7 ms·

Immortal ZX Spectrum games

87 points by hunglee2 11y ago

christoph 11y ago
In my opinion this is a brilliantly put together list. The nostalgia that comes flooding back to me from my childhood almost brings tears of joy to my eyes. It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA. I do wonder if the children of today will feel nostalgic about the software of today in 25 years time? For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms.
- zokier 11y ago
  > It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA. It makes sense that there will be a lot more games on a open platform than on a platform from company that is notorious for not attracting 3rd party titles. > For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms. Step outside the world of Call of Duties and Battlefields and you will find lots of games that are very much labor of loves from bedroom developers.
  - christoph 11y ago
    The author probably just picked that as an example of a very popular platform - the DS (2072) has double the titles of the PS3 (1026) according to Wikipedia and isn't far off the total titles of the PS1 (2355) or PS2 (2468). I know there are plenty of indy titles on Steam and the other app stores that are remarkable games and immense labours of love, but I wonder how many really get under the skin of a lot of children today for a long period of time? So many games I see my nephews playing are freemium titles that seem to drift in and out of their lives on a day to day basis (especially on iOS). I certainly don't see them building a connection like I did with Manic Miner or the Dizzy games anyway. One exception I can clearly think of though recently with kids would probably be Minecraft. Others miles may vary I guess.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
  Yep. Superb list. Only one quibble - I'd have given Skool Daze and Back to Skool a bigger mention. I loved those games. Crash review: http://www.crashonline.org.uk/11/skool.htm http://www.crashonline.org.uk/11/skool.htm
- sixothree 11y ago
  If there's one thing I am finding is that people of every generation are nostalgic to video games (in particular) from their childhood.
- hibikir 11y ago
  Team size is very relevant when we look for cool, original, cohesive games. Back in the day, a team of 3 could do something that had never been attempted before, and compete evenly in the marketplace. Today we still have the indie scene, and find games like Paper's Please, which are subversive, refreshing, and clearly a sign of a mind that knows where the game is going. But when we want to compete on graphics, we need games to be finished in two years at the most, so hundreds of people have to be involved to make anything big. With over a hundred people, it's very hard to manage that cohesiveness and remain even mildly quirky. Even something like a Mario game builds different levels in very different ways, minimizing the costs of cohesiveness. So if we want that spirit alive, we need to see more work building engines for indies. If what you need is already in Unity or Unreal, it's far easier for game creators to just focus on what makes their game special, instead of rendering polygons or writing collision detection.
- jlees 11y ago
  I think another part of it was the effort required to try out new titles; I got very attached to the Dizzy series because I had to save up my pocket money and actually go to the computer shop to buy the tape. And that shop certainly didn't stock 15,000 different games :) Kind of the same way music discovery used to be, only with demo tapes instead of the radio. (I still wonder if the demoscene could come back somehow.) With the barrier to entry being that of downloading a Minecraft mod or free app, it's harder to get anywhere near as attached, in my opinion; but I don't have kids, so I wonder what they do spend their hard-earned pocket money on instead? For a similar nostalgia trip I recommend reading Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett.
  - Theodores 11y ago
    This is how I feel about music, which I used to buy on vinyl/CD/cassette up until music became 'free'. I would but a record without hearing it first, paying £4 to £8 for a 12" single or 'EP'. Provenance was important, if I already knew of the artist/label/producer then that was enough information for me to base my purchase decision on although radio play mattered too at times. Invariably the 'best' records would not always be stocked, you would have to get them when they came out or 'special order' them later (again probably unheard). In some ways there was no point in buying a record by a major artist (as you would have heard it already and a copy would not be too far away in a friend's collection etc.). Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...
- babuskov 11y ago
  We still exist. I spent the last nine months and 10 days creating this all by myself: http://store.steampowered.com/app/363670 http://store.steampowered.com/app/363670 and it's finally done and coming out this Friday. I did all the programming, graphics and level design myself and created the game I would want to play. I only hired some musicians to create music for it, the rest is really labor of love made in my basement.
sixothree 11y ago
The game Driller is certainly worth a look. Though I'm not sure this would be my platform of choice. It is a 3D puzzle game. Circa 1987 running on XT CGA class systems I find it to be fairly advanced for the time. But it feels certainly antiquated today. Still it definitely deserves a look.
rdtsc 11y ago
I had spend a lot of my youth playing those games. Elite was fun to play. It even had SimCity. Remember being so impressed I could get SimCity on my puny 3Mhz/48K machine since before I had only played it on an IBM desktop at scool. But the good thing about the platform is that there quite a few programming environments, there was a C and Pascal compiler. You'd load the compiler from tape for 5 minutes, enter your program, compile it, run it, it would crash, rewind the tape, do the whole thing again. Remember writing my own assembler as well. Good times... All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession.
- stevekemp 11y ago
  > All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession. Me too. Started with the 48k, switched to assembly soon after getting bored with BASIC, and for a few years I got my name printed in Your Sinclair for posting POKEs for various games. The Z80 assembly language set me in good stead for early programming with MS-DOS (3.3 or so) as the assembly syntax was familiar. (I think Zilog engineers were ex-Intel. But my memory is a little hazy these days.) I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months, alongside "The Hobbit" and the various Hungry Horace games.
  - Twirrim 11y ago
