h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How can we mention the C64 and ZX Spectrum without including the Acorn BBC Micro, especially on this site. There were some great games on the ol' BEEB, the most notable being Elite, which was the computer gaming equivilent of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - a game about life, the universe and everything...

The statement about those pioneering home computers using BASIC for games was only partly accurate. Most commercial games were written in 8-bit assembler, and so could not easily be modified.

... because this is about consoles, so the computers that played games are only brushed upon in passing.

more importantly, the zx spectrum was primarily a games computer, the commodore 64 was primarily for machine code programming, which included a lot of games programming, but the bbc was only used for games as a sideline to it's real uses.

if you forked out for a beeb, you usually learned to program, and often learned how to connect sensors and controllers up to the hardware. you would also use it as a business computer at a time when pc's were 286 or lower spec, with 640k of memory and a £2,000 price tag.

for quite a large number of tasks, there is still nothing equal to or better than a bbc micro.