Our object is to find
people's real needs...
to develop products which have
real benefit to people...
in whatever way.
And to do that at a price
that they can afford to do
for Tempe, what anyone
can do for a pound.
My father was always
thinking about the next
invention, new ideas.
They were pretty much constantly in his mind
and always tinkering with the next big thing.
He played poker and cards a little bit,
but um, didn't have much hobbies outside
of the inventing and the designing.
So, uh, that was where his heart was. I think
What drove Clive professionally was he's an ideas person,
so he wanted to come up with something completely new
that everybody would adopt, often price-based.
So what really interested him was to come up
with something really low price point
and with really clever engineering.
That's really what his goal was.
To have a product that everybody wanted and everybody needed
A precious,
a precious,
it's a precious
Clive Sinclair we knew about
because he would be on the news.
You knew who he was, some great British inventor,
but I don't think we sort
of realized at the time the significance of
what he was innovating in and what it would lead to.
One of the strengths of Clive was that he was newsworthy.
He could capture a lot of Colin inches.
He was a personality, he was a bit of a maverick.
People wanted to know what was he gonna say,
what was he gonna do next?
And people interviewed him, people wrote about him.
And by attracting
and absorbing that interest, of course he brought business
to Sinclair Research.
He sold the products through his own persona.
Clive started in journalism, so he would write
for practical electronics or practical wireless.
And one of the first products he did
was actually called the Micro m*dget.
That was like 1958, which was a predecessor
to the Micro Matic, but it was a similar thing.
It was a matchbox size radio
and it took him a while to commercialize.
But, um, this product was hugely successful by mail order.
PLA always had a very strong preference for mail order.
There isn't a lot of inventory sitting out there,
and if you can advertise very effectively,
you are giving up less of your profit margin than
you are to a retailer.
Part of the reason why this was so low cost was
because he found out that transistors that were thrown away
as rejects, you could test them
and they're actually good enough to use in a radio.
So he'd buy these transistors for next to nothing,
And then hobbyists could buy those
and you'd buy them by the thousand
or something, separate them into little bags, test them,
and then sell 'em as tested components.
I think the strategy was to make things were small,
make things that were appealing to an audience
that we already knew,
and make them have better margins built into them.
So you had to make them
with cheaper components if you could find them
and make them in ways that would be easier
for them to put together.
So we didn't have too much to spend on repairing.
So Clive used to do mail order amplifiers.
So if you wanted to build a set a PA system in the,
in the sixties, you could buy one of these electronics kits,
get some speakers, and you've got a PA system.
And one of his early customers, in fact was Alan Sugar.
So Alan Sugar used to turn up at the Sinclair office,
he would buy all the reject amplifiers, repair them,
then sell 'em on the market stall.
And that was quite something
because obviously Alan Sugar did his own range
of stacking Hi-Fi,
and then obviously Amstrad
became a competitor against Sinclair.
Later on,
When I first met Clive, it was obvious immediately
that he was an incredibly bright guy.
Clive always read an enormous amount of technical journals
so he knew what was going on in numerous fields
of electronics, display technology,
semiconductors, et cetera, et cetera.
All the technical stuff. He would read the the literature
and could pick it up very quickly.
But his bookcase at home was heaving with techie stuff.
I know when he designed the square eel, which was one of the
satellite dishes, he had a book on the kitchen table,
four inches thick, something like, uh, the theory of
of satellite dish design.
And, you know, he could read that style of book like a novel
Live Sinclair started his own company in the 1960s
and his first breakthrough was the small pocket calculator
in 1972.
The executive calculator builders the world's slimmest
lightest calculator.
It's a really, really nice design
and it's got this really clever way
of just recessing these little round buttons
inside a square recess there to give the feel
that the buttons are bigger than they are.
But actually the moving part is only
the, the round bit in the middle.
And it sold incredibly well
From an engineering point of view.
It was very interesting because they had to turn it on
and off with a certain frequency
and that would allow you
to use it just operating from batteries
and not, uh, power supply. You
Were talking about calculators that sat on your desk
plugged into the mains.
So these things were quite big
to have the pocket calculator like this one
and such a thin pocket calculator of
that other calculators at the time
that would come out later were much deeper.
You know, this was a, a real triumph.
I think that if you had told Clive
that all he could ever do was build calculators,
albeit more advanced calculators, the thought of
that would've been too terrifyingly boring to him.
He was very interested in display technology.
He'd had a small TV previously in the late sixties
that had not been a commercial success.
He had ideas about semiconductors, about televisions,
about electric vehicles.
So Clive was thinking about those things years, years ahead
and was always anxious to take whatever
financial success he had in any one area
and start investing in his next projects.
This is the newest way to tell the time
the Black Watch developed in Britain by Sinclair.
Its electronic, its moving parts digital
to tell you the time precisely and quartz controlled.
So you are sure that time is right. In
Fact, well, the Black Watch had some issues
with chip shortage problems at first.
One of the suppliers pulled out, uh, which caused lots
of issues, but also the very first black watch is if you
went in there was static, it would reset the time
and that was a major issue.
Very unfortunate for Sinclair
because they sold a huge amount and got a huge amount back.
The black watch very easily got zapped
by static electricity.
So if you had too much nylon in your carpet, your watch
suddenly would be, you know, not reading the correct time
or any time at all.
It is zero zero out.
I think even getting too close to a television
with the black watch could be a problem.
There's a problem they fixed quite soon,
but it caused major issues for the business.
A design modification was made,
which involved putting some sort of shield
inside the plastic case.
And this made it very, very difficult to assemble
because the case had not been designed to have room
for a a shield inside it.
But again, when sold in kit form,
that became the buyer's problem.
That wasn't a Sinclair problem any longer.
It was a story where somebody sent back a black watch
and the song was, came with a letter that said,
we've solved the problem on the black watch
and had a great nail hammered straight through the
Thing. I mean, I laugh
about it and I don't feel guilty about it
because I know from having talked to many, many people
over the years who say, oh yeah, I I've still got one
of your black watches waiting for me to finish work on.
I know that they enjoyed it.
If it was too easy to put together,
they'd have got no satisfaction out of it at all.
So the actual people were sort
of happy putting them together themselves,
but it was right at the end of Sinclair Radionics
and they did have a lot of problems financially.
That was when cl thinking about doing computers quite early
on in the seventies, he decided if he was gonna do
something, the next big thing it needs to be on,
on a completely another level being the XX 80.
So the Mark 14 I think was a sort of almost stopgap product
to get a bit of turnover in.
And there was a couple of other products around at
that time, like the risk calculator watch again,
it was a sort of quickly hashed together product
to get some turnover in with
what re limited resources they had at the time.
But really what client had been planning for years is
to do a, a low cost home computer,
a very slick design, local cost home computer.
And he'd been talking about it for some time.
So back in the middle of the seventies,
we didn't have computers at home,
so Apple was doing their first things in us.
Commodore Atari in Europe.
Clive Sinclair realized he could, uh, try to,
to do something in that field also.
Well, it was a new market which was dominated
by the Americans and where
clearly if the cost could be reduced substantially,
the the market could be expanded.
It seemed to me that the prices then being charged were such
that the appeal was the sales were going more
to the small businessmen than to the,
the man in the, in the home.
They had been designed origin of the man in the home,
but small businesses were proving the biggest market
'cause they're really just too expensive for personal use.
So I set about seeing if there was some way
of really bringing the cost down
by a major factor, and that's what we achieved.
Of course,
Let me tell you about the most exciting ad
that's ever been printed anywhere in the history
of the universe was
that 39 pounds single board computer.
And it was just like suddenly there was something that was
like potentially within my budget.
And as it happened, you know, it was a full six months
after ordering it, before I actually had it in my hands.
But this is Sinclair in a nutshell, wasn't he, uh,
bringing us to the future early?
Because there was this amazing chip
that we used in the MK 14 that we knew that there was
a greater level of interest in that
because it was called a computer.
Clive had a good idea of what was going on with some
of those early computers,
but basically his method of competing was
to steer away from them, never
to go head on against somebody.
So his goal had been, well, I'm just gonna make something
way smaller, way less expensive,
and um, affordable to a much bigger mass market.
I knew what computers were, I didn't understand
how they worked, but there was something about
them that I knew I wanted.
I knew they could make decisions for you
and that fascinated me.
But how it was done wasn't clear to me
how you would program a computer
and that I didn't figure that out until I had an MK 14.
That, that was my moment
of enlightenment was following the manual for the MK 14,
getting numbers to go in and stay in.
Okay, that was the first part of it.
And then discovering
that those numbers could represent decision points.
It's a very rudimentary design.
So you've got this little display here,
which is actually the same display as used in calculators.
So that's where that comes from.
And you have these little bubbles
that go over the, the segments there.
So they look bigger than they really are.
The little magnifying glasses on each one.
Little tiny touch keyboard, nice and cheap there.
And it's based around this chip here,
which is colloquially known as the scam chip, SEMP.
And if you wanna program this thing,
you're programming in machine code.
So you were typing in hex codes here for the op codes
and you only had
that little tiny LED display there to get the results back.
You got involved in the assembly process
and you've got a much more intimate connection
with the product that eventually arose from it.
MK 14 was a, uh,
a build it yourself fun thing with a difference.
So I was born in 1969.
What you without face, you look so young. Yeah, 1969.
So I was like 1110 in 79
when things like the Atari 2,600 were dropping
and what we now consider
to be the modern video gaming age was starting.
And what you've gotta remember is this was completely new.
I sort of envy my kids 'cause of their youth
and the standard of the video games, the quality of
what they get to experience now and the ease of multiplay
and organizing your friends and all joining up
and running around these incredible worlds.
But I wouldn't change it for what we had,
which was a perspective of no video games.
And then that extraordinary change happening
because it was just
Insane, h* h*, h*. It's
Magic.
You know,
it's magic.
Never believe it's
Never been away.
Never seen A day winning on my pillow in the
Morning, lazy day in bed.
Music in my head.
Crazy music playing in the
Morning.
Oh it's magic. You know,
The 1970s was so analog in so many ways.
It was so real.
You know, g plan furniture and like very simple food.
If your town had a cappuccino bar,
it was like living on the Riviera.
It was so unusual. From that came the kind of neon,
crazy multicolored world of eighties and computer gaming.
It, it's like being smacked in the face
by the tango character.
It's like, it was so vivid, multicolored
and extraordinary both in terms of the features
that the new world
of consumer electronics were suddenly delivering
in place of what?
Nothing. It was it, it was like new
but also the design,
the product design that we were getting.
So my first memory of owning, not just seeing
but owning a personal computer was a ZX 80.
And I bought option number two, the cheaper version
or other than my dad did, which was a bag of parts
and I assembled it with my dad.
They needed to have a computer that was going
to appeal to the masses.
The X 80 is that step towards
what would later to be the X 81,
ZX 80. I remember
by that stage he'd left Sinclair Radio ons
and set up his own new company, Sinclair Research
and moved to much smaller offices.
So we're away from the big St I'S office
and just in basically a couple
of rooms in Kings Parade Center of Cambridge, he realized
that the computer would be a huge hit if only it was
affordable by just average normal families.
If you can get that market, it's massive.
So I think he was concentrating on, I know
what the price needs to be then work backwards from there
for on all of the components to get that price point.
A proper computer. Uh,
affordable prices. No one had done that before.
The Z 80 chip was brilliant.
Uh, XOG licensed the design,
so it was available from multiple number of foundries.
So there was competition in the market.
You could get the Z 80 at really a quite reasonable price.
Secondly, the Xog Z 80 did help pave the way certainly
for Sinclair to reach the price points for the Z 80
and ZX 81.
And as you know, it was used by a lot
of other home computer makers as well.