    > I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months I remember my cousin introducing me to the game early on. I think I spent more hours playing Chaos on the speccy than any other game, possibly more than any other game combined.
    - pekk 11y ago
      For Chaos fans in this thread, note that there is just recently a nice remake of Chaos by the original creator called "Chaos Reborn."
  - jlees 11y ago
    Well, it was POKEs from Your Sinclair that got me into programming, so perhaps I have you to thank? Thanks!
jgrahamc 11y ago
Wow. Reading that I could literally taste in my mouth the excitement I felt all those years ago playing some of those games and seeing the amazing graphics and interaction modes.
pjmlp 11y ago
I remember most of those games, boy I am really old! :)
- dwd 11y ago
  Yes, we are. 30 years ago, pretty sure I would have been playing Lords of Midnight.
aidenn0 11y ago
Back when a single person could make a top-notch game, and a really large team might be 4, I feel like there were a lot more games. This, of course, meant a lot more crappy games too, but diversity makes for a more rapid exploration of the problem space.
rcarmo 11y ago
Amazing list. I've yet to find a Laser Squad clone that was as much fun, or a Deflektor one. I did find a modern version of Highway Encounter sometime last year (I forget where, since my hard disk died) and of course I have been keeping track of the Elite renaissance, but it's amazing to think that I spent hours as a kid waiting for these to load from a dinky cassette player. Happy, happy days...
mikkom 11y ago
Nice list although I knew many of the games from other platforms (c64 and amiga mostly) where the graphics were a lot better.
- hunglee2 11y ago
  Time for a Speccy vs Commodore redux I think. Two tribes....!
Malic 11y ago
It's been brought up here before but relevant again in case you missed it the first time. The original developer for R-Type for the ZX Spectrum wrote up a detailed story of the technical challenges for developing the game. Shaving cycles off to make action smooth was what it was all about. IT'S BEHIND YOU: http://bizzley.com/ http://bizzley.com/
- foobarge 11y ago
  Yes - a recommended read. In a similar vein: http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/ http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/
huskyr 11y ago
Excellent resource! Does anyone know of comparable listing for the C64?
platz 11y ago
"Hard Drivin's approach to collisions or unrealistic events—putting the car back on the road at a standstill—was the norm for driving games until later games such as Cruisin' USA and its successors introduced intentionally artificial physics to force a car to always stay near the road and land right-side up pointing forward." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27 I thought it was fun due to its realism. also this bit is interesting from the wikipedia page Physics The engine, transmission control, suspension, and tire physics were modeled in conjunction with Doug Milliken[18] who was listed as a test driver in the game credits. In the 1950s his father William Milliken of Milliken Research led a team at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo NY USA (later Calspan) that converted aircraft equations of motion to equations of motion for the automobile, and became one of the world's leading experts in car modeling. BTW, what is the spiritual successor to Hard Drivin' today?
- Gazk 11y ago
  I remember playing Hard Drivin on the c64, it was a terrible port. The spectrum version was great though. Spiritual successor? In terms of realistic car modeling, I would say the rFactor series.
  - platz 11y ago
    In terms of modeling I'm sure you're right. Something about Hard Drivin' makes it feel not like a straight up racing game. It was an odd combination of physics + disembodied stunt tracks. The combo of a sim, but a playful environment seems very hard to find.
    - Gazk 11y ago
      I see your point, maybe something like BeamNG.drive when it is finished.
      - platz 11y ago
        I think you found it :)
anthk 11y ago
Life is serendypic. Yesterday I was doing some Z80 ASM code for the Speccy (FUSE + OpenSE ROM) with the help of Pasmo, just for fun.
zem 11y ago
i really liked the monochrome isometric graphics from games like knight lore. wonder how successful that would be today; it produced some very atmospheric games.
asgard1024 11y ago
I wish some retroprogramming fan would do Civilization, The Sims and Minecraft (isometric) on ZX Spectrum. It would be interesting to see how well these would be doable...
- anthk 11y ago
  >Civilization Could be done >The Sims There is a home simulator for the C64 I think.
  - joelanman 11y ago
    Little Computer People https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Little_Computer_People https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Little_Computer_People
- jerf 11y ago
  Minecraft's basic storage requirements get ugly, fast. The 3D in that era is a gross, gross cheat, and there isn't room for very much "world". Even at half-a-byte per block, which means 16 types of blocks (including air) and even assuming no program loaded, you've barely got RAM for a 200x200 playfield... in 2D. In 3D, well, 60x60x10 = 36000. That's pretty small. (And remember in Minecraft, since the player can do whatever they like, no compression schemes work. Anything that did wouldn't be even a Minecraft knockoff anymore. Minecraft could really only exist on home-machine levels of processing power in the 21st century.) The other two could be recognizably done, though they'd be relatively cut down.
thomasdd 11y ago
I would love to see or play "Nether Earth" like game clone :) I liked the concept of "Nether Earth".
- anthk 11y ago
  There is a libre remake somewhere. http://www.braingames.getput.com/nether/default.asp http://www.braingames.getput.com/nether/default.asp
gcb0 11y ago
i had a spectrum and a monochrome (green phosphorous), beige box, TRS 80. i always wanted to play games and write basic on the TRS80 just because i couldn't stand the keyboard on the spectrum.
anjc 11y ago
Great great list. It feels so good remembering all of these. I can't believe Jack the Nipper 2 isn't on your list though. Excellent graphics, great theme, great gameplay.
- varjag 11y ago
  Good God you just mentioned it and the soundtrack started playing in my head.
  - anjc 11y ago
    Ha the SFX are burned into my memory kicks green coconut
joelanman 11y ago
Pete Cooke was responsible for a lot of great, great Spectrum games. I don't hear Micronaut One mentioned much, but to my mind it's the smoothest 3D game on the Speccy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKUZRI90rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKUZRI90rI His "Whole New Ball Game" was brilliant too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIHM8SY1pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIHM8SY1pE

