For the Mag: ZX Spectrum Memories

[sirclive1]

Christmas 1984 was the most amazing day ever , i'd had my spectrum for a year but had just really been scraping round for games , typing in listings from sinclair user or sinclair programs , modifying them , reading crash and imagining how they all played , borrowing games off mates and having a great time doing that but not owning many as like most of us , money was tight . But i'd only wrote spectrum games on my christmas list , i got The Lords of midnight , Daley Thompsons Decathlon , the automania / pyjamarama double pack , booty and ghostbusters , i don't think i moved off the speccy all day , only for a quick rest to eat my christmas dinner , i still have all those games on a seperate shelf at home , great times.

[slacey1070]

I've never owned a Spectrum, however I have three sets of memories of the cracking little machine.

My mate got one for Christmas, with The Hobbit and Jetpac. We spent a ridiculous amount of time on both, although I don't think we actually completed The Hobbit - we did get very close. Jetpac was amazing and that Christmas holiday seemed to last forever play it constantly. His neighbour was a Spectrum nut and copied him some games (including chuckie egg, Vahalla) and used to get Spectrum magazines with the mastheads removed (something to do with W H Smiths returns) and that fired my interest.

A few years later, I was given a Spectrum (oh how I wished I'd kept it) and get a new membrane and gave it a quick service, before presenting it to my nephews as a Christmas present, although with a few games. Father Christmas also gave them Rescue on Fractulus (they never did ask how Father Christmas knew about the Spectrum...) The eldest nephew works for a minor software house, so I like to think I helped fire his interest.

My third memory was on the DS. Having never owned, I got myself an emulator. I've had a fantastic time, it really is a great bit of kit . . .love Chuckie Egg . . .I've had great fun exploring what I never had chance to back in the 80s..... its a lovely bit of kit and I wonder what my gaming experience would have been like had I gone down the Spectrum route, rather than Vic 20 and C64. . . .

[SirClive]

I remember playing endless hours of Hyper Sports at my mate Lee's house. The Speccy was in the kitchen with a tiny portable TV. We had an old Atari joystick and I would always have blisters on my hand from the waggling technique (palm flat across the top of the stick). Am sure many thought the blisters were from too much of a very different type of waggling!

[NorthWay]

My first Spectrum experience was with an Amiga 4000 (which has been in my possession for 18? years now) of a fellow student and an emulator. Cue total headscratch. Still don't see the point in it, but then again I hardly do with a CPC either eh?

[greenberet79]

My childhood = my Spectrum. Back when games where a thing of mystery and exploration!

[deadpan666]

My first Speccy memory is getting Sinclair User with the Batman demo on the front, and using that as an excuse for my parents having to buy one so I could play the free game! I didn't really expect one any time soon after that as my parents were pretty skint, and I never usually got what I asked for...but the very next day, I noticed my mum carrying a rather large box into the house when she returned from town! Praise the gods of credit !!

That night and the next few were spent playing Mailstrom, an odd little game about a mailman with a hi-tech van delivering letters in a violent neighbourhood, and the Batman-The Movie demo over and over again! I'd got the +2A Lightgun Pack, so I had Solar Invasion, Robot Attack and the other gun games to occupy me too! My favourite had to be Operation Wolf though...I was a huge fan of the original, and being able to play my own copy at home with an actual gun was pretty damn awesome!

Being a bit late to the Speccy scene, I bought a lot of games pretty cheap and the magazines bumped up my collection pretty quickly...I remember leaving the various music demos that came on some of the tapes playing while I tidied my room up too, which got me loving 128k tunes and prepared me for chip tunes in later years!

I also managed to persuade 4 of my mates and my brother to all have a game of Chaos one day as well, and playing it as was intended (with lots of real life players) was a gaming memory that will be with me always! I think it ended with loads of Gooey Blobs and Magic Fires pretty much consuming everything on the screen, though....

