[dave]

Prompted by this article, lets reminisce about 1980's home computers:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7303288.stm

I remember there being a lot of BBCs around at school when i was a yoot. We also had an Acorn Electron at home. Nice. Nothing beats the excitement of loading a 90minute audo cassette into a Dixon's cassette player and watching pages and pages of basic code scroll past your eyes for hours in order to play a basic platform game on a old black&white TV.

[andy_e]

We had a Dragon (I think it was made by Spectrum) which had a game where you had to count how many balls a kangaroo had kicked into a bucket. Oh, the memories...

[Jaspersharpe]

Or waiting hours while said cassette of "Horace Goes Skiing" loads only for it to crash 10 seconds before the end. 

I had a ZX Spectrum 48k and then one Christmas I got the spanking new 128k version with a disk drive! It was still shit but it cut out the tape annoyance.

[Houdini]

Yup, I lost interest in gaming when the platform-style became obsolete-ish (?).  Though I guess someone will pipe up w/ a modern example.

I liked Horace the Skier and other retard mush of the day.

What was that platform arcade/home game w/ a knight who had to collect wotsits in a haunted castle?  I loved that.

I see Jasp beat me w/ Horace... 

[dave]

I remember by dad buying "Electron User Magazine", which always featured pages upon pages of code which you could sit for hours and hours typing in yourself and then saving to tape instead of buying commercially produced games. We actually did this too!

[Jaspersharpe]

I did that once too. Once was enough.

[Bubba]

yay! Chuckie Egg was a great game

[SA Chris]

We had a ZX81 spectrum. remember playing football manager and waiting for the cutting edge graphics of the goals being scored. Also Leisure Suit Larry and The Hobbit.

[Jaspersharpe]

Like this Chris...........



Kevin Toms Football manager was top.

[Bubba]

Yup, I lost interest in gaming when the platform-style became obsolete-ish (?).  Though I guess someone will pipe up w/ a modern example.

The Ratchet & Clank series are top notch platform games. It's the one game I would like a PS3 for when the latest offering is released. Gameplay clip from the upcoming game here:

[dave]

has there ever been a more classic game than this though?

[Jaspersharpe]

Ah Frogger!

My favourite Spectrum game was Matchday.......



Spent plenty of time on most of the others listed here too....

http://zxgoldenyears.net/sport.html

Daley Thompson's Decathlon was another quality game. Trying desperately to run faster by furiously battering the little rubber keys. 

[Bubba]

Earliest game i remember was "3D Monster Maze" for the ZX81 - a forerunner for things like Doom i guess, and could be quite scary when it flashed up "Rex is behind you!"

Here's somebody playing it on an emulator:

[SA Chris]

Like this Chris...........

Quality! Although I think we used to play it on an old B&W telly. No colour graphics

[SteveM]

I could never get near the BBCs at school, but wrote my own version of horace goes skiing on the Spectrum 48k which had a bug in it so I could escape through the trees and ski down the side of the screen without fear of obstacles. Whipped my little brother's high score everytime 

But who came up with the idea for all the games? Must have been an interesting brainstorming session... http://www.cracked.com/video_16019_video-game-pitch-meeting-1979.html

[Houdini]

That modern platform looks mental.


Ghouls n ghosts was my fave, but a bit more advance than BBC/Acorn

[dave]

fucking hell don't get me started on Doom (its not 80's so probably not fair game for this thread), probably my all time best game, i played on that for hours, you really got into it, and it was quite freaky. remember having this one a 486 or something like that, it was amazing, proper absorbing. Also had Heretic which was similar (probably touch more advanced) but not as good really.

similarly their predescesor Wolfenstein 3D played on a 386 was fucking well brown too - fighting robo-nazis in a castle with a luger. dynamite.

[Bubba]

I wrote my own version of Pacman for our school's North Star Horizon



The maze, ghosts and player were all held in one 2D text array and the screen refreshed about every second to show the updated positions of everything. It actually worked pretty well.

[Johnny Brown]

featured pages upon pages of code which you could sit for hours and hours typing in yourself and then saving to tape

Yeah, and then the fucking thing didn't work! God I'm actually still annoyed about that!!! Damn you TRS-80!

[Jim]

That was back when floppy discs were actually floppy.
I wrote my own car driving game on the acorn electron, 3 lanes with cars randonly coming towards you and having to change lanes to avoid them. Was pretty lame but I was made up being only 10 or something.

Felix meets the evil weevils was a class game.

I play some of these games like ghosts and goblins on my mobile phone these days, they are still well good.

I spent alot of time playing games on my commodore amega like speedball2, rainbow islands, turrican2 etc...
They don't make em like they used to, now you have to learn a complex sequence of key commands before you can even begins modern games these days

[Johnny Brown]

I wrote my own car driving game on the acorn electron, 3 lanes with cars randonly coming towards you and having to change lanes to avoid them. Was pretty lame but I was made up being only 10 or something. I also wrote it myself.

Can you reiterate who wrote that Jim, its not really clear?

[Jim]

The same guy that went canoeing everyday

[slackline]

What was that platform arcade/home game w/ a knight who had to collect wotsits in a haunted castle?  I loved that.

Could it be Atic Atac?  Spent hours playing this myself, along with other gems such as Stop the Express, Manic Miner (absolute all-time classic!), its follow-up Jet Set Willy, JetPac, Underworlds, Jason's Gem amongst many others.

Full(ish) list of games at ZX Spectrum Games.

Had a 48k ourselves, and then the 128k with disk-drive.  I suspect my parents still have them lying in the loft too.  Might have to get some retro gaming on the flat-screen 

Used to buy some computing magazine religously that always came with a free tape with user written games on.  I expect they're still in the loft too.

[slackline]

But who came up with the idea for all the games? Must have been an interesting brainstorming session... http://www.cracked.com/video_16019_video-game-pitch-meeting-1979.html

Hilarious...

Acid tabs all round!

 

[SA Chris]

When I first got my PC i had an emultor with all the old arcade games on it; Xevious, Juno First, Scramble, Moon Cresta, etc. Played them for hours rather than the modern complicated ones. Probably because I knew what was going on.