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THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ZX SPECTRUM PART TWO by Mr Biffo

26/11/2015

24 Comments

 
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Given the ease with which it was possible to pirate computer games back in the 80s, it's little wonder that consoles replaced the home computer scene.

However, I was, and still am, a technophobe. I never copied a game for anyone else - that seemed like an excessive level of faff - but I certainly found myself giving tapes to classmates so they could copy games.

Everyone else was doing it... why shouldn't I? But somehow, having pirated games devalued them for me. 

I had a C180 a friend had given me, which contained dozens of games - The Hobbit, Deus Ex Machina, Pimania and others - and none of them gave me the same buzz as buying a game, or receiving one as a gift, in the original packaging. It stripped them of some of their magic.

​A game was a complete package which included the instructions and the box artwork, and if I wasn't getting them in the form that the creators intended I felt I was missing out.

I'm the same now. I never got into the whole Napster and torrent business - and I struggle to enjoy new music, in this streamable ecosystem, as much as I did when unwrapping a new CD, or vinyl album. The ZX Spectrum games that I loved were all ones that I owned, legitimately.

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16/48 OVERTURE
Many of the games which stood out for me from the era are the same ones which stood out for everyone; Jet Set Willy, Skool Daze, Underwurlde, Pyjamarama, Starglider, Valhalla, TLL... 

I've never forgotten the excitement of seeing Knight Lore screenshots for the first time. Or the suppressed disappointment at how difficult it was. 

​But the one game that really got me wasn't even a game - it was a magazine.


16/48 was a mag on cassette. I remember it cost around a fiver, which was almost a month's wages back then, but you got your money's worth; demos of games, reviews, features, and an instalment of a multi-part graphic adventure. There was something more than a little teletext-y about it, and the first of its adventure games, The Long Way Home, hit me so hard it left a mark.

Somehow, that adventure - more than anything by Ultimate Play The Game, or Ocean, or Imagine - was a turning point in my love of games. Though basic, its time travelling story provided the escape I needed. It would be a pointless flourish of melodrama to pretend it saved my life, but it certainly made my life, as it was then, more tolerable.

The Long Way Home showed me that games can be as powerful as meditation, or medication, or a nice back rub. It's why games aren't just something I enjoy: I owe them. I care about them. And I get frustrated when I see their potential being squandered.

Games have a potential for alchemy that can be profound in the right hands. I resent the corporate, committee-led, nature of the blockbuster games we get now. They lack personality, identity, and idiosyncrasy.

Just as a person is more interesting and unique the more they've lived, the more they've been through, the more they're a sum of their experiences - like a pair of comfortable, battered trainers - so games fail to capture me the more they've had their edges rounded off. I want games that are a reflection of those who made them. I want that passion and identity to bleed through.


Any game that has a truth to it can take me out of the world, transport me somewhere else, somewhere full of possibilities. The Long Way Home didn't just take me out of the world, but out of time. Into the future, and the past. Back then, I wanted to be anywhere but the present. 

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PLUS ONE
At some point, my dad upgraded me to a Spectrum+ - the one with a proper keyboard. Sort of. Ish.

I think my original Spectrum had died - or the 48k upgrade pack had come loose. Either way, it was an opportunity for him to try and bond with me, as he'd exhausted every idea he had to interest me in football or the army. 

I'd tried to show an interest, of course. I'd collected the Panini stickers, I owned a Watford FC shirt and scarf, but the few times we did go and see a match together, I invariably messed around out of sheer boredom. On one occasion, I flung my friend Warren Cox's baseball cap onto the pitch. He never spoke to me again (Warren Cox - not my dad). The 1984 FA Cup Final between Watford and Everton was a painful ordeal, but at least they had remote control helicopters during the half-time show.

I showed slightly more interest in soldiers. I'd badgered one of dad's colleagues in the Territorial Army to give me a job, and he'd offered to pay me if I helped out at the TA Centre one weekend. Unfortunately, while messing around in the back of a lorry I had the misfortune to poo my pants - having been too shy to ask for directions to the toilet. I hid the soiled underwear in the back of a truck, and asked to go home. I never heard if anybody found them.

After that, computers were the only real common ground we had left.

