Back when I was just three years old, life was a much simpler affair for everybody. Sure, the Cold War still had a few years left in it and fashion sense was still waiting to be discovered, but everything else was… simple.
Sir Clive Sinclair, like Sir Alan Sugar, two Brits that could do no wrong. Their companies saw staggering profits throughout the early ’80s with their affordable, innovative hardware. Throughout my early childhood, Sir Clive’s <£100 ZX Spectrum was king of the hill. OK, it was a hill within the UK and the hill probably wasn’t the biggest, but it was a hill, and a lot of folk enjoyed looking at it atop said hill.
Of course, it had its rivals; the big, brash, and all-round more powerful Commodore 64 from across the pond had its eyes on the Spectrum’s crown, (and its hill within the UK, to boot) but was too busy winning the hearts of the Americans. The BBC Micro (which were still being used in schools when I was in Year 6) was another contender albeit, a more expensive contender, and even Sir Alan’s Amstrad CPC put in a bit of a fight.
Early consoles like the Intellivision, ColecoVision and the Atari 2600 were still kicking about but they were in a different, much lower league to the rest (sort of in a ditch running around the hill). Console games at that time were simple arcade clones, points-fests and nothing more, whereas the Spectrum with its broader range of games (RPGs like the Hobbit; adventure games such as Dun Darach, Tir Na Nog, and Heavy on the Magick; platformers like Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy and the Dizzy games; football management simulations like Football Manager (possibly the first ever football management game created)/Football Manager 2; space/flight simulations like Elite/Fighter Bomber; and even first person 3D adventures like The Sentinel! A final mention to this little gem based on the book of the same name: How To Be A Complete Bastard.) was obviously the better choice.
I’m not even going to go into the home-programming side of it, which was another really BIG – if not the biggest – selling point for the system. Again, something completely missing from consoles even to this day. Microsoft have begun to bridge that gap with XNA for the Xbox 360, but you still need a PC to do the coding, so we’re still a long way off having in-console programming. However, with the licensing/copyright issues and everything else in this complicated modern age, we probably won’t see a console allowing the End User to program for it. Plus, it’s no longer a case of typing a number of simple lines of code. There are 3D models to create, audio to record and everything else that makes these modern games “better”. I digress; this is a topic for another day.
ANYway, this was all fine and good in the ‘80s, a big royal rumble of sorts between the contenders of the day… until it all changed. Almost overnight things went from being simple… to being complicated.
Two Japanese companies had to stick their oar in and stir everything up, as this article from my beloved Your Sinclair demonstrates. (This is a wonderful website, by the way, not many websites have had such devotion. YS was a fantastic mag and obviously still holds a lot of good memories for a lot of people. The fine folk at RPS mention it in one of their posts on the wonderful Dwarf Fortress (More on that in a future post).
Yes, The Japanese introduced “The Sega” and “The Nintendo” as they were known back then. Another console war broke out and many arguments were held in schoolyards around the country. Many were injured.
Perhaps needless to say, Sir Clive didn’t fare too well after these two newcomers joined the mix, Sir Alan stepped in and bought the Spectrum range and the Sinclair brand name hoping that by combining parts of this new acquisition with his already substantial Amstrad company, the brand would live on. Indeed for a while it did; the Spectrum 2+ and the Spectrum 3+ (which is ever so-slightly mocked in the article) were released before Amstrad ran into difficulties.
In the article you can see that there’s a little bit of resentment to both The Sega and The Nintendo, perhaps because they were already successful in the USA and Japan, and with the buzz being generated for their release in the UK, everyone could see the end of the line for the Speccy. There were assassins climbing the hill to take the King’s crown. In fact, they weren’t assassins – they were stealth ninjas!
While the article admits the new consoles are more powerful and look fantastic graphically, you can see it’s a shame that there’s not a British based console to compete against nor is there a more-current successor to the Spectrum to pass on the home-programming baton. The Spectrum brought home computing to the British masses, and MANY current video game creators cut their teeth coding on a 48k. (I have fond memories myself following the instructions to create an adventure game called ‘Condensation Street’ with my brother.) Now, however, the closest thing was to buy an IBM PC or one of its incarnations, but to most folk, these were still simply too expensive and out of reach.
People, especially the youngsters like myself that these new consoles were marketed at, were obviously more interested in playing games that looked great rather than learning how to create games themselves, and even though there was a wealth of games on the Spectrum, they didn’t have the sparkly graphics to with them.
Pssst! You know that sex sells? Well in the video games industry prettier graphics sell.
The war between Sega and its Blast Processing, and Nintendo that… don’t…? is a fairly long one spanning a few console generations, and is something I might write about in the future. I’ve written enough for now, and as I only intended to write about the changes I’d witnessed and what it meant to me but I’ve gone slightly off track to write about something you probably already know about!
Make sure you check out World Of Spectrum and The YS Rock ‘n’ Roll Years that goes hand in hand with it, and from there, you can relive the glory days by downloading an Emulator and ROMs of the games. Emulation, and abandonware – something else to discuss in the future!
Le Spectrum est mort, vive le Spectrum!
Dag's Paradigm 