The Z 80 was so general purpose that it was used in
thousands and thousands of different applications.
I mean the, you know, the ZX 80 was in those days one
of thousands of different applications.
So for us, the Z 80
was using high volume in the first chess game
players in 1980.
When the ZX 80 came out, the highest volume application was,
uh, chess game that that spoke to you,
One C three number
R two seven, you know,
the computer voice.
It was kind of fun. And they were making hundreds
of thousands of those a quarter in those days.
Those were high volume application.
Today you laugh because, you know, with cell phones
that you make, uh, millions a day.
You know,
CEX eight is a complete computer selling
for just under a hundred pounds
and it's applied with a manual.
It plugs straight into a conventional television,
straight into the aerial socket.
There's no modification of the set.
And if you wish to record your programs into
a standard cassette recorder.
And the great thing about the ZX 80 is that
although there were computers before that were available
to individuals to buy, they cost several hundreds of pounds.
We've brought it down to a hundred,
a hundred pounds without any sacrifice.
You can learn the program on it
and subsequently use it perhaps in your job or at
Work. The ZX 80
is certainly not a powerful machine,
but it was a very influential one and a very popular one.
It was also very influential on Jack Tramel.
When Jack Tramel decided that he wanted to do the VIC 20,
it was essentially
because he'd had a trip to the United Kingdom
and he'd seen the ZX 80
and he'd seen that this computer was being bought by people
and sold at a very affordable price
that wasn't making a loss.
So he went back to his people and,
and that was his famous phrase, we want to produce computers
for the masses and not the classes. It
Was white with a white clean keyboard
and white has a real
seventies science fiction association XX 80 straight
outta 2001.
I got it. And I remember thinking it pretty futuristic
that I remember showing it to a, a, a friend of mine saying,
do you believe this is a computer?
He's sort of looking at it going, uh,
When I saw the ZX 80 for the first time, I was astonished
because the computers I'd been used
to from nearly 10 years earlier, you'd need
to load up the programs
with paper tape than you could run it.
Whereas the ZX 80, you connect it to the tv,
you plug it in and it just works.
It sits there waiting for you to type things in.
And I thought, well, you know,
where's the paper tape reader,
the punch card readers sort of things. I had
A friend who had a ZX 80, that's
where I first started dabbling with programming at home.
That wasn't at the school or anything.
I adored it, I covered it. I really, really wanted it.
The ZX 80 is really something that change, uh, and
and demonstrated to Clive Sinclair that he was right.
There was a market, an opportunity for launching computers.
But when we look at it even now from the 21st century,
when we look at it and we realize we're talking about a
black and white computer, no sound one k of memory
with this very, uh, I wouldn't say annoying
because I think it is fascinating feature when you press a
key, the screen flickers.
So all these kind of things show how limited it was
and at the same time it shows you that if that had success,
anything that you could evolve on top
of it would have a huge potential.
Obviously the journey
of computing has been about the cost coming down,
the size coming down and the power going up.
That's been something that has been iconic within
the journey of computing.
And no other industry really does that.
So the importance of the processes,
because it was the microprocessor revolution
that's kickstarted this entire industry.
So having AZ 80 processor that you could buy
for a few pounds enabled this.
Now Richard, you divided what's available on the market
into three broad sections.
So where does the newcomer,
who knows nothing at all about computers start?
Well, for the newcomer, I'd recommend this first category,
which really covers machines from 50
to a hundred pounds and far and away.
The best example here is the Sinclair's XX 81.
Over half a million of them have been made and sold.
Now, uh, I'D
Really, the X 81 was designed to be sold
to your average person on the street
that had an interest in computers
but didn't necessarily know what they wanted from it.
So this term home micro computer was out there,
it was in the news all the time.
So this had to appeal to them.
And the way this was packaged in the small box
with this manual, everything you needed just plug it into
your tv fitted that bill the case.
Now we've got something that looks actually really nice.
It's still small, it's still got the same kind of keyboard,
but this fills a bit more finished,
more like a general product that you would buy in the shop.
This thing was sub 100 pound.
Other things out there were 200, 300, 400 pound.
It's not like they just saved a few pound off.
This thing was really, really cheap in comparison.
These were in boxes on the shelves in W eight Smiths
and Boots and places like that.
And people were picking up those boxes
and saying, I'd like to buy one of these.
That hadn't really happened before.
You know, this was one of the
first machines to be doing that.
So when you opened that box, you wanted to see something
that looked the part like a piece
of consumer electronics and you
Did And you could code it
and to begin, there was no software.
You just wrote your own.
And an awful lot of people have started
to buy these weak computers in order to learn to program,
not to play games or anything like that.
The same with Spectrum. And the point was the price point
was accessible to core a families
who could never have afforded hundreds
of pounds on a personal computer.
Clive Sinclair, I didn't really know anything about him,
but all I knew about was that in the magazines
of these little adverts
for a ZX 80 little advert for E ZX 81.
So eventually I went, yeah, okay, that I can afford.
We were all in our mid-teens.
So we were all just beginning to get into this whole idea
of home computing.
When I started, I started
with the Sinclair Aesthetic City one.
I like to talk when I give speeches about what that meant
to be, trying to make a game in one K of memory
and then show how we went from one K to 16 K
and how mind bending that was
to go 16 times more in one leap.
It was such an enormous leap
that people started making things like flight simulators
and I shield them screenshots
of the sign on flight simulator running in 16 K.
But then I show them the eBay logo
and I go, this eBay logo takes more than 16 K.
And so in the space of that eBay logo,
they wrote an entire flight simulator.
It starts to put it all into perspective
and people go, I get it.
It was such an amazingly different time.
We looked at what everybody else was doing
and what had gone out there and we would try to figure out
how it was done, but we didn't know whether something was
possible or not possible until we actually
went and and did it.
So we were never stymied by can't be done.
It was always how can we do it?
XX 80 and the XX 81 gave rise to that scene
where you could create your own gaming invention,
record it and distribute it.
So when the ZX 81 was launched,
of course we read the reviews.
Um, we knew that sales were going well,
but we were very much focused on
what was gonna be the next machine.
And you have to remember that we'd launched two
machines in two years running.
We knew that in 12 months time, the whole world, the market,
all the zx 80 81 fans would expect a new model.
So yeah, we were very much heads down
and I was starting to think together with Jim
and Clive, what sort of a machine would this be?
So we knew we had to launch something at the 1982
April exhibition.
We knew that it had to be better for games players
and also better for those that wanted to learn programming.
So we decided we needed color,
we needed high resolution graphics, we needed sound
and we needed something of a moving key keyboard.
So those were the basic specifications regarding the name.
I think probably everybody assumed it would be ZX
82, you know, one a year.
But we quickly realized that we were making a rod
for our own backs as soon as that was launched,
of course then we'd be expected
to make another one 12 months later.
So we needed a name that would
describe the product rather than the year of its launch.
So Steve and I came up with Rainbow.
We loved the idea, we wanted to call it the rainbow.
Clive came up with a much more scientific technological
sounding name of spectrum
and of course that's the one that stuck. But
The other thing you need to understand about Clive was
that he was fiercely, fiercely patriotic.
He would do anything he could not
to be dependent on Japanese technology.
And he would try to buy
chips from the few British manufacturers
who were still making chips like Ferranti
Ferranti were really benefiting from the success
of the ZX 81.
You know, they were selling their ULA in in volumes
that they'd never appreciated
before they'd got into the consumer market.
And they were determined to bend over backwards
to roll out the red carpet to give us
whatever help we needed to ensure
that the ZX spectrum was a success.
He wanted to do something for high technology in Britain.
He wanted manufacturing to be done in Scotland, which it was
as long as it possibly could be.
It was only with reluctance
that he gave into commercial pressures
and realized that global economics dictated
that assembly jobs got done elsewhere.
The spectrum compared
with the ZX 81 right from the off it was going
to be color for games.
Color seemed essential and better graphics.
So that needed different hardware, it needed extra software
to deal with the fact
that pixels had colors associated with them.
So that meant
that it certainly needed extra memory allocated
to the color information
and it needed some extra code for dealing
with the different colors.
That was a big thing. It was gonna be the colored ZedX 81.
So one of the reasons that we decided
to have high resolution pixels
and lower resolution color was based on
the way the human eye works.
Human vision can resolve
to much finer detail brightness luminance, if you like,
than we can resolve color.
And the PAL TV system took advantage of that so that the,
the bandwidth of the luminance signal was three
or four times greater than the
bandwidth of the chromate signal.
And we also knew at that time that the Oracle
and CFAs TeleTech standards also followed a similar pattern.
They set color per character,
but of course you could address individual pixels.
So that was the background
and the reasoning behind choosing high resolution pixels,
but lower resolution color.
We've got the color clash. You know, why did you do that?
So why did we make that compromise?
We had to meet a price point.
The spectrum was made by some,
within a different kind of mos entirely.
It was, um, what would give our features in a minimal sort
of way, rather than doing color per
pixel, it was color per block.
And that's, that's okay, but it's, it's a hack.
It's kind of will get us to the end cheaply kind of way.
We could have gone for hardware sprites,
the chips were available, we could have put special chips
and additional memory in so
that we could have multicolored sprites,
moving invisibly across a background without
any degradation of color.
We could have gone for something that approximates
to much later computer standards
where every single pixel on the screen has
its own color palette.
But again, think of the additional memory that's needed.
Think of the additional chips that would be needed
for all the address mapping, all of the video buffering.
Again, we needed to meet a price point.
So that was the compromise.
So it used cassette tapes for storing programs
and that had been a bit crude on the ZX 81.
So on the spectrum that was much improved.
You had headers so that the programs had names
and you could look for the one you wanted.
And when you're loading from Tate, there are lots
of signals coming through.
And the spectrum we found, if you fed that through
to the TV display, you know, pretty patterns
but you, you could also see what was going on.
Sinclair didn't wanna sell you a
cassette deck that you didn't need.
'cause again, it's a huge piece
of money on the end of the price.
So let's use something that's already out there.
The home cassette recorder that everybody had them.
This was all about getting into the hands of people
that may have been on the fence
and may not have got into computers at
that's fine by keeping it cheap.
Our object is to find people's real needs
to develop products which have real benefit to people
in whatever way.
And to do that at a price that they can afford to do
for Tempe, what anyone can do for a hand.
Steve and I joined Clive for the launch.
And I have to say I was blown away by the popularity.
I knew that we had something special for the whole morning.
The crowds were four deep around our stand.
Clive had offered that first thousand people
to order a spectrum
and offer cash would get it, uh,
with an accelerated delivery time.
People were just queuing up with money to spend.
But it wasn't just the volume of interest,
it was also the level of detail.
We were behind a couple of teenagers and,
and we just listened.
They enthused about the Zuck
spectrum, you know, which was great for us.
But what amazed us was they knew
every single detail of the spec.
It had only been launched that morning.
It had been a secret the day before,
but they'd absorbed everything
and they were interested in it.
The release of the spectrum changed the nature
of the UK games industry
because with the ZX 81, it was still a little bit geeky
and a little bit hobbyist.
But with the spectrum, all of a sudden you had kind
of mass market products.
The look of the spectrum really was driven by necessity
because the whole drive behind it was to create a computer
as cheaply as possible for the masses.
So the Commodore 64, which did look like a proper computer,
obviously retailed
for a lot more than the spectrum ever did. The
Commodore 64, remember it costs less than two 30 pounds.
And don't forget it has the enormous memory.
And I think as a result of this necessity, they actually,
whether you call it by accident
or design, they actually created something
that became uniquely iconic
because it did look different from everything else.
I remember just being really struck
by the form factor and the design.