87 points by hunglee2 11y ago

In my opinion this is a brilliantly put together list. The nostalgia that comes flooding back to me from my childhood almost brings tears of joy to my eyes. It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA. I do wonder if the children of today will feel nostalgic about the software of today in 25 years time? For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms.

zokier 11y ago
> It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA. It makes sense that there will be a lot more games on a open platform than on a platform from company that is notorious for not attracting 3rd party titles. > For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms. Step outside the world of Call of Duties and Battlefields and you will find lots of games that are very much labor of loves from bedroom developers.
- christoph 11y ago
  The author probably just picked that as an example of a very popular platform - the DS (2072) has double the titles of the PS3 (1026) according to Wikipedia and isn't far off the total titles of the PS1 (2355) or PS2 (2468). I know there are plenty of indy titles on Steam and the other app stores that are remarkable games and immense labours of love, but I wonder how many really get under the skin of a lot of children today for a long period of time? So many games I see my nephews playing are freemium titles that seem to drift in and out of their lives on a day to day basis (especially on iOS). I certainly don't see them building a connection like I did with Manic Miner or the Dizzy games anyway. One exception I can clearly think of though recently with kids would probably be Minecraft. Others miles may vary I guess.
Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
Yep. Superb list. Only one quibble - I'd have given Skool Daze and Back to Skool a bigger mention. I loved those games. Crash review: http://www.crashonline.org.uk/11/skool.htm http://www.crashonline.org.uk/11/skool.htm
sixothree 11y ago
If there's one thing I am finding is that people of every generation are nostalgic to video games (in particular) from their childhood.
hibikir 11y ago
Team size is very relevant when we look for cool, original, cohesive games. Back in the day, a team of 3 could do something that had never been attempted before, and compete evenly in the marketplace. Today we still have the indie scene, and find games like Paper's Please, which are subversive, refreshing, and clearly a sign of a mind that knows where the game is going. But when we want to compete on graphics, we need games to be finished in two years at the most, so hundreds of people have to be involved to make anything big. With over a hundred people, it's very hard to manage that cohesiveness and remain even mildly quirky. Even something like a Mario game builds different levels in very different ways, minimizing the costs of cohesiveness. So if we want that spirit alive, we need to see more work building engines for indies. If what you need is already in Unity or Unreal, it's far easier for game creators to just focus on what makes their game special, instead of rendering polygons or writing collision detection.
jlees 11y ago
I think another part of it was the effort required to try out new titles; I got very attached to the Dizzy series because I had to save up my pocket money and actually go to the computer shop to buy the tape. And that shop certainly didn't stock 15,000 different games :) Kind of the same way music discovery used to be, only with demo tapes instead of the radio. (I still wonder if the demoscene could come back somehow.) With the barrier to entry being that of downloading a Minecraft mod or free app, it's harder to get anywhere near as attached, in my opinion; but I don't have kids, so I wonder what they do spend their hard-earned pocket money on instead? For a similar nostalgia trip I recommend reading Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett.
- Theodores 11y ago
  This is how I feel about music, which I used to buy on vinyl/CD/cassette up until music became 'free'. I would but a record without hearing it first, paying £4 to £8 for a 12" single or 'EP'. Provenance was important, if I already knew of the artist/label/producer then that was enough information for me to base my purchase decision on although radio play mattered too at times. Invariably the 'best' records would not always be stocked, you would have to get them when they came out or 'special order' them later (again probably unheard). In some ways there was no point in buying a record by a major artist (as you would have heard it already and a copy would not be too far away in a friend's collection etc.). Nostalgia isn't what it used to be...
babuskov 11y ago
We still exist. I spent the last nine months and 10 days creating this all by myself: http://store.steampowered.com/app/363670 http://store.steampowered.com/app/363670 and it's finally done and coming out this Friday. I did all the programming, graphics and level design myself and created the game I would want to play. I only hired some musicians to create music for it, the rest is really labor of love made in my basement.

