From the Atari 2600 to the NES to the Sega Genesis, you thought you've seen it all in retro gaming. Don't get too cocky though, Americans! There's a whole other chapter of classic gaming you may have missed. Pack your bags... 1UP is taking an extended trip to England to discover:
I’m pretty well-schooled in the old school, having grown up with an Atari 2600 and spending most of my teen years in front of a Nintendo Entertainment System. However, no matter how knowledgeable you
think you are about classic gaming history, there’s always something you’ve missed. For me, that something is the ZX Spectrum.
Back in the early 1980s, game consoles were on the decline, and home computers had finally reached a price point where homes could actually afford them. The United States was dominated by the Commodore 64, with competitors like the Atari 400/800, Tandy’s Color Computer, and Texas Instruments’ TI 99/4A fighting for second place. However, in Great Britain, it was all about the Spectrum. Masterminded by tech wiz Sir Clive Sinclair (holy crap, they're knighting nerds!), the Spectrum was designed for tight budgets, with the entry-level model debuting at £125 (about $190) and a higher-end 48K system costing £175 (roughly $265). With the competition retailing at double the price, it didn’t take long before the Spectrum was the computer of choice for British households.
So it wasn’t a
game console per se, but you’d have a hard time telling from the software library and the influence it’s had on the industry. Thousands of games are available for the Spectrum, ranging from the standard issue conversions of Pac-Man and Space Invaders you’d expect near the system’s launch in 1982 to audaciously ambitious ports of cutting-edge arcade hits like Street Fighter II. The Spectrum also served as a proving ground for future industry giants like Rare (then known as Ultimate Play the Game… hey,
I didn’t choose the name!), Codemasters, and Eidos back when it was called US Gold. Wait, they’re not even called Eidos anymore, are they? Well, you get the idea.
The Spectrum even had the soul of a video game system, with the same Z80A processor that powered the Master System, GameBoy, and ColecoVision. The hardware was closest to the ColecoVision’s, with the same sharp resolution and brisk clock speed. However, Clive’s team at Sinclair Research had to trim away a few features to keep the price of the Spectrum affordable. Well, maybe more than a few. The ColecoVision was restricted to just sixteen onscreen colors, but the Spectrum cut that total in half. Coleco’s game console had four sound channels, capable of nearly arcade-quality music and effects, while early models of the Spectrum had just one. The ColecoVision could display up to thirty-two sprites independent from the background; the Spectrum didn’t have any at all.
What American gamers will find most jarring about the Spectrum is a peculiar handicap known as “color clash.” Most early game systems and computers use a technique called tiling to display graphics, which as the name suggests is like setting ceramic tiles to create a mosaic. Each tile can only hold so many colors, with a system like the Nintendo Entertainment System capable of four and the 16-bit consoles capable of sixteen. The Spectrum is limited to two. You probably won’t get the full effect without visual aids, so let’s use an image of Sir Clive Sinclair himself to really drive home the point.
Here he is in 256 colors, the number of onscreen hues available to the Super Nintendo. He really hasn’t lost much in the transition… his shiny scalp has lost some of its sheen, but no truly important details have been lost.
Here’s Clive after getting the ColecoVision treatment. There’s an obvious loss of color and detail here, but this is still good digitization… for 1982 technology, anyway. You can still tell that this is an older gentleman with a bronzed remote and a mischievous grin on his face.
Now we’ll take the original image and put it through the Spectrum filter. Yikes. It’s hard to tell what the heck is going on here, which is a common issue for a lot of the later games on the system. Either the developers go for straight monochrome graphics, as was the case with
Street Fighter II, or they press their luck with more colorful backgrounds that swallow the characters whole, like in
Bionic Commando.
So, with all these hardware issues, what is it that kept the British so faithful to the Spectrum long after more gamer-friendly computers like the Amiga were released in the mid and late 1980s? Is it a simple case of childhood nostalgia and parental penny-pinching, or is there something wonderful about this humble machine that you just wouldn’t notice at first glance? I’ll find out over the next three months with reviews of the Spectrum’s top games, starting with the British cult classic Manic Miner. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to Planet Sinclair and ZX Golden Years for their valuable information about the ZX Spectrum, its technical specifications, and its history.
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