I've always loved things that look like the future,
but I remember the BBC micro just being this chunky, clunky,
noisy sort of beige
but yellow by the time it hit our classrooms,
machines that weren't attractive.
So the ZX spectrum for me was a revelation
because it was so slim I couldn't understand how it was
so slim and sleek, the little rainbow on the side.
I sort of never understood what that was for,
but I presumed it was
because then the games would be in color, you know,
and the buttons just felt nice.
So I felt like it was something you
could probably put in your school bag.
Five worried a great deal about how things looked.
The external appearance was always
very, very important to him.
And he surrounded himself with very, very good designers.
Rick Dickenson that came on to design most
of the computers was just a brilliant guy at translating.
What, uh, Kai wanted,
And this is one of the things that I think people miss
for me, Sinclair,
it's not about his knowledge of electronics.
I relate to him because of his talent for product design.
The product design that he brought
to everything he did was something that
until Apple came along
and Steve Jobs, I can honestly say I'd never seen. I
Thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.
And in a way I still do.
The more I look at this,
the more I can sort of smell my bedroom.
I don't mean that in an unpleasant way.
I mean the, the, the atmosphere,
although I was a teenage boy, I just mean that kind of,
you know, sort of red curtains there.
Ano style bookshelf over there full
of my James Herbert collection bunk beds over there.
Little white MFI computer desk here
with a black and white tell there.
And then this little thing here like that I can, yeah,
I mean that is mad.
That's where Sir Clive Sinclair's understanding of form
the emotional connection we have to objects.
There is something in our genes that, uh,
brings an emotional connection
to certain shapes, objects, and colors,
Regardless of what goes on under the bonnet.
That must be one of the most iconic
designs of the 20th century.
And it is, isn't it? I mean in terms of its impact,
but just in terms of its, yeah, I,
I I shall use the B word I think.
I think it's beautiful.
I think it's a timeless design, what the spectrum gave us.
So I think the work of Rick Dickinson
and his team was amazing from a cosmetic point of view, it's
A balanced, subtle approach.
Nothing shouts at you, it's not fighting for attention.
The famous rainbow in this colored text here,
it just starts singing, it starts coming alive
and that rainbow is synonymous with the product.
People seem to really like it.
The rainbow stripe on the bottom right, it's a thing
of absolute beauty.
And the Sinclair logo itself, the font get out of town.
It was obviously decided for the next iteration,
the color one that we need to up our game slightly
and get some tactile feedback.
And that tactile feedback comes in the form
of an elastomeric
or a rubber keyboard, we'll call it rubber shall we, is not.
And then you've got that popping, that tactile feedback
and you can engineer tune it to get the right feed to it.
But it's still made at a cost.
But clearly it was an improvement over the 80
and the 81 of course it got famously
described in one early review as having all the feel
of dead human flesh.
I think were the words that were used.
I'm one of those that loved the
touching the, the rubber key.
So I don't refer to it as the dead flash experience.
I really enjoyed it because it's what I had. It was magical.
So even if it was not perfect, you don't remember that
and you forget those details very easily.
I found the tactile sense of them really nice, kind
of like rubbing my finger on the edges
of the keys was just really nice for some reason.
But to use not so great.
But obviously Clive Sinclair's little shortcut keys
for programming helped reduce the amount
of keys you had to press.
I had friends with the original rubber
keyed 48 K spectrum.
Um, most of them had trouble loading games
because the J key had gone
and you had to press the J was the shortcut for the load.
And as it was the key that was pressed by far the most.
And when that one went, you were in trouble
and the quotation marks were the next thing to go as well
because to load from tape on the 48 k, it was load, uh,
quotation mark, quotation marks.
So those were the keys that went first. So
There was a whole learning curve with learning
to program using all these shortcut operations.
But at the same time it was a really nice
experience 'cause it was new.
I think the spectrum as a piece of design,
it's unparalleled in what it is.
You see a 48 K ZX spectrum, you immediately know what it is.
In fact with all the different spectrum models,
you know from the design, what they
Are and unusually the Sinclair products were black
and most of the other contemporary products were
beige, weren't they in the day?
The beige kind of dominant aesthetic of computing it is
for the business community.
Whereas Sir Clive wasn't held back by that.
He wanted to make an impact. He understood his market.
There were so many computer companies in the UK
during the early mid eighties
and they all wanted to slice
of the same pie machines like ARI 800.
The revived versions came a bit too late.
The Acorn electron obviously had supply problems
and that arrived about a year too late to make an impact.
BBC Micro was great machine but incredibly expensive
and not many games were available for it.
Very much an educational orientated machine.
So the spectrum just had a clear path, I think, to the home
and the games industry and cut, cut straight through it.
By that time we'd missed out on the BBC contract.
Acorn had got it with
what I considered a much more boring computer.
The government hopes to have a computer in every secondary
school by the end of the year.
But it was classic, it was more boring
because it actually worked.
It could sit in a classroom.
The keys were more reliable,
the whole thing was more predictable.
The BBC was a competitor to it
and Clive was always disappointed
that Acorn had won the rights for the BBC Micro
and the education programs.
But the reality is we sold several times more aesthetic
spectrums without the support of British government.
On the BBC micro side,
I'd say the spectrum was the big one.
Spectrum made the market, whereas BBCB never really had
that same kind of vibe.
The spectrum was a bit more mass markety really.
And the BBB was still a bit kind of, um, snooty.
And this machine is credited as the machine, uh, that sort
of kickstart our games industry.
And people that are working in the games industry now cut
their teeth programming games on the spectrum.
I'm sure the, the spectrum did start the British
gaming and compute scene.
It because it was just so successful.
I think it just came about at exactly the right time.
The spectrum really was the one
that sparked the game scene.
It was affordable. There was a Christmas
where everybody just seemed to get one.
They were selling out everywhere.
You went downstairs on Christmas morning
with your fingers crossed, hoping your parents
had managed to get one as well. It was
December, 1983 when I was surprised at Christmas
with a brand new Spectrum, 48 k.
It was mine and my brother's. That's
where everything really kicked off.
It was in color, it was on your TV
screen and it was beautiful.
I badged my parents who said I might be able to get a, a,
a spectrum for my birthday,
but there was a definite emphasis on the might be.
But then I remember coming home from school a couple of days
before my birthday and my mum said, look down
between the two, between the sofa and the chair
and their in a Boots carrier bag was a brand new ZX
spectrum, 48 k as well.
I did one of these kids go mad things,
you know, like it was mine.
And there it was and I couldn't believe it.
And I was like, wow. And then I set it up then obviously,
and then was on it off until my dad came home from work
and said, right, I wanna watch the TV now.
I really wanted to get the Sinclair spectrum.
And so I had a very strange thing happen to me.
My grandmother, I was at her house one day
and she said, I wanna talk to you.
And I'm like, okay. And she goes to me, you know,
I'm getting pretty old now
and someday I don't wanna think I left you like some pea
Potts or something like that.
And so I want to give you some money just so I know
that you're not gonna end up
with silverware or that kind of thing.
And so she gave him like a hundred pounds or 150 pounds.
And at that time that was a really big deal
because that was my Sinclair spectrum.
And so by buying that computer,
that was the knee in the curve for me.
'cause suddenly I was able to, to take off, difficult
For me to have an insight into
what it meant to other people.
To me it just made it possible for me
to get into computing probably four years,
five years before I might
otherwise have been able to afford it.
It was cheap, it was color and my brother liked it as well.
So did I like the design? Yeah, great.
But I think the first thing I did was open it up.
I had probably in all honesty, more interested in
what was under the hood than anything else.
Like, um, into hardware. The
Machine seemed impossibly small, like how can you pack all
of this power, this obscene amount of ram,
these bitmap graphics and all of
that into this tiny little box?
It was very understated.
I mean, at that time when the leaflet was doing the rounds,
nobody knew just how rubbery those keys would feel.
So it still looked amazing.
So for me it was really, this is an arcade capable machine
that you can have at home at a ridiculous price, which meant
that it was a perfect blank slate for new people coming in
to do things that had never been done before.
The spectrum was incredibly important
because up until that point, whether it's the ZX 80
or the ZX 81, they were black and white.
They didn't have proper keyboards and so on.
And here we had this product in either 16 K form
or 48 K form that had memory to go with it.
So we had for the first time in the spectrum, uh,
products which you could actually do something with.
And what most
of the software developers decided here
was a games playing machine.
So the ZX spectrum became the doan
of the developers of computer games.
And it was the games playing
that really made the spectrum the success that it was.
The spectrum was there at the time when it was affordable
for parents to say, okay,
as a main Christmas present or whatever.
Yet we can stretch to that.
And I think that was the opening for many, many kids
to get not into just games,
but into fiddling about with basic programming.
And it meant because of the limitations of of the spectrum.
The programmers had to be really, really creative
For an aspiring games developer for,
for someone who's interested in that sort of thing.
The spectrum was ideal. You go to a shop, you pick it up,
you unbox it, it's there, you plug it in,
Plugging it in, and then you telly
and then you'd just be sitting there with this in your hand.
It was absolutely nuts.
The notion that this screen would do things
that you'd only seen on films
that you'd only seen on Star Trek was, uh,
I mean it must just have been absolutely mind
blowing, but of course you're there.
You don't realize your mind is being blown.
You just know that you don't wanna look away.
I just became absolutely fascinated by the whole thing.
And I remember like type a small piece of Caribbean
and seeing the result on the screen,
I was absolutely gob smugged.
I couldn't believe it. I thought, wow, this is amazing.
You know, I just like typed in a few lines of something
and this happened on the screen.
I think the best thing about the spectrum was it was a
big box of bites.
You can do anything you want with it.
Uh, you didn't have to know anything particular.
And you can make simple basic games
and then as you progress, you can learn assembly language
and make more complicated games,
but you can start making them yourself.
It was so accessible
that everyone could make their own games.
And it came with a very good programming manual,
which at the back had a reference section
regarding programming in machine code, which I understood
that programming in basic alone,
you couldn't really create decent games.
It was too slow. So I had to learn machine code
and that's when I started dabbling
and trying to get as much information
as I could about programming in machine code.
Steve was the author of the manual.
I edited it, made a few comments.
It wasn't just aimed at showing people how
to plug the device in and load games.
We really wanted it to be an instruction manual
to help people to learn to program in basic.
So the Spectrum manual, I approached it more
or less the same as with the ZX 81 Manual.
No, no special differences.
And in fact, some of the material was
valid for both of them.
So I I more or less lifted it from the ZX 81 manual and,
and reused it.
It reads as though a human being is writing to you.
I, I wanted to try
and anticipate what the reader needed to know
and address that.
And clearly history has shown that a lot
of people learn basic through that manual.
It had a lot of humor in it.
Steve's particular brand of humor,
I know Clive wasn't completely happy
with my style of writing.
All sorts of completely flaky, extraneous ideas coming in
and trying to get across the serious ideas
of how you would use it.
Bit Monty Python ish.
Sometimes from time to time I get emails saying I
so much enjoyed the manual.
You know, sort of one or two
Popular computing weekly.
I think it was one of the best magazines ever.
It was like a tiny little thing.
And it was a weekly magazine, which was amazing.
So we didn't have to wait too long for the next issue.
And they also covered the machine code.
They, they used to have a small section about machine code.
And, and I, I read this article in one issue where it said,
if you wanna become a really good programmer,
successful programmer,
you must forget about the basic language
and learn machine code without even knowing the difference.
I said, well that's what I'm gonna do.
And it was that kind of what people were doing
with the spectrum and stuff
that actually got me into doing a little bit of coding.
I was never good enough or bright enough
and in mathematics at all to do anything proficient.
