in Gaza would require both sides to want peace. Neither is the least bit interested…” Jun 2, 13:09
Dick Wall on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Hamas and The Netanyahu govt. Are like a weird but bad version of a pair of organisms that need each…” Jun 2, 12:59
robertkknight on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “…. futhermore, Hatey, your assertion that “Whilst the other side isn’t at all interested in killing us. And hasn’t” is…” Jun 2, 12:55
Iain Mhor on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “You can only be dragged into something if you are interested in it, or perhaps trying to keep the wife…” Jun 2, 12:49
Andy Ellis on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “His media goes to another school Stu…..but it definitely exists. And it absolutely proves his point because it’s uniformly bad…” Jun 2, 12:48
Marie M on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Excellent point,this is the way colonizers work.” Jun 2, 12:34
Rev. Stuart Campbell on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “If you blame Israel for the whole problem, then you blame them for the current conflict, because the current conflict…” Jun 2, 12:32
JuneCalder on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “The poll question sounds to me like who stated the current big conflict. Hamas did on 07th Oct 2023. But…” Jun 2, 12:31
Insider on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “Wish ALL of your racist claptrap about being swamped by “incomers” was lost in the ether !” Jun 2, 12:23
Athanasius on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “As a great man once said, Stu, opinions are like arseholes. Everybody’s got on and most of them stink. You’ve…” Jun 2, 12:15
James Cheyne on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “At some point, sooner rather than too late, the people in all four nations are going to have to work…” Jun 2, 12:07
Oneliner on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “So the Stern Gang was merely a neighbourhood watch organisation?” Jun 2, 12:06
Andrew on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “The media that squarely blamed Hamas for hostage taking and 100% stood behind Israel, buying all their stories about how…” Jun 2, 11:55
robertkknight on A Butterfly On Absinthe: ““Whilst the other side isn’t at all interested in killing us. And hasn’t.” Only because we don’t have something they…” Jun 2, 11:50
James Cheyne on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “The newb people that inhabit the like the SNP, Labour, greens, lib dems, and tories are there for a reason,…” Jun 2, 11:38
Robert Hughes on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “hmmm…..the trouble with these types of ” both-sides-as-bad-as-each-other ” verdicts is the absence of any attempt at identifying root causes…” Jun 2, 11:21
Edward Chang on A Butterfly On Absinthe: “I have never understood why the Gaza issue in particular has assumed such prominence on the Left.Yes,it is mixed in…” Jun 2, 11:20