That said, on one occasion, my dad went with me to return a copy of a game I hadn't liked; Jack and the Beanstalk. I'd told him it didn't work - having done my best to corrupt the tape using a magnet - but when the shop loaded it up, it worked fine. They refused to give us a refund, which resulted in my dad storming out of the shop after directing an unfortunate racial slur towards the manager. 

We get on fine these days. He's 81, and a fantastic granddad (especially if you play football, or joined the army), and considerably less racist. He still struggles with displays of affection, though.

"Why don't you ever tell Paul you love him?" my mum once asked him.


"I don't need to", replied my dad. "He knows I like him".

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THE END
​Much as I love the Spectrum, as important to me as it is, looking back it's remarkable how few of its games I ever completed. I've played so many of those games since, and it's pretty clear why I never finished them: they're mostly impossible.

​Such were the limitations of the technology at the time that they demanded a level of patience and forgiveness to overlook their flaws and overreaching ambition. I was never blessed with such gifts, and so I'd typically play for as long as I could - those same few opening moments, over and over - before moving onto the next game. 


Zoids, Shadowfire, and The Hobbit were three I particularly recall failing at. I barely knew what I was supposed to be doing in Zoids and Shadowfire, and the latter stranded me in a gloomy empty land the second I left Bilbo's hole.

Mostly, I ended up improvising.
​
Seiddab Attack - with its first-person take on Space Invaders - ended up as just one part of an elaborate game of make-believe. The loading screen of Bugaboo the Flea, which featured a flight through space, became the view out of my spaceship windscreen. I suppose, in its own way, it was an early example of emergent gameplay. For me, it was just trying to get some value out of something I'd spent pocket money on.

At some point, the Spectrum began to gather dust. The last game I remember playing on it was a conversion of the Star Wars arcade game - as good a demonstration as any of how far the system had come in just a few years. But the industry had moved on, and so had I. I took a trip to Harrods with a friend on my 15th birthday, and played on an NES. I knew it was the future. 

By the time I left school, and got a job, my family had started to piece itself back together. It had been a rough few years, but my Spectrum had been more than just a home computer, more than just games. It's not overstating it to say it had been a life raft, keeping me afloat through the daily trials of school, and storms of grief and upheaval at home.

It did its job. I could see dry land again.

And waving to me from the shore were the Atari ST and Sega Master System...

CONTINUE READING...


FROM THE ARCHIVE:
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: THE ZX SPECTRUM PART ONE by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: ATARI - PART ONE by Mr Biffo
THE GAMES OF MY YEARS: ATARI - PART TWO by Mr Biffo

24 Comments
Monkeymanbob
26/11/2015 12:53:36 pm

Shadowfire, Stonkers and The Alchemist. The only 3 games I finished.
So many games, so little time and always something new to redirect your energies towards.
And it's no different now.
Bought Elite: dangerous on release and played it for a week before something else grabbed my attention. Fallout 4 is the same. Though I do keep returning to Guild of Dungeoneering.
There will always be a special place for those old cassette games. With there art and inlays evoking a magical sense of what was to come. I sat on the bus reading and rereading the inlay into Voyage into the Unknown (1.99 Mastertronic release) this was going to be an epic star trek like romp through space. It wasn't. You got stuck after 4 moves and there's only so many times you can reload a game before sulking up the loss and loading up Lords of Midnight (forgetting what you'd done previously and immediately regretting it).

Would like to know what those cover artists are up to these days as they shaped a love of art and fantasy.

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Voodoo76
26/11/2015 12:54:30 pm

This is excellent Biffo. Please tell me you had Teddy Boy on the Master System. My mate and I spent ages on it, went to pause it on the console but pressed the reset button........ aaaaghhhhhh!!

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Thom link
26/11/2015 01:53:36 pm

The view from the windscreen of a spaceship rings so very true. My brother and I used to pretend the exact same thing. Things you think are personal that turn out to be universal are the best sorts of thing.

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Clive peppard
26/11/2015 04:10:22 pm

Booty was my all time favourite Spectrum game. Quality Pirate platformer.

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MrDrinks
26/11/2015 04:28:37 pm

My dad took me into Boots to return Ghostbusters 2 for the Spectrum. They couldn't understand the fact that he wanted a refund not because it didn't work, but because it was complete shit. He shouted and swore at them and eventually they gave in, that may have been the time I got Chase HQ as a replacement (which was excellent), but I think that may have been the time he brought me to return Ninja Warriors which was also total shit.