But as a hobbyist, you could explore, you could play around,
you could take some of the very early computing magazines
and with their endless long forever pages of listings,
you would type 'em, they'd never work.
They would never ever work first time.
But if you were inquisitive enough, you started playing
around with that bit of code
and working out what was going wrong
and fixing it as you went along.
And eventually slowly,
I wrote the most horrendous space invaders again one day.
And it was just appalling pretty much.
But, you know, that was, that was my genesis of, of gaming.
It was an iterative process.
You'd type it in, then you'd suddenly figure out,
well it won't run what I done.
Missed out a piece of punctuation
and it was scanning down the page trying to find
what you'd missed and and
putting it in and getting it working.
And when you did it, it was a real sense of achievement.
And so it literally was something that had
that we had never seen anything like before.
You know, you sat in front of a TV
and you know, you just basically consumed the
output that came at you.
And that was fun for many decades.
But the, but the ability to really kind of turn
that output into input
and to type in even just a basic program
or just kind of waggle the joystick
and see the character move around on, on the screen.
Arthur C. Clarke has this great quote about
how any sufficiently advanced technologies
indistinguishable from magic.
And at that time when we were doing those basic programs
and playing those basic games, we'd literally
never seen anything like it.
And so it really did feel like a form
of digital magic to us.
I think
Sinclair was still at the stage of the product lifecycle,
which all products have, where it was still being
really targeted at the people
who don't really mind if it works.
They just like to tinker around until it does.
And this stage of product lifecycle
is early adopters, innovators.
And when he was targeting those people,
Clive, he was happiest.
Developing gamers on the Sinclair spectrum in the early
days was a little bit difficult,
a little bit uh, unreliable.
I has a 48 K spectrum with dual ZX micro drives
and these were amazingly primitive devices.
Yeah, these little micro drive cassettes which had this
endlessly of tape going inside them. The
Micro drive was inexpensive attached to the spectrum.
It had the right capacity, it had the right speed,
essentially it was a cassette head
and that was one of the beauties of it, is
that Clive had taken some readily available components,
which were high-tech in themselves
and leveraged it in his concept.
It's actually surprising how reliable they were,
considering how basic the technology was.
The carts he put in, either you got a,
a reliable one which you could use a lot,
or you got an unreliable one, which you really had
to throw away after a while.
It was that hit or miss.
I didn't have too many problems developing.
It wasn't very fast, but it did work.
I dunno how well the micro drive did fare in the market.
It's a very, very flimsy piece of tape.
If it doesn't go from one reel to another,
it goes round in a spiral on itself.
So it has to slip past itself so that there has
to be some wear and tear. When
I saw the adverts for micro drive, they seem to be, oh,
the answer for the spectrum.
'cause it seems to take ages loading and saving tapes.
There were these little gizmos which were going
to be like disc drives
and they had tiny little cartridges that you could put in,
but I had so much frustration in trying to make them work.
I really got near to crunching it with a hammer.
I really did feel like doing it.
But they went back to Sinclair
and I actually got my money back for those
and I said, they're not for purpose.
One of the other problems we used
to have was spectrum overheating all the time,
especially when you had your gizmos on the back.
I heard of people kind of standing a glass
of ice water by them.
We used to use fans in the office for a while,
but we used to find that switching on
and off the fans sometimes could make your machines crash.
So those weren't terribly popular.
In the end, I bought another keyboard for the spectrum
and threw the rubber keyboard away and,
and the circuit board from the spectrum can of lay right
inside the other keyboard, which gave it a lot of room.
And that's how I spent most of my time programming.
So the rubber keys didn't last sort
of more than a few months.
This is the spectrum that an attack, zombie. Zombie.
And if the mask was written on
and conveniently the top will come off
and there's my little modifications
that allowed mapping the softie in.
That was a way for me to connect the softie to the spectrum.
So the advantage of having your work on another machine
where it'll stay pristine even if this crashes. The beauty
Of the spectrum in regards to
that experimental approach was
that it was a beautiful blank slate.
It was a block of memory, a block of screen memory,
block of attribute memory.
Here's a fast processor, off you go. That was it.
That's all you had to work with.
So you had to fashion everything from those raw
ingredients, especially
On the spectrum because you didn't have anything.
No hardware, sports, no nothing. You have to do everything.
You have to be really creative.
Technically, all those limitations allowed people like me
to try unlimited things.
I always knew the computers for, for having fun
and entertaining people.
By the time the Sinclair Spectrum arrived,
it was Peyton the obvious.
They were for only one thing
and that was making interactive movies.
Of course, not only did we have moving stuff on a little
screen, it had color.
This was a toy shop just like Austin Wells must have felt
when he had Free Reign.
And if this was gonna be my Austin Wells moment,
let's make Citizen Kane.
I thought, yeah, we can do this now We've got a Sinclair 48
K ZX spectrum, let's go make Citizen came.
So I feel I could make movies in 1982. Oh boy.
Now I'd seen a couple of three D games on the ZX 81,
A little Game with a Tyrannosaur Rex Running
through a maze was one that I remember.
And I thought you could do this with the kind
of sh**t 'em up if you kind of had spaceships
and you were flying into the game.
It was about the time Star Wars was very big.
And I thought, ah, if I do a game that's like Star Wars,
people are bound to love that.
And I have spaceships flying out the game.
So three D Space Wars was the concept from the start.
And to make it feel like a scene in Star Wars
where you're flying into a crowd of fighters
and they're all flying around you.
At that time, no one had done a
three D game on the spectrum.
So I thought, right, I'm coming up with something new.
I think there were a couple that came out
by the time it was published,
there was a three D motorbike game where motorbike was kind
of riding through a forest of trees,
but there certainly wasn't any around when I started.
So that gave me a feeling that, yeah, I,
I was onto something new.
The sound on the ZX spectrum was really very simple.
We had a, what we called a little beeper,
ingenious programmers could develop square waves to drive it
and create something that approximated
to different tones of music.
It, it was very, very simple.
Well all you can do with a spectrum is um,
switch the speaker on and off, you know, as one bit
and an attack just you have to generate a frame of graphics
and then make some kind of a click.
You could maybe do a tiny little bit of a beep
or a little bit of noise
as you can hear footsteps in anti-tax.
So it draws a frame of graphics,
does a tiny bit of white noise.
I'm often asked whether I can make music as well
as graphics and code and I can't.
Someone else supplied the music for Saboto
and I always wanted to get the music playing
during the game, but I was new to this.
So in the game I played some beeps.
No music, no interrupts,
just an occasional white noise sound.
When you kick someone,
Spectrum sound basically involved, you could
directly move the speaker,
but you can only move it in or out.
You don't have any fine control.
Now bear in mind that sound continues continuously,
but you have to do other things like the graphics,
which take rather more time up than everything else.
So on the spectrum, any music I played, I had
to do little bursts of.
So at each intra, which occur 50 times a second,
I put some sound out, just a little burst
of sound at whatever frequency
it needs to be at that moment.
So there's this distinct 50 hertz hum
because the whole sound was being broken up
into these little chunks.
Every 50th of a second, which rung
through everything was never gonna sound that a commodore,
the color, the sound limited though it was,
and the memory of the spectrum compared to the 81.
And the 80 meant
that there were some really terrific games developed
for it very quickly.
And that took off like wildfire
and Clive's attitude was that it would take care of itself.
He hadn't set out to develop a machine
for people to play with.
He acknowledged that that's what they did do with it.
And that drove sales and that was all well and good,
but he let the software people take care of the software.
So I think for a lot of people, their first experience
of video games was going into the arcade.
And the arcade was such an exciting place.
You've got explosions, grabs, loads of colors,
but they wanted to recreate that into their home computer.
Growing up in the early eighties,
it was all about the arcades.
That was where the best games were. These amazing games.
You'd go to the arcades, it would just be rows
and rows of brilliant arcade games.
And I was always pestering my parents to go
to the Seasides or wherever.
So the opportunity to have a machine
which could replicate this experience in some form at home
cheaply and easily was obviously very attractive to me.
The arcades were incredibly important.
When you go back to the early eighties,
it's the golden age of the arcades.
There are so many games that are so popular.
And already on the ZX 81, there were versions
of Space Invaders, very crude,
but playable versions of games as well as original games.
Games like three D Monster MAs
that had their own momentum. The
ZX 81 died off very quickly.
The spectrum was coming out
and Arctic immediately bombed me a spectrum
and I taught myself how it worked
by writing an unbelievably bad Space Invaders Clone,
which was never released, but it taught me how to use it.
And I went on to writes Cosmic Debris,
which was Asteroid's claim, all claims in most days.
Totally unimaginative really, which Arctics sold again.
But this time on a pretty good royalty deal,
I was pretty much on 25% verb, all the early games.
So almost as soon as the spectrum came out,
you started seeing immediately lots of versions
of games like Space Invaders, Pacman Asteroids,
m*ssile Command Logger.
We ripped off arcade games
because Arcade Games were the only games that served
as reference pieces.
We all went to the arcades
and we wanted to copy what we saw.
It's how you learn anything, right? You imitate.
And you'd have that instant connection
because you'd see a game
and you'd go, oh, it's just like Space Invaders,
which was like Spectral Invaders.
Or you'd have Defender except instead
of er on the end it would be a on the end,
just subtle little changes like that.
So they did realize early on
that these games could be replicated,
but they also realized that the game should be different
because the way in which we played them was a lot different.
Instead of being in an arcade
and shoving coins in a machine to keep going,
we were at home and the game should be able
to involve us a little bit more than those arcade games.
The game design for Chucka came about mostly nicking ideas
from what I loved playing in the arcades.
It's a cross between Space Panic, which is a platform,
letters game and Donkey Kong.
And then a few ideas that I just chucked in myself.
A bit of a mishmash really.
I realized that you could do pixel movements on the
spectrum, even though the received wisdom was that you,
you couldn't, everything had to be character movement.
And so I wanted to do a game, which was pixel movement.
Pixel movement was an advantage just
because it was technically superior.
It would be better to play, it would look better.
You could make a better game.
Everyone that owned a ZX Spectrum played Jet Pack.
There's something about Jet Pack I think that made you feel
that you were emulating the archaic experience that most
of us were having in the early eighties.
And it was an important thing though.
Can I take that arcade experience Home with Me
Ultimate or Ultimate Play?
The Game as they were often known back then,
were an incredible company.
Obviously the two stampers behind them,
The Stamper Brothers,
they had Arcade experience themselves.
They had created their own minor arcade games.
So when they started to make ZX Spectrum games in the home,
they were really able to bring that experience
of already making arcade games through to create
a game in Jet Pack Lap.
To me, even if it's only in 16 K,
it feels like not just an arcade game,
but a superb arcade game that has all the qualities
that's an arcade game should have.
And so when Ultimates came out with that,
I think especially in terms of going
beyond perhaps Arcade clones, that was a game changer
for original software.
Ultimate Play of the Game brought out a load
of games at once, which worked on the 16 K Spectrum as well.
Like Trans Am was amazing
because you had this whole world of driving round America
and just being able to explore this entire
land was brand new.
I I loved that. TransAm, which was a driving game,
very similar to the Arcade game Rally X by Namco.
So they weren't exactly original,
but the games they made were brilliant
and they looked good as well.
Attic Attack, I played for hours.
That was just a simple Maze game with repeating graphics
and doors in different places
and that occupied me for just as many hours.
I never finished it. I think I got pretty
close, but I never finished it.
I think Ultimate was the one that you went for for Quality.
Jet Pack, Luna, jet Man, a Sable Wolf.
It wasn't just the game, it was the box. It came in as well.
And they were the ones that you wanted.
They were a little bit more, but they were worth waiting
for and worth saving up for
To really kind of justify the nine pound 99
that these games were selling for.
