Retrospective: The Good Old Days

By Martyn Carroll Published 15 May, 2011

Games for the hard of spending.

Bit of a twist for this week's retrospective. Rather than focusing on a single title, we've allowed former Retro Gamer editor Martyn Carroll to get all misty-eyed as he recalls a particular era in gaming history. If phrases like Knight Tyme and Kikstart 2 mean anything at all to you, polish those rose-tinted glasses and read on.

I was really thin at high school. No weight on me. I'd love to say this was because I was always outdoors, riding bikes and building bivouacs. The truth was that I spent far too many hours indoors, playing games on my ZX Spectrum, pasty-faced and oblivious to the benefits of Vitamin D.

The reason I was thin was because of games. You see, full-price games were expensive and I was only able to afford them following Christmases and birthdays. This obviously wasn't ideal.

Surprisingly, the answer did not lie with piracy. C90 tapes packed with games regularly did the rounds at school, but in my experience homemade copies rarely worked. There was nothing more annoying that waiting 10 minutes for a game to load only for it to crap out at the last second.

Then, in the mid-eighties, the solution for my gaming drought turned up in the most unexpected of places - the local newsagent. I went in to pick up the latest issue of Sinclair User magazine and there, by the counter, had appeared a spinning rack filled with blister-packed games from a new company called Mastertronic.

There were titles for the Commodore VIC-20, the Commodore 64, the BBC Micro, something called the Dragon 32, and - yes! - the Spectrum. Back then this was akin to discovering digital distribution. I could buy games straight from the local shop rather then catching a bus into town or waiting for mail order companies to meet their frankly ridiculous '28 day delivery' promise.

1

Hurrah for 180. A darts game that was funny, and not rubbish.

But the best bit was the price. All of these games were yours for just £1.99 a pop. This was a quarter, perhaps even a fifth of what you'd pay for a full price release. This was the rule book getting ripped up. This was revolution!

And this was the reason why I was skinny at school, but more on that in a minute.

Over the next few years the budget game market went mental. Mastertronic's games began to appear in convenience stores, video shops, petrol stations - basically any building where people bought stuff.

Other publishers quickly moved in. British Telecom released budget games through its Firebird Silver range, while Richard and David Darling, two teenage brothers who'd wrote a number of hits for Mastertronic, launched their own budget games company called Codemasters.

Ocean, US Gold and Elite Systems also got in on the act with their own low-cost labels, although in most cases they used them to re-release games that had previously retailed at full price - great if you couldn't afford a game first time around.

2

Kikstart 2 was one of the finest games on the Commodore 64, regardless of price.

The budget model wasn't just about games at pocket money prices. Frequency played a huge part too. Whereas full price publishers might release one title a month, the budget guys were banging out several titles every week.

In 1987, Mastertronic alone released 267 games across 11 different formats. This meant that every time you went into your newsagent or wherever, there would be new games on the rack.

Magazines often couldn't keep up with the sheer number of new releases and as such, reviews wouldn't appear until weeks later (if at all). This meant buying games 'blind', based only on the cover-art and the blurb on the back of the box.

Or in the case of Codemasters, the hilarious "ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC!" inlay quotes usually made by David Darling himself. (For the record, David, I would still like to know what colour the sky was in your world when you described the shameful Twin Turbo V8 as "Amazingly playable, just like real performance car driving!").

Buying budget games was like purchasing a 59p game from the App Store based solely on the screenshots and the publisher's comments. The low cost and the general quality of titles meant that you'd rarely feel ripped off.

I'd estimate that for every 10 budget games available, two would be wretched, seven would be pretty good for the price, and one would be as good as a full price release - perhaps even better.

Those in the top 10 per cent included several quality titles written by industry good guys John and Ste Pickford and published by Mastertronic. There was darts sim 180, zany platformer Zub, isometric bug blaster Amaurote, and wizard warfaring action thing Feud.

Mastertronic also published a couple of brilliant 'bike' games. Kikstart 2 was the superior sequel to the original trial bike race game. It was unofficially based on the BBC TV series Kick Start, where kids who were clearly superior to you and I rode bikes over ramps and barrels in a muddy field somewhere.

Action Biker is probably best known for starring Clumsy Colin from the old KP Skips crisps commercial. It should really be remembered just for being a great game (only on the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits though - the Spectrum version was completely different, for some bizarre reason).

The Firebird Silver label was also home to some top cheapies. The best included Booty, a neat little platformer set on a pirate ship, and Rebelstar, a classy turn-based strategy game from genre supremo Julian Gollop. Firebird also deserves slaps on the back for bringing the BBC Micro masterpiece Thrust to other 8-bit computers as a budget title.

3

It's a good job Codemasters provided handy 0898 hint lines to help you solve these dastardly puzzles.

By comparison, Codemasters became a bit of a joke thanks to the number of mock 'simulator' games the company whizzed out - BMX Simulator, SAS Combat Simulator, Professional Cow Tipping Simulator etc.