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Kelvin Green link
26/11/2015 06:41:49 pm

I remember getting Golden Axe for the C64 for £9.99 (!) and it didn't work, so I took it back to the video rental/games shop and asked for my money back. He wouldn't refund me so I went back home and told my father.

Months later the owner of the shop turned up on our doorstep, quivering and apologetic, with a ten pound note in his hand.

I have no idea what happened in the intervening time to change his demeanour so much, or what part my father played in it.

My father also threatened a bouncer at the Future Entertainment Show in 1994 or so, but that was a misunderstanding.

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drunkndandy
26/11/2015 06:54:42 pm

what a great read!

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Retroresolution link
26/11/2015 06:56:24 pm

Another cracking article Mr. Biffo; reflects many of my own experiences, contemporary and current thoughts, and insights.
As always I doff my cap to your fine skills as a scribe.

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Chris
26/11/2015 06:57:13 pm

I agree with the piracy thing, Mr B. Actually on the Spectrum I never saw much need, as magazines came with an ever-increasing number of free games attached to the cover, and the latest Codemasters titles were only £2.99. Even my paltry pocket money could stretch to that on occasion. The Amiga was a different kettle of bananas, and most of my games were copies as I simply couldn't afford to buy them (and my local dealer was often handing out games before they'd even hit the shops). One only gets so many birthdays a year, but I preferred the real thing, partly from a moral standpoint, and partly because the box and manual was part of the experience.

I still buy physical games instead of their digital counterparts, despite the box art being far inferior in most cases, and the instruction manual consisting of a flimsy sheet of paper with controls printed on it. The disc still wants to (re-)download most of the game before you can play it but it's a tangible item and that makes it special.

I do the same with music. I once imported a CD at great expense when a digital version would have been a fraction of the cost. Amazon gave me a free album download not too long ago. I burnt it to CD and printed out the insert. It looks like a cheap pirate copy, even though it's completely legit.

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Bruce Flagpole
26/11/2015 07:10:09 pm

Great series of articles Mr B.

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EmmaI
26/11/2015 08:19:37 pm

I wonder if you could help me? I am looking for a game I used to own on the Speccy, but I cannot for the life of me remember the name. It was a dungeoneering adventure, with both text and visual game play. Usual stuff, which way do you want to turn, collect gold and objects, fight various creatures etc.
The thing I remember most vividly was fighting rats - there was usually five of them pictured in a line opposite my character, and they would attack in turn before I got to attack them.
Any ideas? I'd love to download the game on the emulator, and it's driving me crazy!!
Thanks for the nostalgia :)

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Chris
26/11/2015 09:24:35 pm

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0004039

That it?

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Stay
26/11/2015 10:15:30 pm

Would it be Bards Tale?

Did it look like this screenshot? http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/pc/bardstale1/images/versions_spectrum_screen2.gif

WOS site with tape images: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0000418

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EmmaI
26/11/2015 10:39:31 pm

It could be!! Looks very familiar.
Thank you so much!

Emma

Col. Asdasd
26/11/2015 10:08:15 pm

These are getting better with every article.

If it's any consolation, the BBC Micro was a similarly minefieldesque in terms of software quality. I was lucky that one of the disks my from the collection my dad borrowed off a workmate was Chucky Egg. I'm sure I owe a lifelong obsession to the medium due to the sheer quality of that timeless gem.

Well, maybe 'lucky' is the wrong word..

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Stay
26/11/2015 10:12:10 pm

This summer marked the 20th anniversary of the only time I fully shat myself since being a toddler. It was a Friday night and I hadn't seen my girlfriend since the Monday due to being at a client site installing a software system I had developed. I hadn't had a poo since Tuesday. On the Thursday we stopped off in Cheltenham on the way back to Bristol to have some food in the Hobnails Inn. I had a large steak bap with chips and mushrooms. Very nice. So Friday night I meet my girlfriend, go back to my house and wait for my parents to go out. I feel the slight groan in my bowels but being 21 I had a different type groan on my little heads mind. So its last bus time so we take the 10 minute walk to the bus stop and I see her off. All is good. 3 minutes into the walk back the groan is back but this time is much more urgent. I walk faster but that makes it worse. I run. That allows me to cover more ground but its worse. Less than 2 minutes from home on the final straight I lose the battle, admit defeat and stop and just let it happen. Like a baby. Unlike a baby I waddle home and go straight upstairs and proceed to clean the mess up and hide the evidence in the dustbin. Still to this day when ever I eat mushrooms I can't but think of all the black bits I had clean off myself before jumping in the shower.

