If you weren’t a kid in the 1980s, retro TV shows might have you believe we spent all our time slaying demogorgons or waxing the classic cars of old Okinawan men. But we also played computer games, you know. And we had to jump through hoops to do so.
Before Sonic the Hedgehog sped into the world, kids usually fell into the camp of Commodore, Amstrad or the Sinclair Spectrum.
I was the latter.
There was something very charming about the Speccy. I religiously read the magazines each month, Your Sinclair, Sinclair User and Crash which had varying levels of useful information, schoolboy humour and outdated references to Morrissey lyrics which probably explains my own writing style.
The mags, which fondly referred to us as things like ‘Spec-chums’ not only gave us star reviews of the latest games, they also gave us pages of laborious machine code to type out to programme our own games. It was like a particularly cruel sort of self-inflicted detention.
You’d type about 1500 words of ‘If run = 20 then print 10″ gibberish on the Speccy’s unforgiving rubber keyboard, then it invariably wouldn’t work because you’d left out a comma. Paraphrasing Obi Wan Kenobi, it was an elegant hobby for a more civilised age.
We would spend hours loading games with a cassette deck (Google it kids) which emitted a shrill howling noise like I imagine Sonic the Hedgehog would make if he fell into a blender.
The nefarious could also pirate the games by connecting two cassette decks together, not that I ever did that, obviously.
My favourite games were the Dizzy series. Dizzy was an anthropomorphic egg in boxing gloves, red wellies and a pith helmet (it was a look) who used to bounce around solving puzzles assisted by the other ‘Yolk Folk’.
If, like me, you were a Spec-chum you may be excited to learn that the Spectrum is making a comeback.
Launching last week, ‘The Spectrum ‘ as it’s called is part of a revival by Retro Games, a tech company in Luton.
‘With its timeless aesthetic and vibrant personality, The Spectrum isn’t just an updated replica of the iconic Eighties home computer, it’s a work of art that delivers a nostalgic yet ever-relevant gaming adventure for everyone’ promises the company.
The replica, selling for £89 or thereabouts, is based on the classic 48K Spectrum but has 48 games built in (so no screeching tape decks) including Manic Miner, The Hobbit, and Head Over Heels.
It even comes with a copy of Crash magazine and has the authentic rubber keyboard.
And it seems this is not the end of the Spectrum revival. Its story is being told in a documentary called The Rubber-Keyed Wonder.
Created by Sir Clive Sinclair who was best known for the barking mad idea that we should all start using electric vehicles, the ZX Spectrum hit the high street in April 1982. Unlike his C5 electric scooter which was seen as the nerdy flight of fancy of a bearded boffin, the Speccy was an instant hit.
But after the C5 bombed, costing him millions,Sinclair sold his company to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad for £5m in 1986, and the Spectrum was discontinued in 1992.
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