We received our Spectrum as a gift from my uncle around 1991. I don’t remember exactly why he gave it to us – as I recall; it was not a new computer, (probably one he had owned previously and was giving away after purchasing something newer). Anyway, the computer came with a bunch of games. An awful LOT of games, in fact. Well, it was actually a mixture of games and various kinds of software – but the fact was, I felt overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I could explore and try out. Thinking back now, it is quite remarkable to think that all my games took the form of old tape cassettes. Something even harder to imagine was having to wait, probably up to half-hour, for one of these games to actually load up so it was playable on the computer! While it was loading, the game would display an illustration, surrounded by a border of flickering lines of different colours. This was accompanied by an infernal screeching kind of noise that would last the whole duration (in fact, I wonder now while I never muted the TV). With the game finally loaded, I would take a seat, directly in front of the TV (so to be able to reach the keyboard) and would spent the next hour, two hours, or whatever, playing my game.
Spectrum games were not exactly ‘pretty’ by today’s standards. Colours were plain, music and sounds were just ‘beeps’, and gameplay was simple. Well, ‘simple’ in terms of design – actually, games were very, very hard to beat. And it’s not just because I had little gaming experience back then – replaying some of those same games today (courtesy of emulators – more on this later) has shown me just how tough these games were, especially compared to today’s titles. I was lucky if I successfully beat any of the ones I played back then. One quite amusing example is a game that had something to do with Jack & the Beanstalk: even before I could play the game, I had to input some kind of weird colour code before it would let me load the thing. This was a momentous challenge in itself – I have no idea why this was required, or whether there was simply some other way of doing it that had eluded me, but I have memories of my family gathered around as we tried to painstakingly replicate this tiny coloured grid that came on a card included with the game. And when we finally did succeed, the game itself was so tough that I barely progressed anywhere in it at all…
The memories were not all painful, however. Some of my best gaming memories came from some of the titles that I would play for hours on end. My all-time favourite was Dizzy, a series of games involving a walking egg with boxing gloves, who went around solving puzzles and evading obstacles – still with me? Read all about it here. Two things about the series appealed to me – the thrill of exploring and encountering new areas (even if these were just new screens containing a slightly different arrangement of shrubbery), and the puzzle solving aspect (which I still enjoy in games today). Back in those days, my Dad would buy almost all of my games for me – and I remember getting so excited about the prospect of receiving new titles (often in the form of a surprise). There was nothing quite like the feel of pouring over a new game’s cover, and the rushing upstairs to my room to shove it into the cassette player (followed, of course, by the obligatory waiting period). Interestingly, it is these moments that I tend to remember more than the experience of actually playing the game for the first time.
I could go on and on about my fond memories with the Dizzy series, but suddenly remembering that this is supposed to be a thoughtful, semi-intellectual blog, I think I ought to wrap things up. In my next post, I want to think more about Nostalgia, and how often the sweetest memories are best kept as such – something that is becoming increasingly difficult in an age where pretty much everything I loved from my childhood can be accessed and re-experienced in some form or another.
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