Any child of the 80’s that did not encounter a ZX Spectrum was, by any standards, deprived. I, on the other hand, had the great fortune (?) to have owned two! Yes, two! Different models as well. The first one I was given was the newer of the pair, a ZX 128 Basic with in built tape recorder. 000h, I hear you cry, that’s very impressive, for any Spectrum buff worth their salt knows that the earlier versions were just a keyboard that you had to wire up to a bog standard tape recorder, not that I’m saying that wasn’t fun.



You see, the wires that connected said tape player to the keyboard, a lovely little black thing with squishy keys, rather like today’s TV internet computers, were very sensitive. If you dared to breathe in the same room as them while the precious little darling was loading, the whole thing would crash and you would have to start again. Crash? Loading? Tapes? Yes, I know this needs a little explaining. The premise behind a Spectrum is that the programs loaded through sound. The noise that the tape emitted, kind of an undulating high pitched screech cum warble, had to be a certain volume and completely intact (no scratches or gaps) for the game to load (kind of an audible equivalent to the grooves on a record ((God can you imagine a computer that loaded on records, someone sooo has to invent it))). So if you knocked the wire, making a temporary gap in the sound, the screen would go blank and the dreaded ‘R TAPE LOADING ERROR” would grace your TV. Yes, you had to plug it into your TV, come to mention it, I’m surprised this whole internet TV thing has taken quite as long as it has, me thinks that they were doing the jigsaw from the middle rather than the outside out there in computer Geek land.



As the game began to load, my mother and I would hold our breaths, sit very still and carry out any number of superstitions associated with the game we were trying to load. The screen would have an inch thick frame around the edge filled with horizontal lines that we would watch intently. If they went from red and blue to yellow and blue, accompanied by the appropriate screeches, then everything was on course but if it stayed the same, or went claret and blue, then it was not going to load correctly. In fact, the bizarre aberrations that were possible as a consequence of disruptions at any stage in the loading process were innumerable. For example, you know when Windows goes wrong and the colours go all funny, like that, only characters’ features could get mashed around and interposed with objects, a bit like a psychedelic version of the Philadelphia Experiment, and obviously the game would fail to work. Sometimes you could wait all the way through the loading process, usually about five minutes, only to get a very subtly altered picture meaning that it had failed, leaving you with a frozen, pointless, screen. In fact, some games loaded so rarely that when they did I felt obliged to play them, and only them, all afternoon in order to appreciate them properly.



The best loading colours had to have been on a game called Commando. Maroon, green and white, thicker stripes than the others and softer on the eye. It didn’t really matter that the game was physically impossible to play on your own, unless of course you had more than ten fingers. The easiest, and quite a good game, was Bruce Lee, the kind of thing that’s a good challenge and you can go round and round again, losing no lives and only getting killed when you’ve had enough. Underwurlde on the other hand, set in a bizarre kind of hell, was bloomin difficult and I’ve still not finished it. The Hobbit was one of those role player thingummies where you ask it questions and it takes you places. However, as I hadn’t read The Hobbit I was always greeted with ‘I don’t understand the question.’ So I used to ask it it’s mom’s name, did it like Bros, and how old it thought my budgie might be, oh what I’d ask it now…



The later models had an integrated cassette player and were a joy to load, although some awkward tapes still wouldn’t, even after cleaning the heads. As it was tape based, the games were no problem to bootleg and you could fit loads on a 3-hour cassette, but if you should get the volume slightly wrong they wouldn’t load. However, some might be ok, and it was my mother’s job to mark off on the cassette where to fast forward to to get to the games that we could play. There were also games, like hangman or a drawing of an all red (!) Union Jack (game?!) that you could program yourself, typing in line after boring line of code onto the screen, one error in which would make the whole thing fail. Dull yes, but not for my Dad, who would dutifully take over because I wanted to see what would happen, I wanted to see it now, Daddy, please…


So next time you slap in your CD-rom and moan about the 30 seconds that it takes to upload, think of the Spectrum and the complete game playing experience. It’s a bit like having a baby really. Making sure the wires were connected to the appropriate sockets, holding your breath to see if the game would actually load, and then waiting ages to see if you could play with the end product. The only difference is, you don’t get to bootleg your baby and give copies to your friends, unless of course, you’re a Raelian.