You really got to kind of up your game,
kinda the beautiful artwork on Night Law
and Alien eight, et cetera,
and the kind of expensive looking black box.
Is this something you wanted to own
and touch as well as the game itself?
Plus as well as that
you knew you were buying a quality game?
'cause it's ultimate play. The Game
Night law was an amazing game
because it suddenly brought cartoon style graphics
to the spectrum and also in another dimension as well.
I know Antech had already done it,
but this was on a different level.
This was, I think some people compared it
to a Disney cartoon back then,
which maybe might have been a bit fanciful,
but it did really look that good.
It was a completely different type of game.
By the time I got a Spectrum, which was about a year
after night, Laura had come out, a lot
of other people had worked out how Night Law worked
and they'd done a lot of similar games.
So as usual, there were a lot of games
that were very similar to that
and a lot of clones of night law.
But it stands out as the original and also the best
because it was the game that basically created
that whole style of gameplay. People
Who started making games
and experimenting with the hardware
that then became available, like the ZX spectrum, you know,
you were always trying to do something a bit more
interesting and trying to push the boundaries
and that is what characterizes the video
games industry even today.
So always sort of pushing on those different ways
of telling stories or different ways of having fun. That's
Why we had such a wave of creative games in the eighties,
which probably haven't seen since some of these games were,
if you had them now, they would be
groundbreaking at the time.
It just meant an entirely new world was opened up.
Manic Minor when that came out.
Definitely felt like a level ahead of a lot
of the other games that had come out the spectrum.
I mean, it wasn't quite inspired by minor 2049
or a game that Matthew Smith really loved.
But the way that the game was created,
it was created in a way to appeal to everybody.
The reason I find manic miner being such a classic is the
fact that you are always in peril.
All the bodies are on screen at once
and there's about eight of them on most screens.
So in that little bit of screen real estate, there's peril.
Like at every point.
Manning Miner was a genius game.
Matthew Smith was a legend.
First level, the perfect entry into any platform game.
First of all, when you
played it, you didn't know what you were doing.
It was a very, very hard level.
But then eventually you knew where to jump.
You knew where the floors that collapse were,
and you could eventually work your way to the top,
pick up the item, go back down
to the bottom, get to the next level.
What it really did well, it kind
of prepared you for the rest of the game.
Manic Minor was, you know, probably the the one first game
that really got me
and we played it,
I can't remember like an all summer holiday, you know,
forever a mother Shane up the stairs, get down, get outside.
I was like, where your other, including g*ns.
For me, I think one of the best games
of all time is Jetset Willie by Matthew Smith,
who made the original manic minor, Jetset Willie expanded.
There was a lot more rooms you could go up down.
You could change rooms rather than being
stuck in one room all the time. It was impossibly hard.
Jesse Willy was the big one, wasn't it?
A seminal platform game.
What those platform games did was take the page turning
element of an adventure, which was obviously my big thing.
Like what happens next? I get through to the next stage
with the more basic arcade element.
I mean, crikey, I played that for hours
and tried all the pokes as well.
The little pokes you'd used to do, 'cause it had a bug in
It. Ingested was a
very well known bug called the Attic Bug.
And basically if you entered the attic room,
it would corrupt many other screens in the game.
So if you hadn't collected the things you had
to collect from those screens, the game
became un completable.
Also, there was a infinite death routine, a thing
where if you stepped off a ledge,
you would fall down a screen
and then when you died, you would go back to the top
of the screen and fall down and down
and down again and lose all your lives.
So basically the game was incredibly hard,
Really. It gave
the tools of production to the hands of millions
and you made your own fun
and it enabled you to kind of get your head around, okay,
well this is a set of instructions
that I need to give this machine.
Let's see what I can do. It just fed that curiosity again,
that creativity, that creative spark,
that's what drives innovation.
It's what drives curiosity and creativity. There
Was a massive variation in the type of games we had.
So instead of one company making 10 games that everyone had
to play, there was so many different things,
it appealed to so many different people.
So someone who likes football games
or football would like football games.
Somebody who likes maths might like a puzzle game.
So it cater for everyone.
Other computers have as well, but this was cheap.
It was in everyone's houses, it was color. It's beautiful.
The spectrum for me opened my eyes to art in computer games.
I found it fantastic and amazing.
The color, the things you could do on screen,
it was really basic at the time and,
and the way the colors worked on the spectrum meant you
couldn't have individual colors or individual colored
pixels, but it kind of almost made it like a challenge
to create things that did work within those boundaries.
So if you've got two colors moving in front of each other,
then you could still only have those two colors on one
square, where really you should have three,
but that is impossible.
So you'd have all these, uh, graphics changing color
and taking on the color of the background.
Um, but we just got used to it.
It wasn't, it wasn't that bad.
You couldn't do graphics on the spectrum without knowing how
to work around tribute clash.
It started the great video games C Crash I never even knew
about until I watched YouTube five years ago.
But I'm telling you what color clash really
what I don't know what you're talking about.
And, and I don't care.
I mean, I was just discovering girls break
dancing and computer games.
Do you think I'm gonna care about a color clash?
This is awesome. It was my opportunity to do
what I couldn't afford to continue to do in the arcade.
I could spend all day and all night doing this
color clash be damned.
The amount of games that we used to get
through was just incredible.
There were so many that we played for five minutes,
some we played for hours, some we played for days
and days and days and days and days.
There was a whole genre around that time
of things like Jet Set, Willy Manic, minor Monte on the Run
that were just so good at gameplay.
They had so much in them, so much
to look at while you're playing as well
and could be so frustrating to just get
that jump pixel perfect
Daily. Thompson's
good at track and field daily.
Thompson's good at track and field daily.
Thompson's good at track and field daily.
Thompson's good at track and field, everybody.
Come on just me then. Yeah, and that's a real thing.
And I remember that from the playground.
Daily Thompson's decathlon to me,
I was a massive athletics fan as well.
So Daily Thompson was a bit of a hero of mine.
So when, when there's a game of your hero,
it's always quite nice Daily
Thompson's decathlon, that finger bashing exercise
and that pixel perfect jump to get the long jump right
or throw the javelin at the right point.
Fantastic games that that, that really did grab you and, and
and, and keep your attention for hours.
One of the most amazing games I ever played was Antech.
In the early days of the spectrum.
First of all, I was completely stunned.
I remember unloading it up where you were given the choice
of either playing a boy or a girl.
Obviously these days we we're kind of used to that sort
of thing, but it was very unusual back in 1983.
And then you had this really creepy city,
which is very evocatively shown on the cover,
and it's full of these giant ants
Looking at other games that are around,
I I I really hated things
that appeared on screen that didn't do anything.
They were like decoration.
So I kind of wrote a, a consistent little universe
where if you could see it, it was there and really worked.
If it was there, you could climb on it.
There was no decoration in that.
It was like a complete little universe
with a miniature version of physics. So
Antech was the first isometric game I saw.
I remember that vividly
because I found it super confusing when you could rotate the
camera and you had to, to see things from the other angle
because the ants could be coming from anywhere.
Characters were behind things because that never happened
before with any other game that I knew of.
And you have to avoid these giant ants
that are stalking you at every term while you're trying
to find the boy or the girl.
So for its time, it's an amazing game
and I think, I think, yeah, it's,
it's quite rightly revered today as well.
One of the games I left a big imprint on me was saboteur.
And the main reason for that,
it was the first time I saw environmental
storytelling in action.
If you remember, the spectrum was a lot about text.
Adventure games were very descriptive.
You will be someone telling you where you are,
why you're there, where do you want
to go now, or you have arcade games.
But Aire was about telling a story without actually
saying out loud.
You are certainly up for no good
because you are getting into a company in the middle
of the night using a dinghy.
And then once you are in there, you are k*lling guards and,
and there are these dogs around.
And then you figure out this is an underground facility
because there is a a, a tube system going from A to B.
So all these things start to play with my mind.
And I was building a story of why I was there,
and that told me so much about game design
and how to make people get sucked into a universe.
This is why I hold saboteur in such high esteem.
Your mission in saboteur is to break into a building,
find a disc, plant a b*mb, and then escape by helicopter.
If you read the instructions, you'd know that,
but no one reads the instructions.
They'll get pirate copies of their friends.
The number of people who said, oh, it's really easy,
you just go to the helicopter and, oh, I, I only had a copy.
I didn't read the instructions.
One of the things I should have done is say,
you have failed your mission if you just go
to the helicopter, but I didn't.
It says mission successful and it shouldn't. It's a bug.
The spectrum had a very high resolution for the time.
I don't think any other computer had
as high resolution as a spectrum.
So it did mean that in the hands of talented artists,
you had some amazing pictures on the spectrum
and graphics, most notably loading screens,
which have become an art form in themselves.
And you had to watch these
for several minutes while the game loaded
and the artists often went to town on them
and made sure that these were absolutely brilliant.
These loading screens,
Well a loading screen would be for someone
to watch while the game loaded.
If you loaded a game without a loading screen,
you're sitting there staring at a black
screen for five minutes.
And even though it did add to the loading time,
it was part of the package.
Uh, I always try to base my loading screens on the artwork,
so I'd interpret the artwork
of the game on the screen of the spectrum.
So I always think it was just like a little bit
of extra detail that didn't have to be there,
but gave you just something to look at.
And so something that looked pretty while you waited
for three or four minutes for the game load.
Now what happened with me, I was still at school at the
time and an early sort
of proper video game developer in
Manchester Co binary design.
I came in work experience for a week
and now as I could draw graphics a little bit, they said,
oh, draw a loading screen for this game.
So I sat down and sat on the spectrum, plug it away,
drew a loading speed, and he said, oh, that's quite good
that, um, this is like Wednesday now.
You ate till five. Could you do another one?
We've got this other guy. Could
you do a loading screen for that?
Yeah, okay, got to Friday.
Do you think you could stay for another week?
We've got a load of loading screens.
And I said, well, I'll ask my mom,
you know, follow the school up.
Stayed for for two weeks. I just did loads of graphics.
Some of the loading screens were beautiful art,
like, like the covers of crash.
A loading screen would come up, which served no purpose
at all except the aesthetic pleasure in the six minute
or seven minute pause waiting
for the actual game to kick in.
And again, it was on your telly
and you'd put it there, you'd put it on your telly and
and there it wasn't glorious
technicolor winking back at you.
It was, it was like nothing else before or sins.
Magazines were an easy way of finding an echo chamber
for people that were like-minded
and to find out what you should be saving for, maybe how
to complete a particular game
or cheat codes, that sort of stuff.
They had a role to play that well.
It was impossible to ignore.
There was a real kind of window shopping thing as well,
being able to understand what was coming,
when it was gonna be available, how much it was
to fantasize about having
that put it on your Christmas list,
on your birthday list, whatever.
Magazines were the only way of doing that.
They were almost sort of like game of porn, weren't they?
They, they were so necessary.
I relied on those magazines as my lifeblood
to teach me some techniques
that I wasn't gonna pick up on my own, your computer crash.
And also to some extent personal computer world.
They were doing some game reviews quite early on
and they were small pieces, but they were important
For me. The amazement
I got from looking at magazines
and looking at all the graphics
and all the ideas that people were coming up
with was the thing that I looked at back then.
And even today I'll be drawn to a game on how it looks,
not necessarily how it plays.
Getting one of these magazines once a month.
That was our gateway to find out what was happening.
They shared lots of tips as well.
You could write in, you could ask them how
to expand your spectrum.
You could ask them what upgrades to get, how
to plug a joystick in.
And that was crucial for spreading
knowledge to the user base.
And they expanded that into the letters pages.
So we would write letters. You couldn't go on the internet
and write a comment on anything.