I've got hundreds of other Speccy memories, as like a lot of people it was my first real games machine, and a massive part of my early gaming life! It saw me through good times and rough times did my little black +2A, and I was sad to see it give up the ghost when it's built-in tape deck finally packed in..I'd moved onto the SNES by that point, but I still went out and picked up a +2 to replace it as soon as possible, and I'm still playing new Speccy stuff now! Something I would never have imagined back when I first picked it up.....

[Fawltykog]

Ahh the sweet smell of burning cordite as the mains power pack for my Speccy overheated on a blazing hot summer day in 1984, yep that's my most remembered memory of the wonderous ZX Spectrum.

Oh and Sabre wulf, Atic Attac, Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy...Ad Nauseum.

10 PRINT "Fawltykog"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

[webding]

Hours and hours and hours of two-player Match Day II and Target: Renegade round my mate's house. Then the disappointment of getting hold of the C64 versions of both, only to find that they were substandard in comparison. Followed by yet more hours on the Speccy versions til we knew both games inside out...

[thevulture]

Earliest? Think it was going around my mates (we'd all regularly pile round someones house and spend a few hrs gaming on their machine, wide selection of formats, inc a C16 and an Electron), now i'd gone from a ZX81 to an Atari 2600 at this point, so was 'shocked' at the notion of having to use keys to control a game.Once i got over that, it was getting used to the 'dead flesh' keyboard.Think 1st Speccy game i got to try was The Fall Guy.

My mate later got a joystick but i never really felt blown away by the Spectrum, hence going the Atari 800XL, then C64 path.

But really wanted one at the time for Rebelstar, Chaos etc, but no way was i going to get my folks to buy 1, espically not after they saw the 800XL get sold to fund the C64.

[jdanddiet]

Hours and hours and hours of two-player Match Day II and Target: Renegade round my mate's house. Then the disappointment of getting hold of the C64 versions of both, only to find that they were substandard in comparison. Followed by yet more hours on the Speccy versions til we knew both games inside out...

This is definitely going in lol

Davey are you going to say something or not...?

[webding]

Hours and hours and hours of two-player Match Day II and Target: Renegade round my mate's house. Then the disappointment of getting hold of the C64 versions of both, only to find that they were substandard in comparison. Followed by yet more hours on the Speccy versions til we knew both games inside out...

This is definitely going in lol

Davey are you going to say something or not...?

It wasn't a ploy; virtually everything about the C64 was better than the Speccy in my view, but I think you'd have to be pretty blinkered (and/or a moron) not to admit that some games were better on the Sinclair. I can't agree with the ridiculous comment in issue 99 about The Last Ninja looking (or being in any way) better on the Spectrum than the 64, but some stuff played better, plus it had some belting exclusive titles.

Oh, and Sam Fox's knockers looked better in monochrome.

[GarryG]

The first one I had I bought myself. It was a brand new Spectrum+ 48K. I honestly had so much stuff for it I can't say what was best.
The thing I remember most about it was the fact that my mum gave it away to the kids next door, along with SEVERAL carrier-bags worth of games, after I had mooved out and she decided to clear the 'junk' out of the loft

There was even an interface 1 and 2 along with a microdrive amongst that little lot!


I did get given the machine back years later, but the games were long gone...

[stvd]

My first encounter was at school.
You know at the end of term you would take games in as you started to wind down for the holidays?
Last week of term my maths teacher brought in her 'computer'.
It was a 16k ZX Spectrum. The only games she had were JetPac & Wheelie.
Hooked!

[pantal00ns]

1983 - My older brothers were back on leave from the AIr Force.

They clubbed together and took a chance on Sir Clive's little box along with Tranz am, Alchemist and of course 3D deathchase.

I had to have more.... but what really blew me away was Lords of Midnight then Tir Na Nog. Beyond and Gargoyle games became my two favourite software houses for the rubber keyed wonder.

[joefish]

Building a mechanical joystick from LEGO to operate the up/down keys for Penetrator. After that, the LEGO went away for a good 20 years as I had a new 'new toy every day'.