Wings Over Scotland

There can’t be many all-time classic videogames that originated on the Sharp X-1.

But Bousou Tokkyuu SOS (literal translation “Runaway Express SOS”) is definitely one of them. Or the only one of it. Of them. Whatever. But anyway.

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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.

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It’s been almost two years since I wrote the 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.

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.

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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.”)

A fun, inventive 12-screen platformer with puzzle elements, it came out in 2014 and was apparently a spiritual successor to a Polish-language text adventure for the C64 and Nintendo DS from a few years earlier by the same author.

That’s already quite weird, but we’re just getting started.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

It’s basically become magic.

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As alert readers will know by now, there’s nothing I like more than preserving weird old videogame stuff that’s in danger of being lost to posterity, unless perhaps it’s seeing games ported to strange formats they were never designed to run on, years or even decades after those formats ceased to be current.

So man, what a stroke of luck!

What’s all this, then?

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Ashby Computers & Graphics Ltd, better known under their trading name of Ultimate Play The Game, were the most reclusive and secretive videogame developers of the 8-bit era. Almost never doing interviews and giving very little away when they did, they preferred to let their stream of smash-hit games do most of the talking for them. The anti-Bitmap Brothers, if you will.

The games themselves were just as enigmatic, never really explaining your goal or even how to play. You'd be told the control keys, given a bit of cryptically florid plot waffle and left to get on with it.

But even now, 37 years after the last new Ultimate release, remarkably little is known about how they managed to arrive full-fledged on the scene, already making games that most other releases of the time paled and quailed beside.

And as I'd given myself the week off writing about politics and there wasn't a poker game on, I decided to spend last night having a bit of a dig.

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Galaxy Wars, released by Universal in 1979, is one of the first wave of "proper" arcade videogames (defined here as coded on ROM chips rather than being semi-mechanical or solid-state like Pong). 

Running on a hacked Space Invaders board (as most of the first wave did), it actually bears a lot of similarities to Taito's 1978 blockbuster. It's got UFOs running across the top of the screen, above a field of asteroids which move one way across the screen, then drop down a level when they reach the edge and start moving back across in the opposite direction.

The screen was a monochrome reflector – sometimes supplemented by sheets of coloured cellophane to mimic a colour display – and all the sound effects are ripped straight from Invaders.

It was a pretty dull game, and other than an inexplicable Japan-only SNES port in 1995 (which seems to have been the only ever licenced home version on any format) it made very little impact on posterity.

Until this week, when it suddenly threatened to become mildly interesting.

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