You had to write an actual letter
and send it off to Lloyd Mangram at crash.
And he would reply in some pithy manner.
There was a regular feature in Sinclair user
where people would send in a list
of all the adventures they'd completed
and people would solve your problems for you.
And I called myself the Perlin goblin
and a list of adventure games that I'd solved
and you had to send me 20 pence
with a stamps addressed envelope
and I would send back a solution by return of posting.
So the magazines gave you this sense of being part
of a much broader community.
It felt like you were at the frontier of something
and you were in a way, you were the first generation ever
to be doing this kind of thing
and interacting with technology in this kind of way.
And the magazines almost had a kind
of a uniting theme to them.
And I remember inhaling them,
I remember reading them cover to cover
Quite a few, um, magazines, computer and video games,
and a few others had art tools about me.
I remember one about sto the gist of the article was
that there was this guy from used to be a seeding fixer
and now he's running games
with sophisticated ai Bingo trick.
Yeah,
Well it's fantastic fun for a start off to do an interview
and then see, oh, I did an interview
and then, you know, the first time you do that, it's like,
there's me in a magazine.
Hey mom, look here I am. You know, it was always pleasant.
I don't think I read a bad review or anything like that.
I spotted something that looked a bit wilder,
had this incredible bright, colorful,
crazy fantasy almost cover
and it was just called being Bold crash.
And suddenly I found a spiritual home from me
and my spectrum in a magazine that celebrated games
and brought them to life.
And the interesting thing was that was I think probably the,
the genius that Roger
and Ollie had then in that they actually got teenagers in
after school to play those games
and give them their comments.
But you had this injection of
what people your age actually thought.
So it talked absolutely directly to the audience
and it made it so different to everything else.
But we were also a very small unit.
It's only me, Oliver, Franco, Matthew Del. And that was it.
Handling 15 to 20, 14
to 16 year old school boys as the reviewers.
It would've been very difficult for us
to have taken on a multi-format magazine at the time.
We were aware that the spectrum was doing well.
It was definitely establishing a, a good sales base.
So it was all we cared about
until the 64 came along. They could
Quite easily make or break a game.
You had to play the game with them
and make sure they had early shots
of the games you were developing.
You got them involved as much as you could.
And yeah, it was part of it.
We got to know these people very well.
As soon as Saboteur was on sale,
there was no feedback, there's no internet.
Gradually people started to write in saying,
we love your game and Crash loved it as well.
So the reviews were the main feedback at the time.
And the great thing about Newsfield,
it was like a big family.
Roger Ley took the business very seriously
of making very good magazines.
That's what they were super bash at at in terms of
what it was covering and what it was doing
and how it was speaking to its
Audience. And the cover
had to reflect that it had
to attract the readership that we wanted.
And the only way to do that was to be as dramatic
and in a sense, realistic as possible to attract them.
I think art was terribly important to burgeoning video games
industry because given the fact that the, the actual pixels
and the moving sprites didn't live up
to whatever the game's title was at all, you needed art
to create the make-believe in the Player's
mind was the game.
So Little Blob here was actually Indiana Jones or whatever.
I think that governed my entire work with Crash.
You were sort of carried along on a wave
because the reviewers
and the readers who wrote in, they were all enthusiastic.
So you suddenly felt part of this exciting new thing.
And to me it was exciting
because I'd always wanted to make movies and I didn't.
But this felt a bit like that being part of
a whole new segment of entertainment
Spectrum was like a big bang really.
It really took off from every point
of view really from the number of games coming out,
the quality of those games coming out,
the companies that were getting started.
And those companies were smarter in terms of knowing about
how to get their games reviewed, wanting
to get their games reviewed, advertising
and marketing their games and
improving the quality of their games.
So it really was a big bang.
So of course you had people creating their own games,
but we didn't have the means of distribution as we have now.
Uh, because we didn't have the internet.
You had to actually physically put,
put games in people's hands
In the early days before you had the likes of WH Smith
and Boots taken on games,
you had these little tiny independent computer game shops
and they were just the only real way at the time.
Apart from mal order, we could go into a shop,
look at the game, get to know the guy who runs a shop,
play the games on the computers,
and really sort of get into the world. The
Computer shops would've godsend
because if it wasn't for the computer shops,
I wouldn't be in the games industry.
Now, when I went in
and said, do any computer companies commit into the shop?
Yeah, I said, can you get me a phone number?
I went in the next week and he got me a phone number
and phoned up, said, can I have an interview?
And basically I was working the next Monday
They did become beehives of activity.
Places like Just Micro in Sheffield,
which eventually became Gremlin just
Micro stood out to me.
It looked like a fun shop to be in.
They were interested in the games.
They would let me know what was coming out.
They would let me know what was good, what was
Bad. We spoke about,
you know, what it was he
was making, et cetera.
And it soon become apparent
that there was an opportunity there to use this talent
that was coming into the shop to start summing of our own.
As well as Pete coming into the shop.
We had, uh, Tony Crower coming into the shop.
He'd already been producing some games
for Alligator Software. I
Remember the shop quite well 'cause I used
to have a sat job selling computers just up the
road in another shop.
And I just used to go down to the shop
and load it up on their computers, see what people thought
of my games before they were released.
So it was quite fun for that 'cause it was
before the ages having qa.
So the QA was going into the shop and letting people play it
and see what they think or other,
it was me playing it, you know, how good it is. How did
We go about building Gremlin?
I'd already watched the,
the guys at Imagine Software in Liverpool
do exactly the same.
Matter of fact, a guy that used to work
for Alaska, it's the same as I did.
A chap called Mark Butler
where some other guys started Imagine Software.
And I think it was too good an opportunity to miss.
And then it was a case of convincing Pete
that he didn't need to go to university.
He'd be far better working with us
and creating computer games.
One day I went in and Ian Stewart was there
and he called me over and said, uh,
can you actually write games?
Don't know. I'm thinking about writing one.
And he gave me the idea
of we're wanting this character Monte Mo.
So Monte Moley is his, what he looks like.
He's, he's down to me
and my mother trying to decide what he should look like.
I think Pete would've started this when the minor strike
was first kicking off and Arthur Scargill
and obviously Sheffield right in the middle of everything,
just set my brain running as to what this game could be.
And I suppose we were a little bit brave putting, uh,
an effigy of Arthur Scargill
and the product to put, uh,
it seemed appropriate at the time
and it gained us an amazing amount
of coverage with Local Press.
I think we've got in total about 13 minutes
of prime news time, including, and finally,
And finally the latest thing in computer games.
It may be politically biased, but it is highly topical.
The villain of the piece,
a minor called Arthur Scargill, the hero.
Monty Mole has to get his coal for the winter
and run a gauntlet of flying pickets and cans of Hairspray.
Monty winds using a ballot paper.
Now, once that happened, we started getting demos coming
through the Post people calling us, people coming
to Sheffield to bring their demos in, et cetera.
But what we were quite good at was identifying people
that had an ability and the skills to join us
and to start making more products.
Gremlin used to make some of my favorite games.
It was really a hotbed for UK games.
Gremlin Graphics had a great reputation.
They were a great bunch of people.
Melbourne House were also a publisher.
They produced some amazing games throughout the eighties.
You may have noticed I'm actually wearing a classic Spectrum
game T-shirt, which is why
of the Exploding Fist Melbourne House.
A very early street fighter esque game for the Spectrum.
It was just a really fun kung fu style game.
Quicksilver were a very big publisher early on.
They produced a game called Four D Time Gate,
which was a very fast space.
sh**t 'em up. And that was an amazing game for the time.
And I think that helped establish certainly Quicksilver
as one of the early Runners Bug Bite.
They published Matthew Smith's Manic Minor
and you also had the quirky publishers like Ulta Mater.
There were a lot of publishers like that, smaller publishers
that struggled once the spectrum became a
real commercial concern.
The real game changer was a company called Master tro
because Master Tro did a deal
where their games would be distributed into places
where you wouldn't normally find video games, for instance,
the little corner shop where you buy a newspaper.
So to have these budget games, which retailed
for 1 99 was a real boon to any spectrum owner.
There's your classic Master TRO game,
this is called Tank Tracks one pound 99 for a place called
Top Fair, which I don't remember, I'm sure
that's gone by the wayside.
And a very basic cassette tape instructions
on Pound 99 Who Caress Brilliant.
More importantly, the games actually got good as well.
So what you could buy for 1 99 changed a lot.
And it changed in 1985 with the release
of a game called Finders Keepers, which was the first game
of the Magic Night trilogy coded by David Jones.
Finders Keepers were so good that Master TRO realized
that they were doing themselves in a bit
by retailing these games for 1 99
and they should create a special label
where they could charge an extra pound
because the games were that good.
And when David Jones produced Spellbound,
which had the wind motion
where you could select different things from the menu
that dropped down, that was another game changer.
'cause people just realized that you could get a lot more
value for money for just three pounds. Bell
Bound was a lot more a eventually than,
than Fineness Keepers and enabled you to select things and,
and build up more complicated commands
and enabled me to input stranger
and more interesting puzzles.
In Storm Ringer finished the first
trilogy of the actual proper venture games.
Storm Ringer. Sold well
and had very good previews, very good reviews.
Even with Storm, I was still a bedroom coder,
but it was a bedroom in the house I bought from the profits
of the previous games.
And all of a sudden I think people realized
that you could produce these games on a budget,
sell them on a budget, and make a lot
of money, sell a lot of units.
And the games could actually crucially
be quite decent as well.
That when Code Masters formed,
they pretty much made it a wall.
You know, we'll, we're just going to sell budget games
because turns out a lot of people are interested in that
and we can make a lot of money doing that.
And they did games like Dizzy Professional Ski Simulator,
grand Prix Simulator, BMX, actually very playable games just
for a couple of quids.
And eventually the big labels kind
of cottoned onto that as well.
And so you end up with the likes of the hit squad
and kicks where studios like Ocean
and US Gold are re-release in their old games.
So the budget market ends up becoming, again,
a pretty big thing that helped sustain the spectrum.
As the night got darker, so to speak,
It did become obvious to me that software was so important
to the spectrum
that we shouldn't just leave it up to other people.
And I hired someone
to work at Sinclair whose job was to act as a liaison
with software developers.
Uh, and Clive was very, very opposed to that.
I had a real fight with him over that.
It was one of the few times that I dug my heels in
and said, Clive, we are hiring her or I'm leaving.
The interview with Clive was completely bizarre.
Well, it was at he's flat
and he is not a very easy person to talk to.
He doesn't say anything who have to start going, gab,
go Gab, which I did nervously.
He then offered me a cup of coffee
and I made a huge mistake in accepting
because he looked furious
and he then had to make me a cup of coffee.
And during making me a cup of coffee, he said nothing.
And I sort of stood in the kitchen
and then we went into the drawing room, an enormous room,
and he still said nothing
and sat at the far end from me miles away, me and my coffee
and my shaking hand.
And uh, we sat there and I said, it's lovely room.
I said, nervously. Hmm.
He said, and then
after a bit, I said, do you have much
software for the spectrum?
And he said, no, it was peripheral.
What he was interested in was the hardware and lab
and the engineers.
Almost every time the subject of software came up,
particularly if the software was games, Clive was always
likely to question the value of doing it.
It was not our core mission to sell software
or even to encourage the development of software.
Our business was to sell computers.
So I'd say that he accepted the software
and he accepted the role of the Spectrum
as a predominantly games playing machine.
But it wasn't what he'd had in mind when he developed the
product and it wasn't what he wanted
to spend his time on when he had bigger
and better hardware development projects to do.
I didn't get an induction. I ended up next
to Jane Boothroyd, who was then UK sales
and marketing manager.
And she was responsible for selling the hardware.