sixothree 11y ago

The game Driller is certainly worth a look. Though I'm not sure this would be my platform of choice. It is a 3D puzzle game. Circa 1987 running on XT CGA class systems I find it to be fairly advanced for the time. But it feels certainly antiquated today. Still it definitely deserves a look.

rdtsc 11y ago

I had spend a lot of my youth playing those games. Elite was fun to play. It even had SimCity. Remember being so impressed I could get SimCity on my puny 3Mhz/48K machine since before I had only played it on an IBM desktop at scool. But the good thing about the platform is that there quite a few programming environments, there was a C and Pascal compiler. You'd load the compiler from tape for 5 minutes, enter your program, compile it, run it, it would crash, rewind the tape, do the whole thing again. Remember writing my own assembler as well. Good times... All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession.

stevekemp 11y ago
> All in all ZX Spectrum platform is almost entirely responsible for me picking programming as my profession. Me too. Started with the 48k, switched to assembly soon after getting bored with BASIC, and for a few years I got my name printed in Your Sinclair for posting POKEs for various games. The Z80 assembly language set me in good stead for early programming with MS-DOS (3.3 or so) as the assembly syntax was familiar. (I think Zilog engineers were ex-Intel. But my memory is a little hazy these days.) I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months, alongside "The Hobbit" and the various Hungry Horace games.
- Twirrim 11y ago
  > I still play "Choas:The Battle of Wizards" on an emulator every few months I remember my cousin introducing me to the game early on. I think I spent more hours playing Chaos on the speccy than any other game, possibly more than any other game combined.
  - pekk 11y ago
    For Chaos fans in this thread, note that there is just recently a nice remake of Chaos by the original creator called "Chaos Reborn."
- jlees 11y ago
  Well, it was POKEs from Your Sinclair that got me into programming, so perhaps I have you to thank? Thanks!

jgrahamc 11y ago

Wow. Reading that I could literally taste in my mouth the excitement I felt all those years ago playing some of those games and seeing the amazing graphics and interaction modes.

pjmlp 11y ago

I remember most of those games, boy I am really old! :)

dwd 11y ago
Yes, we are. 30 years ago, pretty sure I would have been playing Lords of Midnight.

aidenn0 11y ago

Back when a single person could make a top-notch game, and a really large team might be 4, I feel like there were a lot more games. This, of course, meant a lot more crappy games too, but diversity makes for a more rapid exploration of the problem space.

rcarmo 11y ago

Amazing list. I've yet to find a Laser Squad clone that was as much fun, or a Deflektor one. I did find a modern version of Highway Encounter sometime last year (I forget where, since my hard disk died) and of course I have been keeping track of the Elite renaissance, but it's amazing to think that I spent hours as a kid waiting for these to load from a dinky cassette player. Happy, happy days...

mikkom 11y ago

Nice list although I knew many of the games from other platforms (c64 and amiga mostly) where the graphics were a lot better.

hunglee2 11y ago
Time for a Speccy vs Commodore redux I think. Two tribes....!

