2 ms·

Or they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import a

Or they weren't being absolutely literal, or their Uncle wasn't well off (the UK has and had a lot of inequality), or indeed it was a Spectrum clone or import and they were not in the UK. Edit: I'm almost more surprised by the game being pong! Makes sense if it was a not-entirely-compatible clone, but otherwise there was a vast array of games and copying them was trivial (tape to tape). I'm not positive I ever saw pong for the Speccy!

ajuc 4y ago
My uncle worked as an electrical engineer in a helicopter factory in Poland, he was middle class. It was communism so our salaries were just so shitty compared to the west. Also there was no way to get games from the west, people pirated anything they could get and there were newspapers and radio auditions that distributed program listings (some radio even broadcasted C64 or ZX Spectrum programs in a format you could record on tape :) ). I think he wrote the Pong himself or typed it in from some newspaper. Later after communism fell we could at least import pirated games. I got C64 as a first communion gift in 1992 and it was still a great gift at the time and it still costed about half a monthly salary. Only in late 90s/early 00s Poland catched up to the PC etc.