And there was a pile
of cassettes on the desk, piles on the floor.
And there was no way of knowing
if there were any good or not.
So I thought, how do I make a start on this?
I had no budget, no money to spend.
It wasn't going to cost anything. There was just me.
And then I thought, I better get some of the users
to start testing this stuff.
Then I set off to the local sixth form colleges
to find my testers.
And they each did about 15 cassettes a week.
And each week they were allowed
to keep two or three of them.
The rejects not the real ones, you know, the rejects
and that's how I paid them.
But there was this thing about the spectrum was far more
than just a games machine.
And it was important for the marketing strategies such
as there was that we sold it as a workhorse
that could do useful things in the home
because that would then support parental
decisions to buy it.
And that's what led to my idea
of developing educational software alongside a respectable
publishing company.
There was a wonderful man called Tony Feldman at McMillan
Education and he'd just been made director
of their digital division.
And we developed the range
and it was all right,
maybe being respectable made it not very exciting,
but, um, it was all a bit worthy.
But that was the whole point of it.
We then had this amazing launch.
I couldn't believe we'd swung it.
Harold McMillan, former Prime Minister was then about 93
to my astonishment, he agreed to come
to this pesky software launch.
He agreed to come.
And as soon as Clive heard
that Harold McMillan was coming, he said he'd come.
And so we had this swanky hotel
and instead of Computer Weekly and Sinclair user
and a few sort of trade press people,
we had the world's press.
The room was absolutely packed
and I had no idea what Clive was going to say,
which applied him with a script,
but he never used to say the script ever, ever.
And he got up and said something and then he came to the end
and he said, well, I'm very honored
to have Harold McMillan here,
and I'm sure he would like to say a few words now.
And he sort of started to sit down
and there was absolutely no movement from McMillan.
He sat there and Clive, who I'd never seemed
disconcerted like that, he sort of said sir
and tapped him on the shoulder.
He kind of woke up
and then very, very slowly stood up,
great deal of theatrics.
Then he looked right at everybody and he then made a speech.
He made a speech about the software,
he made a speech about the spectrum.
He spoke without notes.
It was just fantastic, extraordinary.
Everybody was mesmerized.
And he finally said,
and the thing that pleases me most
of all is all this has come from where so much
that is great in the world comes
including this young man on my right.
And he tapped, virtually tapped Clive on his bald
head and everybody went.
He said, Scotland 'cause of course says Scottish.
And then he sat down
and the entire room stood up and applauded him.
Extraordinary.
The name Spectrum became used
for much more than just this rubber key 48 K.
Most of the times computer spectrum is a name given
to the plus the 128 K, the plus two, the plus two A
or plus two B, the plus three and many, many others.
Another very relevant development
that five Sinclair did was in 1984, the synco ql
You are about to witness Sir Clive
Sinclair's Quantum Leap.
He's come up with a computer
to rival these machines at a fraction of their cost.
The QL was a sad story because it was developed
and launched too quickly.
I mean, I literally saw it as a block
of wood on the boardroom table in November.
And when I asked when it was going to be launched,
I was told February.
And I said, but this is just a block of wood.
You know, it's a, it was just a visual, just a visual.
You never had any idea was to how much of it was real,
how much was really going on. You know,
The QL was conceived as a business machine,
so it was a complete break
and the QL absorbed an enormous amount
of product development effort.
I just don't think there was enough time
to think about the future of the spectrum.
And if anyone has said the Spectrum could have a very long
life with upgrades, new versions be backward, compatible,
run all the old software, et cetera,
it could have a long life.
The media objection would've been, well, yeah,
but who's gonna do that work?
Who's going to maintain the product with upgrades
and so on because everyone's so busy with everything else.
My feeling about the QL was that Clive really wanted
to come up with a serious business computer
and he felt the combination
of a more powerful microprocessor addressing more memory
and the micro drives made it a business platform.
You know, if I took away anything from that, I did sense
that Clive kind of lost interest in the spectrum.
There was a strong feeling of wanting
to concentrate on the new stuff.
We had the qr, but we also had a laptop.
We had Pandora various sort
of under wrap pieces of hardware.
We don't wanna waste time among the, the spectrum is boring,
it's so last year, you know,
and of course the fact that we had an installed base
of millions people to sell add-on products
to basic portfolio analysis says
that Stretch was our cash cow that was bringing in the cash
to fund all these blooming developments.
There was so much competition
for the engineering resources as well.
I was hiring people to work on current projects
and projects for next year's computers like the ql.
And the next minute I find out Clive had had a few beers
within a pub and offered them a job working on some
artificial intelligence project.
He'd hired all these engineers, innovators
to work at the meta lab, million pounds a year.
It was gonna cost us and fundamentally everything,
all the attention had been going into
new, new, new, new, new.
The main thrust of Meta Lab is now, um,
as you would would expect to the,
the the future of computing.
We have a, a massive program there
of very advanced computer development works,
all the things that go with it.
Um, semiconductor technology, um,
all the peripherals printers, displays,
very advanced display technology.
Every, everything in that field.
The other areas that were working in there,
of course are known to principles or television and, and,
and possibly some vehicle work.
It really was chaos
and it was driven by Clive's desire to move on
to the next big thing.
And the resources you could have commanded to maintain
what you'd got, they just weren't there.
They'd been earmarked for more exciting things
And meanwhile, if you listened,
people told you what was needed.
They needed a spectrum with more memory they needed, oh,
and with a different graphics and a better keyboard
and this and that and the other.
And so we did start rather belatedly
to produce the products the customers were asking for.
We should have been doing it the previous year.
Yeah, we should have, it's a matter
of regret that we weren't,
This is the ZX spectrum plus,
which was CL Sinclair's C quarter
ZX spectrum with the rubber keyboard.
The spectrum 48 K plus was an attempt by Sinclair
to address two of the main criticisms
of the original spectrum.
The first one was that there was no power button.
So every time you wanted to play a new game,
you literally had to unplug it.
And the second thing was the keyboard, which
although we revere it to a certain extent today
and admire it for its eccentricity back in the day,
did get quite a lot of criticism.
So as a result, Sinclair wanted to design a new keyboard,
which actually came from the ql.
So they got this keyboard and they put
that into a new spectrum along with a reset button.
So the 48 k plus came out in 1984
and Sinclair, if they weren't working on the 1 2 8 K at
that point, they must have certainly been thinking about it.
But by the time 1985 rolled in,
Sinclair itself was having financial difficulty. The
QL sales were not as good as they should have been.
And that frankly was the basis upon which
Sinclair run into financial difficulties.
And Robert Maxwell went in
and all he wanted to do was have the names associated
with his newspaper. We
Jolly well heard that Maxwell was interested in buying us
and everybody ruled their eyes at
what it would be like to work for him.
And what caused Clive to break off negotiations
with Maxwell was that Clive got some sort of deal
with Dixons, the retail chain, who he had a rather long
and up and down relationship with.
But at any rate, Dixon's came in
and said they would buy large quantities
of computers from Sinclair
and they promised a big enough order that it enabled Clive
to change his mind about Maxwell.
So they were planning to bring forward the 1 2 8 K.
And when Dixon's heard that a superior model was coming out
to the 48 k plus, which they had huge stocks of,
they understandably weren't that happy.
I don't remember the exact, uh, sequence
of events about the 1, 2 8,
but there was a recognition that, um, the spectrum was,
was still a success, but it needed more memory.
Products were competing on the specification
and that's a good way to, to bring it up to date was to,
to advertise a spectrum 1, 2, 8.
So I probably said, look, I can do that. That's no trouble.
We extended the basic in quite a few ways.
One of the weaknesses of the spectrum was it didn't have a
sound chip, it just had a single speaker
with a single buyer going to it
and it could make very crude tones
and it would tie up the microprocessor. So
This is a ZX spectrum, 128 K effectionately known
as a toast rack because you've got this kind of
toast rack style thing on the site.
Now the benefit of the 1 2 8 k is you got the advanced
sound chip, the A wire chip. What
We did was we threw another GI sound chip
that would generate polyphonic music without the
processor being involved.
So you could do more activity in the background.
And we wanted to tie that chip in with the basics so
that people could type in commands
that would control that chip.
And I wanted them to compose music on it.
I was kind of interested in the audio again.
And so synthesizing music was a great appeal to me.
So the music was infinitely better
than the original beeper.
This was great. It kind of competed with the Commodore 64.
Of course you got an extra 80 k of memory,
so you could have bigger games,
you could have music in the games,
you could have more colors.
It was just a nice step up before the 16 bit days.
Having an expansion from the 48 K to the 1 28 K spectrum
with its greater software capabilities
and so on was a fairly natural thing to do.
And it just so happened that along the way
that we were negotiating with Invest
to have a Spanish version of it as well,
The result was that the 1 2 8 K ended up being released in
Spain Christmas of 1985.
So the Spanish speaking world got the 1 2 8 K, whereas
everyone else, certainly in England,
which was Sinclair's main market, had to wait
until the following year.
The fallout from this was, which you could kind
of see coming, everybody got a 48 k plus of Christmas
of 1985 when the 1 2 8 K was released in the UK
in February of 1986.
All of a sudden we are like, oh mum,
dad, I'd like this one now.
And they're like, you've just been given this one,
you're not getting another one, forget it.
So as a result, sales
of the 1 2 8 K spectrum were incredibly poor.
When the UK in particular, which was a bit of a shame, I
Realized that things were really over as soon
as Christmas in 1984 was over
and the retailers canceled their orders
and suddenly we were going from selling
at a very high level, a hundred million a year type turnover
to suddenly virtually nothing bang like that.
We had a massive job, we had 18 million
and the creditors who included Barclays, our bankers
and our distributors
and so on, gave us a year to find a,
a solution for the company
and to achieve a, a reduction of the debt.
So Spectrum 1 2 8 was part of that recovery program.
My job was really focused on Timex.
Timex had always been our distributor in America.
And one of the cleverer things we'd done is we hadn't tried
to sell in America like Acorn did.
Uh, people tended to lose their shirts setting up
subsidiaries in America.
So instead we licensed the spectrum to Timex Corporation.
If you've been dreaming of a home computer this year,
Timex has exactly what you need.
A state-of-the-art 48 k color home computer at a
very affordable price.
The thinking was that Timex had their products in
thousands and thousands of retail outlets,
not just large chains of stores,
but they had a relationship with almost everyone
who retailed anything in the states.
And when the time came, they wanted to buy us,
they agreed a deal and Bill, Jeffrey
and Clive were going to fly over and sign the contract.
But on the airplane going over there,
Clive changed his mind
and apparently what he said to a spitting with rage,
bill Jeffrey, I'd rather own the whole of a small company
and start again than known 20% of a large company.
And they got to Boston and they flew straight back.
That was on the Thursday,
we heard about it Thursday evening, senior management team.
And on Friday,
because the deal had fallen through,
the creditors were going to meet round the table
and we'd probably beginning to put into receivership.
And then on Monday the staff came to work as usual,
they were called to the atrium
and Bill Jeffrey gave us the news and Clive didn't even come
and tell us himself, which I thought was a poor show.
And so they told us, I'm afraid this is the end of the line.
You've all lost your jobs.
And then did the deal with Amstrad, there
Are people employed at URA Surge
who have been involved on the, on the distribution marketing
side of the company who will no longer be needed.
Do you feel in any way that you are letting them down?
Uh, well I always feel sad in this, this situation,
but change occurs.
Clive and Alan Sugar could not have been more different,
and yet Clive seemed to have respect for sugar.
Whereas although Sugar wasn't technically in Clive's League,
he did know the electronics business
and electronic retailing.
And I think Clive had respect for him.