Malic 11y ago

It's been brought up here before but relevant again in case you missed it the first time. The original developer for R-Type for the ZX Spectrum wrote up a detailed story of the technical challenges for developing the game. Shaving cycles off to make action smooth was what it was all about. IT'S BEHIND YOU: http://bizzley.com/ http://bizzley.com/

foobarge 11y ago
Yes - a recommended read. In a similar vein: http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/ http://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/

huskyr 11y ago

Excellent resource! Does anyone know of comparable listing for the C64?

platz 11y ago

"Hard Drivin's approach to collisions or unrealistic events—putting the car back on the road at a standstill—was the norm for driving games until later games such as Cruisin' USA and its successors introduced intentionally artificial physics to force a car to always stay near the road and land right-side up pointing forward." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27 I thought it was fun due to its realism. also this bit is interesting from the wikipedia page Physics The engine, transmission control, suspension, and tire physics were modeled in conjunction with Doug Milliken[18] who was listed as a test driver in the game credits. In the 1950s his father William Milliken of Milliken Research led a team at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo NY USA (later Calspan) that converted aircraft equations of motion to equations of motion for the automobile, and became one of the world's leading experts in car modeling. BTW, what is the spiritual successor to Hard Drivin' today?

Gazk 11y ago
I remember playing Hard Drivin on the c64, it was a terrible port. The spectrum version was great though. Spiritual successor? In terms of realistic car modeling, I would say the rFactor series.
- platz 11y ago
  In terms of modeling I'm sure you're right. Something about Hard Drivin' makes it feel not like a straight up racing game. It was an odd combination of physics + disembodied stunt tracks. The combo of a sim, but a playful environment seems very hard to find.
  - Gazk 11y ago
    I see your point, maybe something like BeamNG.drive when it is finished.
    - platz 11y ago
      I think you found it :)

anthk 11y ago

Life is serendypic. Yesterday I was doing some Z80 ASM code for the Speccy (FUSE + OpenSE ROM) with the help of Pasmo, just for fun.

zem 11y ago

i really liked the monochrome isometric graphics from games like knight lore. wonder how successful that would be today; it produced some very atmospheric games.

asgard1024 11y ago

I wish some retroprogramming fan would do Civilization, The Sims and Minecraft (isometric) on ZX Spectrum. It would be interesting to see how well these would be doable...

anthk 11y ago
>Civilization Could be done >The Sims There is a home simulator for the C64 I think.
- joelanman 11y ago
  Little Computer People https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Little_Computer_People https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Little_Computer_People
jerf 11y ago
Minecraft's basic storage requirements get ugly, fast. The 3D in that era is a gross, gross cheat, and there isn't room for very much "world". Even at half-a-byte per block, which means 16 types of blocks (including air) and even assuming no program loaded, you've barely got RAM for a 200x200 playfield... in 2D. In 3D, well, 60x60x10 = 36000. That's pretty small. (And remember in Minecraft, since the player can do whatever they like, no compression schemes work. Anything that did wouldn't be even a Minecraft knockoff anymore. Minecraft could really only exist on home-machine levels of processing power in the 21st century.) The other two could be recognizably done, though they'd be relatively cut down.

thomasdd 11y ago

I would love to see or play "Nether Earth" like game clone :) I liked the concept of "Nether Earth".

anthk 11y ago
There is a libre remake somewhere. http://www.braingames.getput.com/nether/default.asp http://www.braingames.getput.com/nether/default.asp

gcb0 11y ago

i had a spectrum and a monochrome (green phosphorous), beige box, TRS 80. i always wanted to play games and write basic on the TRS80 just because i couldn't stand the keyboard on the spectrum.

anjc 11y ago

Great great list. It feels so good remembering all of these. I can't believe Jack the Nipper 2 isn't on your list though. Excellent graphics, great theme, great gameplay.

varjag 11y ago
Good God you just mentioned it and the soundtrack started playing in my head.
- anjc 11y ago
  Ha the SFX are burned into my memory kicks green coconut

joelanman 11y ago

Pete Cooke was responsible for a lot of great, great Spectrum games. I don't hear Micronaut One mentioned much, but to my mind it's the smoothest 3D game on the Speccy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKUZRI90rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfKUZRI90rI His "Whole New Ball Game" was brilliant too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIHM8SY1pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIHM8SY1pE