Who remembers the winter of 1985? In the UK, it was one of the coldest for many years, although east-west tension was beginning to thaw as US president Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in November. I was 12 years old and unworried by historic political meetings or war in the middle east. All I wanted to do was play computer games. And I wanted to play them on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
I’d first been introduced to the Speccy three years earlier. Growing up, everyone seemed to have that one friend whose parents bought them everything. Mine lived across the road, and one Saturday morning, I strolled into their lounge where he had a 16K Spectrum set up, the tiny computer dwarfed by the large television and furniture. We soon had a game loaded, and, of course, I recall which one: Escape by New Generation Software. A simple maze chase-‘em-up, Escape had us enraptured as we plodded around the faux 3D screen, dodging dinosaurs while trying to locate an invisible axe.
Another friend received a 48K Spectrum for his birthday the following year. He brought it around one afternoon, plugging it into our black and white kitchen TV. Then the day disappeared, swallowed up by the delight that was Melbourne House’s Scramble clone, Penetrator. We created our own maps using its in-built level designer when we’d finished playing. In an era where computers were financially out of reach to many people, this genuinely felt like the most exciting time of my life.
However, I wasn’t a stranger to playing videogames at home. One of these friends also owned a Philips Videopac, and I had an ageing Mattel Intellivision somewhere in my bedroom. But the games for both of these consoles were elusive and expensive. I’d already seen Mastertronic games for sale in my local newsagent for just £1.99 each. I’d seen the racks of cassette boxes in WH Smith and Boots (yes, Boots!). Specialist magazines Crash, Your Sinclair and Sinclair User were on sale every month. This was an actual computer, a machine that could be programmed and even used for educational purposes. Yeah, right.
It took a while to convince my parents, and by the time I’d got my first Spectrum Sinclair were experiencing turbulent times; the Spectrum might have been an outstanding success and had already earned Sir Clive Sinclair a knighthood in 1983, but his plans to introduce a superior 128K model had been scuppered. Retailers such as Dixons, who put together attractive bundles for the Christmas market, were unhappy that they’d been saddled with the minor upgrade, the Spectrum 48K+, as Sinclair plotted its 128K machine. While the 128 may have been a disappointment in retrospect, it’s hard to imagine many 48Ks would have sold that Christmas had it been available. The result was a Spanish release 128K, while my parents, like many others, were sold 48K+ Spectrums in their thousands.
None of this mattered to me on that Christmas morning as I stared wide-eyed at the massive box before me. This was a bundle of technological wonder. Inside was a cassette player, joystick, joystick interface and a large pile of games, mainly from the recently-defunct Imagine Software. And finally, the Spectrum+ itself, bereft of the quirky rubber keyboard but including a reset button so you didn’t have to unplug it whenever you wanted to play another game. It was a joyous gift.
Of course, it didn’t work.
Due to a common CPU error, the TV screen displayed a mass of coloured blocks, the Speccy stubbornly refusing to function in any other way, no matter how much you stabbed that tiny reset button. With the shops shut for at least another day, I spent Christmas 1985 reading the inlays of those amazing-looking games repeatedly. By the time I got my replacement Spectrum, I knew the rudimentary plots to Alchemist, Zzoom, Arcadia, Pedro and Jumping Jack off by heart. I’d be poring over them again soon. The replacement didn’t work either, though. I had to endure another agonising wait.
Then the third one functioned! Hooray! Finally, I got to play Alchemist, a brilliant arcade adventure; shoot-’em-up Zzoom that positively encouraged you to gun down the innocents you were supposed to be protecting; and early real-time simulation game Stonkers. It was the start of a love affair that persists today, and like most relationships, the Spectrum and I have had our ups and downs.
1986 was our honeymoon period. With the delayed 128K ignored by most games companies, a vast range of games were released for the extended user base of the 48K model. It wasn’t just the games: all my friends had Spectrums, and we traded software, magazines and, er, blank cassettes. The Spectrum wasn’t just a computer: it was a family, whether it be mates chatting in the playground about the latest games or the friendly, light-hearted pages of Crash and Your Sinclair.