It gives us a, uh, a new brand name, uh,
and a new market, um, for what we class
as the entertainments of the, uh, home computer business.
Uh, Sinclair, uh, has always been recognized,
certainly in my mind as the, uh, European, uh,
uh, market leader.
This here is the ZX spectrum plus two,
this is the first computer added sugar release
after he bought out Sinclair.
It's got a proper keyboard, got a builtin tape deck,
and now you've actually got joystick pulse in the side.
So it really is a kind of an Allin one kit.
I mean, when Amstrad got 'em,
basically any pretense at all that still existed
of it being an something you could do word documents on
or anything outside
of games went completely out of the window.
It's like games, games, games, that's it.
So with that, the spectrum ended up having a life
after 1985, another six, seven years.
And obviously growing up in the uk you're only aware
of the computers you have around.
So we had all obviously officials, Sinclairs, et cetera.
And it wasn't until years later when I started sort
of looking into things you discover, oh,
these Timex machines in America.
Oh, it turns out there are spectrums.
Then you hear of the Scorpion, which is, uh,
I believe Russian machine,
which is basically a hardware clone of the spectrum.
And then this other clones
and I, the more you look into it,
you could go down this rabbit hole
of obviously Sinclair had made such a sort
of tightly put together machine
that it could be relatively easily cloned
and suddenly everywhere in the world seemed
to have its own version of the spectrum.
And many of them, uh, to put it politely,
not passing any money back to Sinclair.
I, I think is the, uh, most careful I can put that
Everything we have here are computers
that look like normal spectrums,
but none of them is a normal spectrum.
We have the famous clone made
by invest the Invest Spectrum Plus, which is a clone
that was inspired on the board from the 128 K spectrum.
We have Arab spectrums, they were made in Egypt.
The distributor would install a certain switch to be able
to switch between English or Arab.
We have French spectrums,
we have all the Brazilian clones from Mical,
from uh, CPC, uh, even the Ring,
which is a very uncommon ZX 81 clone.
We have, uh, machines from Italy, the Anglo Tutor,
which is a system to learn English
that is based on the ZX spectrum, the famous
ZX spectrum, NTSC.
So used in the states.
We also have something that is very, very uncommon.
The Indian spectrum, the DBE Spectrum Plus.
And so this is just an idea.
So this is a ZX spectrum clone called the Aerobic.
It's interesting that a lot
of the Russian machines particularly were sort
of very basic clones of the hardware.
But as time went on and people got uh, sort
of more into using it, you ended up with these
what are effectively expanded machines, um, with, I mean,
appalling artwork on the front with
what I think is possibly the worst mascot
that has ever been created.
A sort of crushed purple owl, fantastic.
But inside the actual machine itself,
genuinely quite impressive.
The Keyboard is pretty good.
So this actually has 64 K of Ram, which obviously wasn't,
uh, set up for this an actual spectrum.
Uh, you've got the built-in joystick port.
You've even got a built-in, uh, monitor output for RGB,
which again is something the spectrum itself,
the original ones didn't have at the time.
So this is the Dak Tick m it's a Russian clone,
which is quite a similar size to the spectrum,
but it hasn't got the standard ULA,
it's got a Russian made ULA and it's also got 64 K of Ram,
although only 48 K are used.
But it's a cologne.
Other than that is a Russian spectrum in any ever sense.
I quite like it.
It's interesting how far these
different progressions made.
And I mean back at home
after a certain amount of time we'd moved on to sort
of a more high specs computers.
But in places like Russia
where perhaps they didn't have the disposable income
to keep buying these new posh things,
which weren't even released over there.
Anyway, these end up with a much, much longer lifespan,
which is why you end up with these clones
with all the extra internals.
Many of these clones were developed mid nineties.
Some of them were before,
but some were also during the mid nineties, which means
that the spectrum was alive for many,
many more years than it was year.
Brazil is an amazing story.
What they did first
because of one thing in 1981 in March
Cove Syno launched ZX 81
in October, 1981 in Brazil,
there were already unofficial clones of ZX 81 being sold.
I have no concept that those computers are actually copied
or clones from Harvard that existed elsewhere.
I saw a computer with a brand on it, TK 85, a micro digital.
I think that, oh, someone came up with this mic.
Digital was the biggest producer of,
of this kind of computers in Brazil.
In Brazil, there was a law called Reserve of Federal,
which was a kind of a protection mechanism,
not allowing people to import computers to Brazil.
Why? They wanted to incentivize the national
industry to create them.
So they use their creativity in the best possible way
to come up with computers locally made.
And then the spectrum was launched in Brazil
as the TK 90 X.
So the concept that this was copied from another company
with no royalties being paid
and no authorization to do so, was nonexistent at all.
I only started to learn about the other
computers probably a year into it.
There were 40 million clones developed in South America,
in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and so on. But
Trying to set up, uh,
own wholly owned subsidiaries in France, Italy, Germany,
Spain, and set up exclusive distributors in dozens
of other countries, and do it quickly, as quickly
as we needed it to be done.
But obviously, most of our sales were still in Britain,
and we didn't saturate any of those markets
enough to discourage other people from
coming in with clones.
We sold 5 million spectrums worldwide, uh, unbelievable,
uh, sales volume.
It, and we had 70% of the UK market, um,
for quite a long time.
And we had a turnover of a hundred million
with only a hundred employees.
The release of the spectrum was huge, is one
of the cornerstones of the UK computer industry.
Without doubt, it made a real difference to people.
It's lovely that a 40 year old computer still has a legacy.
There's not many early computers
that can say the same thing.
Yeah, so it's, it's a nice thing.
And the spectrum has developed over the years as well.
We've obviously had the 1 2 8 K models
and now we've got the spectrum next.
So this teenager friend of mine, Victor,
is into hardware ever since we were kids.
And his passion is about keeping old hardware alive.
And, uh, his latest creation was this board
called it the TB blue.
So you could just buy this board inserted
inside your old spectrum, and you have everything there.
So Victor reached out to me then said, Hey,
this thing's super popular in Brazil.
Everybody buys it. Do you know someone in the UK
who could help me out
and maybe I can sell in the UK as well?
And I thought of it during the call with Victor
and I said, you know, Victor, that this won't work
because the Zac spectrum is this piece of design, this
full rounded machine, this one thing
that you get under your Christmas tree
and you open, you plug it in and it works.
And that's the memory that everybody has of it.
The memories of trying to keep this expansion working
and putting Blue Tech here
and there, it said, that's not what people want, right?
They want that thing that you open and the smell
and the materials and everything.
So why don't we actually make a computer out of it?
And while we added it, why don't we make the computer
that Sinclair never made?
Maybe we can get the original team to work with us.
Maybe we can bring in Rick Dickinson.
And that's how the ZX spectrum next was born, because
It was designed by the late Rick Dickinson and Phil, and,
and it just looks amazing.
We worked on it together, mainly driven by Rick,
conceptually, because it's his legacy really.
Rick was asked to redesign it using new technology,
a new keyboard, how would it look now?
And this is the result.
And the keys are the, the main feature.
They're extraordinary. I love them.
I really do like those keys.
The colored plugs on the side are a nod
to the original rainbow.
We could not do that. Could we? Really? It
Looks as you would expect it to have progressed.
It. It's got the fail of the Sinclair, the brand itself.
So the ethos behind the ZX spectrum next was that ability
to take it off the box and use it.
So we kept everything from the original spectrum
inside the spectrum next, even the ability to load from tape
or use it just the way you use it back then.
And then started to add the layers
of extra functionalities on top without interfering
with the backward compatibility
On the next. You can do
everything that you could do on
the original spectrums.
You can still have your attribute clash if you want it
as a specky, but it's making it for the next generation
of kids can pick up and start programming
and not be stuck by, oh,
I can't get something moving around on the screen.
Oh, I'll put that away.
And I brought the next, it brought back memories
of my spectrum.
Days, many hours, many late nights coding,
but I think the next is in its own league.
It's really hard to explain.
It's, it's like going back in time, that magic
that you had when you were younger,
when you were first experiment with assembly,
and it, it's back again.
You've, you've got a machine, you can start again doing
that on and, and get that same buzz.
Oh my God. The difference in quality
of the Specker games on the next.
It's something that we all didn't expect,
and I know we know it's capable,
but we didn't expect the quality of the games
that people have been making, even from basic.
And it, it's, it's been been brilliant.
It's the whole story of the next.
It's, it's like I've loved
every minute of doing the project. A
Lot of game designers are trying to replicate
what they did on their 48 k,
but the next really is bigger than that.
You can do a lot more on the next,
and you've got all this extra memory to use.
Plus you've got the beauty of built-in wifi.
The eight bit machine isn't dead.
It's it, it's living on, but this
Is truly the Specky community, the regional people,
players, the creators, the fans who come together
to add small pieces to this project
and make it all together in a sense.
I cannot imagine a more original way
or a more valid way
of keeping the spectrum alive than the people who enjoy it,
keeping it that way.
I think the spectrums remain so popular today
because it had a certain innocence.
And obviously we have a nostalgia for anything
that we played with as kids.
And like a lot of people, I spent a lot
of time playing on the spectrum,
enjoying the games, hours and hours.
And I think when you look back at those times,
they're the times that you, you are very nostalgic about
because they've got a lot of good memories for you.
And I think particularly these days, we all need a bit
of those warm, fuzzy memories sometimes.
I think part of the success of the spectrum was due
to the, the price,
but also the wow factor
of the unboxing really is just like a unique unboxing.
It was also such a neat little package
and people fell in love with its personality
and its rubber keys, but also that it drove creativity.
And if you spoke this language, which I never did,
it must have been so liberating.
It must have felt like the thrill I got from playing a game
with, which had a sense of adventure and discovery.
Imagine if you discovered a whole new language
that allowed you to control events
on a screen in front of you.
I think there's so much love for the spectrum today
because it's a quintessentially British thing.
I mean that rainbow stripe on the bottom right, might
as well be a union jack, right?
It's so British and so uniquely us.
And it was made by a bloke from Cambridge
who was a bit posh, and he was ginger
and he was knighted by a queen, a knighthood.
That's the spectrum experience.
Show me an experience like that from another country. Well,
There's something very British about it.
The fact that it was assembled in Dundee, like,
we like to do things differently.
This is an entirely different machine.
The way it looked, the way it
worked, you know, it was different.
And I don't think there was so much fanfare about him being
British as opposed to
what was happening in North America when it came
to technology, because lots of people, uh, like to claim
that the games industry started in America.
But, uh, we know better.
I think of him as a boffin who understood
what was important to people
and how he could bring the future
into their lives at a decent price.
So although he was pilloried a lot for his eccentricity,
it was exactly that which allowed him
to have such crazy ambition
and crazy thoughts that resulted in people like me
and hundreds of thousands of others
benefiting from his genius of
democratizing this amazing technology.
Rick was very generous with praise where it was warranted,
and he had nothing but praise for Clive Sinclair.
From his perspective, he owed his first step up a ladder
for his career to Clive Sinclair.
He was very protective of Clive
and really didn't like the negative press
he got the mocking.
Clive was an innovator. You need these people.
They're the engines of industry people that are prepared
to take a risk, stick their neck out.
You don't get new products without risk takers.
And Clive Sinclair, from Rick's perspective,
was a risk taker in the best way.
It's the middle of the sun is shining
brightly my eye.
Another Wednesday,
Just Another Wednesday, just another
Wednesday.
Five minutes later I sound
helicopter.
Just another Wednesday.
Just another Wednesday.
Just another Wednesday.
Wednesday
As we take on.
See my manion from the sky.
10 minutes.
I'm
Wednesday.
Wednesday, Wednesday
only.
I.
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Rubber-Keyed Wonder, The (2024)
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