The proceedings at the Supreme Court this week were a tough follow even if you could get the court’s abominably bad livestream to work. They’re all archived here now, but non-lawyers will probably glaze over quickly during the nine hours of intense legalese.
We’re not allowed to clip up any illustrative sections, on pain of possible contempt of court, so perhaps the best way to explain the key parts of what happened in a vaguely comprehensible way is by showing you some commentary from social media.
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.
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.
Young Lochinvar on A crisis of democracy: “Does that post constitute “whanging on about ….”? or am I simply picking this up wrong?” Jan 15, 00:58
Young Lochinvar on A crisis of democracy: “Branchform submission? Rumour is Breathy Bain has rolled it into a phallus shape, rocked up to pal Vals polycule and…” Jan 15, 00:41
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “The Independent: Is Scotland Facing An Identity Crisis? https://www.indiependent.co.uk/is-scotland-facing-an-identity-crisis/ https://archive.ph/giDy7 #ScotlandIdentityCrisis2025 #Yawn” Jan 15, 00:39
gregor on A crisis of democracy: ““The eyes are the mirror of the soul, they reflect everything that seems hidden – Like a mirror, they reflect…” Jan 15, 00:31
Young Lochinvar on A crisis of democracy: “I’m going against a decision I wasn’t going to comment here anymore due to heavy handed “moderation”, but IM; very…” Jan 15, 00:23
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “Myself: “A speaker or writer uses myself to refer to himself or herself. Myself is used as the object of…” Jan 15, 00:09
Scot Finlayson on A crisis of democracy: “£90 billion a year in interest payments for UK £3 trillion debt, most of the debt was from Brown and…” Jan 14, 23:56
Iain mhor on A crisis of democracy: “Yes and no. I’d rather say that under the Marshall Plan (of which Britain received the Lion’s share) the monies…” Jan 14, 23:43
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “BBC (2025): MSP pay to rise by 3.2% to almost £75,000: “The total cost of MSP salaries and associated taxes…” Jan 14, 23:41
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on A crisis of democracy: “I have just watched and posted the lower of two videos at the link below. It is archive footage of…” Jan 14, 23:20
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “Must be my imagination here, but It feels as though I’m talking to myself sometimes, lol” Jan 14, 23:04
gregor on Nicola’s Non-Truths: “re. “Who will get the camper van after the divorce?”” Jan 14, 22:46
Jay on A crisis of democracy: “There is something in common between Starmer and Trump.” Jan 14, 22:32
Jay on A crisis of democracy: “Yes, and as Rev Stu mentioned earlier, much depends on the design of the P.R. system used, it can put…” Jan 14, 22:25
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “Scotland doesn’t get the message, huh ? I don’t believe you… “Message: 1. a communication, usually brief, from one person…” Jan 14, 22:17
PacMan on A crisis of democracy: “That is based on the assumption that all of these appointees and members of both houses are totally loyal to…” Jan 14, 22:17
Jay on A crisis of democracy: “That summarises the threat. There is further threat from oligarchs undermining the ‘4th estate’, either buying formerly reputable titles or…” Jan 14, 22:15
Dave Hansell on A crisis of democracy: “Nope. Not even Wikipedia has a page on “The Sherman Plan” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?go=Go&search=The+Sherman+Plan&ns0=1 The search engine lists the 1787 Roger Sherman…” Jan 14, 22:03
Derek on A crisis of democracy: ““the government is opposed by four out of every five voters” isn’t really true though. Plenty of people who voted…” Jan 14, 21:58
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “COPFS @COPFS: reposted: “Disrupting serious organised crime is a priority for @ScotGov and partners on the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce…”:…” Jan 14, 21:29
willi on A crisis of democracy: “Can’t but help think what friendship the Donald John is saving up for the hapless Sir Keir Starmer who actively…” Jan 14, 21:22
Marie on A crisis of democracy: “If you say so Chatham House. Hilarious” Jan 14, 21:21
Dave Hansell on A crisis of democracy: “Surely the SNP have not done that much damage? Otherwise, we’ed have seen the official D-notice.” Jan 14, 21:20
Humza Who? on A crisis of democracy: “A promise from that amoral grifter Farage is even less reliable than one from the SNP or the Labour Party’s…” Jan 14, 21:07
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “Back To The Future: I have rejoined the SNP: “…in case anyone else is thinking it’s time to work for…” Jan 14, 21:05
Humza Who? on A crisis of democracy: “There should be enough checks and balances in the US system. That isn’t the case these days. The Republican Party…” Jan 14, 21:01
gregor on A crisis of democracy: “Operation Branchform latest (2025): Police ‘fed up’ of being blamed for length of SNP finance probe: “The Crown Office has…” Jan 14, 20:44