Back in 1981 just about everyone I knew at school was obsessed with computers. Some lucky kids had their own at home and I remember diving round my friend Will's house to see his latest acquisition, a curious little black slab of plastic with a touch-sensitive keyboard. This was the ZX81. We spent a whole day typing in programs from magazine listings (way way before the Internet of course) and playing ropey little black and white blocky versions of all the old favourites like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, all hastily renamed to avoid any lawsuits from copyright infringement naturally!
The minute I saw the thing I knew I had to have one, and managed to scrounge up enough savings and pocket money to pick up one of my own, with the ultra-wobbly 16K ram pack. I wrote a lot of wonky old programs in Sinclair Basic but it was the arrival of Sir Clive's next machine that lit a fire under my absolute love of programming and games.
The next Christmas, in 1982, I begged for a ZX Spectrum. At the time there were more powerful (and very very expensive) alternatives around but the "Speccy" as it came to be known just seemed to be the computer that kids at school had - and that of course meant plenty of opportunities for lending and borrowing (and tape to taping, ahem) the all important games. Sure, we all conned our parents into thinking that we could do our homework on the things but have you ever met anyone who ever did?
My lovely parents delivered - well sort of. They bought me a 16K spectrum, which meant that only 2 of the 5 games I got with the thing would work, though thankfully there were a few places around at the time that would upgrade a speccy to 48K without the need for the wobbly ram pack approach again, so I got my rubber keyed Spectrum sorted out with beefier insides.
That was it. I got a copy of Manic Miner that Christmas and that is, without doubt, one of the games that I've played more than any other videogame I've ever owned, and I still play it on a more or less daily basis thanks to emulators. Even today I'm still as obsessed with the game as I've always been, and when I recently took up knitting and crochet, I couldn't wait to reproduce some of the weird characters from the game in my Fair Isle designs...
The Speccy brought with it a whole cottage industry of games programmers who sat in their bedrooms or attics wringing amazing results out of the fairly modest innards of this awesome bit of kit. As before with the ZX81, a fair few games were just soulless arcade game rip-offs but there were a lot of really interesting and original games that you just plain didn't see anywhere else in the gaming world, all tinged with a uniquely bonkers, surreal and eccentric 'Britishness' about them, as the UK was obviously where the Speccy was most successful.
In school, there was a massive class war around the computer you owned. Speccy owners were usually like me, kids from working class backgrounds, usually living on a council estate and scraping together the cash for the occasional game (I remember paying something like £6.95 for a copy of Manic Miner's follow-up, Jet Set Willy, with the hated-by-playground-pirates colour coded piracy protection sheet which I remember one kid dutifully and painstakingly copying for his ripped-off version).
Matthew Smith was a bit of a nutty genius but even if you play either game today, you can see how he performed near miracles with the humble Spectrum, with interrupt-driven music and a really nice balance between gameplay and toughness (I have still never finished Manic Miner in one sitting and I've definitely never collected all the items in Jet Set Willy, and doubt I ever will!)
Sir Clive went on to produce more micros, including the more business-like Sinclair QL (I've only ever seen one of these in operation, at one of my first jobs, and it was the oddest machine you'll ever see with its proprietary Microdrive storage and its weirdly sculpted keyboard). But sadly, Sir Clive may be remembered more for the C5 - an electric trike way ahead of its time really, released into the world as an alternative form of transport and competing for road space with cars (pretty damned dangerous when you consider how lightweight, low slung and unprotected the thing was). I remember having a go on one while on holiday (I think you got a hire of one for about 15 minutes for an extortionate amount of cash) and it was an odd experience, pedalling to get the thing up to speed before you could get the electric motor to kick in. When you consider kids whizzing around at breakneck speeds on their electric scooters today, imagine that all this was going on generations before in the 1980s with the few who bothered to buy a C5 (in fact you can still see the odd one or two around, god knows how the batteries survived!)
Sir Clive always seemed like a bonkers mad professor but with a glint of genius and a slight twinkle in his eye. I think it's nice that in later life he acknowledged and was quite humbled by the impact his machine had on the UK gaming industry, not understood at all over the pond or in other territories but very beloved of folk of my age who remember a simpler time in games when you actually paid for a game and got the whole thing in the box rather than an empty shell. Long live the speccy, and R I P Sir Clive.
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