Anyway back to the Spectrum. I think it was Christmas 83 that we got a 48k Spectrum for Christmas so I would have been about 9, soon to be 10 a month after. There sat Horace Goes Skiing taunting us because first we had to go through the education games on Christmas morning.

Soon after my dad had brought home some copied games on tape from work (the same work he got "those" VHS tapes from). After that I played with the computer on an off for a couple of years until the Lego, Action Man and Action Force toys where packed off to the loft and then my life long love of games began.

I had no problem with being given C90's full of games as those got me through a couple of summers before I could buy my own games. I think the first I bought was Rambo: First Blood P2 and then a couple of years later Renegade. After that I had a scheme where I was given a pound a day for dinner at school but a packet of custard creams only cost 18p at the local shop so I could I make £4 a week plus £2 as pocket money so I could buy one full price game every couple of weeks.

For me the Spectrum was about Chaos, Laser Squad, Lords of Chaos, Renegade and Target plus lots the Ocean arcade conversions they did. I was introduced to the love of narrative and grinding for ever bigger numbers because of Bards Tale.

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ThinkYourselfFat
27/11/2015 09:06:27 am

To the poster above, (Stay), what a wonderful recounting of desperation. Really reminds me of some of my own close shaves (and like you, some defeats). One that sticks in my mind was when I was very ill. Felt some activity down below. Thought it was wind. It wasn't. It was an almighty poo that managed to touch cloth thrice.

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Superbeast 37
27/11/2015 11:50:17 am

Amateur!

The magnet trick was a waste of time.

You put celotape over where the tabs on a recordable tape would be, put it in a tape deck, fast forward to half way through the load and press recorded for a split second!

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Richard Wager
27/11/2015 11:07:58 pm

Good work biffo. The copying of games was rife in the cassette days as was pinching games! Lord Sugars hideous stereo cabinets etc were churning out tons of pirate material lol. I agree, having the genuine article was and still is special. Reading the manual on the bus or tube home would build the hype, loading the bloody cassette took long enough to read the manual again. The load errors oh the joys my kids ain't got a bloody clue how easy it is. NES, we spent hours in BOOTS playing Mario.

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Euphemia
28/11/2015 12:03:18 am

Well, that was lovely.

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Truculent Sheep
28/11/2015 12:53:06 am

It's worth pointing out how so much of the 8-bit market ended up being dominated by the budget market. By 1989, the whole of the Top 20 for a lot of formats consisted almost entirely of budget titles until C&VG moved them into their own seperate cheapo chart.

The only exception to this rule was Ocean's Robocop game, which somehow not only stayed at number 1 for months, but also consistently outsold all the budget games during its reign. Seriously. It spent more than a year at the top of the charts, and it would. Not. MOVE.

There's a lot to be said for recording the folk history of video gaming. Among other reasons, there are just so many stories that need to be shared, if only because they remind us just how strange it was at times...

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Kirby
28/11/2015 10:37:09 pm

I remember playing and failing at so many games on the Spectrum. I always chalked it up to the fact that I was barely 5, and assumed that if I played those same games today I'd nail them no problem.

Earlier this year I bought one on eBay, and discovered that no, I wouldn't... because they were just impossible. Partly by design and partly by the impossibly shit collision detection most of them employed.

I'm looking at you, 'Treasure Island'.

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Hamptonoid
28/11/2015 11:05:58 pm

Have you thought about writing a biography for your book project? Superb series.

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Mr Biffo
29/11/2015 10:58:06 am

Not really famous enough to make that worthwhile, I don't think! BUT! I do have a concept for the book (or books...) project now, and it's underway. There'll be some more news on it after Christmas, hopefully.

It'll no doubt feature various biographical bits - because it's how I write - but not a straightforward biography thing.

Glad you're all enjoying the series, though!

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