Who remembers the winter of 1985? In the UK, it was one of the coldest for many years, although east-west tension was beginning to thaw as US president Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in November. I was 12 years old and unworried by historic political meetings or war in the middle east. All I wanted to do was play computer games. And I wanted to play them on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
I’d first been introduced to the Speccy three years earlier. Growing up, everyone seemed to have that one friend whose parents bought them everything. Mine lived across the road, and one Saturday morning, I strolled into their lounge where he had a 16K Spectrum set up, the tiny computer dwarfed by the large television and furniture. We soon had a game loaded, and, of course, I recall which one: Escape by New Generation Software. A simple maze chase-‘em-up, Escape had us enraptured as we plodded around the faux 3D screen, dodging dinosaurs while trying to locate an invisible axe.
Another friend received a 48K Spectrum for his birthday the following year. He brought it around one afternoon, plugging it into our black and white kitchen TV. Then the day disappeared, swallowed up by the delight that was Melbourne House’s Scramble clone, Penetrator. We created our own maps using its in-built level designer when we’d finished playing. In an era where computers were financially out of reach to many people, this genuinely felt like the most exciting time of my life.
