"In since the beginning" - a potted history of a lifelong obsession with videogames - Part 2: The 1980s and the Micro revolution

 

Welcome to part 2 of the musings of a videogame obsessive, and in this part we'll be delving into a decade that saw a gigantic explosion in videogaming that has never quite been equalled since. 

For me the decade began with the acquisition of a Sinclair ZX81 - a tiny stubby looking microcomputer with a touch sensitive (read: utterly rubbish) keyboard, a mere 1k of memory (expandable to a whopping 16k with a wobbly ram pack clamped to the backside of the thing) and the lure of blocky monochrome games, or the odd decent game typed in from a magazine listing (try describing to kids the pleasure and pain of actually trying to enter a game listing by hand on a terrible keyboard where each key could have at least 3-4 commands mapped to it!)

After the heady colourful thrills of console gaming via the Acetronic in the late 70s (read my previous blog post on all that nonsense) the ZX81 was a bit of a step backwards. It was monochrome, it had a terrible 256x192  pixel resolution and yet the few commercial games I owned for the thing were actually quite amazing considering that there was no sound, and sprites / polygons / high resolution graphics were the stuff of a madman's dream back then. 

The ZX81 offered up a game that genuinely affected me in a way I hadn't anticipated. It introduced fear, an adrenaline rush that made me sit up and take notice. Not quite the throbbing beat of the invaders from space but a sense that you were in danger, and at any moment you could end up dead. 

Even now when I view that game retrospectively, it might well look pathetic and awful to modern gamers but could put the fear of god into me way back then.

Good grief, look at it. 3D Monster Maze. You can almost hear the creaking insides of the ZX81 trying to render a realistic moving maze and an equally terrifying dinosaur pursuing you (the player) around it, Minotaur style. 

As crazy as it sounds, I genuinely shrieked out loud the first time I played this. Back then you often encountered games entirely cold - with no pre-warning of what was to come, no internet spoilers to warn you, perhaps just a few static screenshots in a magazine or a box shot on the back of the cassette (yay, all games came on data cassettes back then - try explaining to your kids that games used to take 20 minutes to load and would often fail at the last minute if you didn't get the volume on your cassette player 'just right'). 

The ZX81 with all its weird little quirks and foibles was genuinely something that many folk my age would have had, passed off by parents as 'something do to your homework on' (did you ever meet ANYONE who ever did their homework on a microcomputer back then?) but for me the first time I realised that computers were going to be 'a thing' - and would eventually be where I'd end up in my later career. 

The ZX81 was swiftly followed up by the rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum. Christmas 1983 was amazing, I had no idea I was going to get one but tore open my presents to find the Speccy's box staring back at me. Initial excitement gave way to a guilt feeling of disappointment as I realised my parents had bought me the 16k version, not the 48k one that was capable of running such awesome games as Manic Miner or Chequered Flag (which I also recieved as presents) but thankfully I got Jet Pac too and that ran just fine. A swift visit to a computer shop to get a 48K chip installed inside (no wobbly ram pack this time!) and that beast was ready to go!

The ZX Spectrum was my go-to games machine for most of the 80s and even today, I'll fire up Manic Miner (not on the original machine but via an emulator) to recapture the amazing intricacy of Matthew Smith's genre-defining platformer (and probably the first platform game I remember playing). 

I spent hours on it, and I still haven't ever managed to get all the way through it on 3 lives (it was probably the first game I remember there being a 'cheat code' for, passed around the playground at school in a whisper like some grand conspiracy). 

There were so many fantastic Speccy games. Introducing my 12 year old daughter to them has been fun, in that she can't quite believe her old man wasted so much time on them. But the likes of Skool Daze, Wheelie, Splat, Jet Set Willy, Lunar Jetman, Underwurlde, Atic Atac, Head over Heels and so many others have all passed into videogaming legend (on this side of the Atlantic at least). 

Spectrum games were amongst the first where I recall encountering an actual storyline. Not just the amazing text adventures (The Hobbit of course, but other more obscure adventure games, parsing a two-word set of commands in order to progress - and still even now more capable of delivering an immersive experience than even the best high resolution rendered environments, using the most powerful games engine in the universe - your imagination - in order to bring you fully into the game world). 

Given that most games were built in attics by spotty kids just like me, it's amazing to think that they could dream up believable worlds and immersive experiences using the Speccy's awful 8 colour palette and terrible sound chip but 'deeper' games could keep you occupied for months, and became the stuff of legends as everyone at school competed to be the first to see the last level on whatever the latest title was. 

But ah, mid way through the 80s I fell for the old "the grass is greener" thing. By now I was working as a humble IT technician and spent a considerable chunk of my wages on one of these...

"Speccy vs Commodore" was the ultimate description of tribalism when I was at school (BBC Micro kids were just "poshos" as far as I was concerned, though I always used to surreptitiously play Elite on the school ones). The C64 really did feel like a genuine leap ahead of the Speccy, yet in some ways it lacked some of the finesse. It was bold, loud, brassy and chunky, it had a proper keyboard you could actually type on (and in fact I did learn to type on the thing, rattling out those magazine code listings again). It had a dedicated tape deck (later a 1541 disk drive which cost me an arm and a leg but was well worth it, purely because games would load in minutes on the thing, not hours). 

And of course the games...

The C64 used to get a lot of great arcade conversions but also had more than its fair share of platform exclusives. Games like Koronis Rift, Paradroid, Alleykat, Racing Destruction Set, Little Computer People (the only C64 game my daughter will devote any time to), and some fantastic text and graphical adventures were part and parcel of the machine's appeal and the booming bombastic sound chip in the thing really did put the Speccy's wibbly bleep generator to shame. Real proper synthesizer music erupting from the SID chip while games were loading, rather than listening to the burbling noise the speccy used to generate through its tape player. 

I loved the C64 to bits, and particularly loved "Zzap 64" - an irreverent games magazine that was around at the time, serving up trusted reviews of the vast ocean of C64 games, crewed by a bunch of spiky haired spotty youths a bit like me. Zzap even printed a letter from me where I laid into Julian Rignall's reviewing style, and his over-use of the word "Excellent" - just a damned shame they couldn't read my handwriting and left my name off it, naming me "A Zzap Reader" instead - but those who know me will instantly recognise the writing style. 

While all this was going on in the gaming home, I also began to visit London on a regular basis to crawl around the arcades up there (Oxford was a bit of a 'dry state' for arcades, you'd find the odd machine in chip shops or pubs but they were few and far between). Arcades in Leicester Square and some of the dodgier parts of Soho had amazing machines like Paperboy, Super Sprint (a personal favourite) and the sit-down cabinet version of Star Wars still felt aeons away from the gaming experiences you'd get at home. 

A day trip to London would always involve arcades and a trawl around Tottenham Court Road, which was rammed with tech shops selling all manner of joysticks, games consoles and (gasp) import games, all vastly overpriced but to a games addict it was never too high a price to pay (I recall picking up the "Cherno-ball" there - a peculiar 8-bit joystick controller that was shaped like a nuclear power station, and was surprisingly effective for fine-tuned games control). 

As the 80s drew to a close, the home computer would still be the gaming mainstay for most folk, but all that was set to change. Consoles would rise again and in the 1990s technological change would be rapid and dazzling. 

Tune in to next week and part 3!