Codies did manage to redeem itself with the long-running Dizzy series. These colourful cartoon adventures, created by the dependable Oliver Twins, were generally excellent, with the third entry Fantasy World Dizzy being the pick of the bunch.

But even when Dizzy was at his best, for me personally he couldn't top the marvellous Magic Knight, star of four budget games written by David Jones and published by Mastertronic.

The first, Finders Keepers, was a slightly uneven mix of platforming, puzzle and maze elements, yet the sequels - Spellbound, Knight Tyme and Stormbringer - were really clever graphic adventures that completely belied their budget game status.

Knight Tyme was also the first game to be designed specifically for the new, bigger memory Spectrum 128. The budget price meant less risk for the publisher should a game fail, so Mastertronic regularly released games for the minority formats that the full-price publishers overlooked.

4

The smart 'Windimation' menu system, as seen in Magic Knight's second adventure Spellbound.

If you owned a Commodore 16 or an Atari 8-bit, the only UK software houses regularly releasing games for your machine were Mastertronic and Firebird. And as the Nineties rolled around and the 8-bit computer market shrank as owners upgraded to flashy 16-bit machines, it was the budget publishers like Alternative, Hi-Tec and Zeppelin who were plugging away at the bitter end.

As for me being thin - it's a bit embarrassing, really. I've left it to the end in the hope you will have stopped reading by this point and are instead posting your budget game memories in the Comments section.

OK, this is what happened. At school I was given 50p a day to buy some lunch from the canteen, which in the eighties was plenty of money for a decent meal. But I'd spend 10p on a pack of Space Raiders and squirrel away the other 40p. At the end of the school week I'd have the magic sum of £2, which I'd spend on a shiny new budget game.

Jamie Oliver would probably disapprove, but I did this for months and months and my software collection swelled with budget gems. And apart from a slight case of rickets, it never did me any harm.

Picture of Martyn.

About Martyn Carroll

Martyn has been writing about video games since 1997. He launched Retro Gamer magazine in 2004 and has been typecast as a lover of rubbish old games ever since. His specialist subject is actually the Crabs novel of Guy N. Smith.

Read more articles from Martyn by visiting the Martyn Carroll archive page.

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Comments (98) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • DDevil #1 1 year ago

    "There was nothing more annoying that waiting 10 minutes for a game to load only for it to crap out at the last second. "

    *sits listening to screetching machine noise for 10 minutes*
    R: Tape Loading Error

    FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

  • lucky_jim #2 1 year ago

    Budget games were great in the Speccy days, but personally I found that getting Your Sinclair, Crash! and Sinclair User each month would, at the peak of the covertape glory days, get me 20-odd games a month!

  • INSOMANiAC #3 1 year ago


    Yanking your joystick too hard (oo err!) and leaving four plungers on the table. happy happy joy joy.

    Most spectrum games were already stupidly hard, and made worse by the fact the kempston joysticks were shite

  • HEAVYface #4 1 year ago

    i used to save my lunch money for games too, but for megadrive carts......thats a lot of missed lunches per game.

    made up for it in later years though, unfortunately.

  • Bahumet #5 1 year ago

    An HD remake of Spellbound please! :-)

    My crowning glory of Spectrum gaming was being the only person on Earth to complete Airwolf without dying once! What a bitch if a game that was - but I loved it all the same.

  • jablonski #6 1 year ago

    @Bahumet

    "My crowning glory of Spectrum gaming was being the only person on Earth to complete Airwolf without dying once! What a bitch if a game that was - but I loved it all the same."

    I just came here to post about Airwolf.
    I never got off the first screen. I played it for days, and just couldn't get passed those vertical defence beams

  • woodnotes #7 1 year ago

    Ah this article takes me back to the two bedroom drawers crammed full of C64 tapes!

    Think I only completed just a few of my 150+ C64 games. Games were really hard back then, not to mention controlling them with a joystick instead of a joypad made them even more difficult again - little did a realise back then! Can you imagine playing a platformer now with a joystick!?

  • Doctor_What #8 1 year ago

    I never could get anywhere with the Magic Knight games, despite trying to days and weeks, but Dizzy still rocks my socks.

  • espibara #9 1 year ago

    Mastertronic games were a rights of passage for young gamers.

    Back whena tenner was lot of money for a full release! Reading Zzapp 64 with its black n white screenshots for the C64 games.

    SKimping on ya dinner to try and get 1 full price game a month................happy days.

    Fondest memory of my dad was him trying to help me get F1 Racing by mastertronic to load from that blasted tape on my C64. He must have helped me try about 45 times and it kept dropping out, cue lots of tears from me. Then one day that magical saturday morning in 1986 it just suddenly for no reason worked..............I remember me and my dad high fiving each other and jumping around the living room.

    The game was shite.................but memories.

    I also remember my birthdays standing in WH Smith in front of the C64 games rack overwhelmed by choice and clutching a single ten pound note, teh decision had to the right one as the next b'day was 12 months away, studying the boxes and the screen shots etc. Then amking your choice and having that nagging doubt all day you should have got the other one.

    Funniest memory of gaming was playing Outrun on my C64 on my black n white telly and moaning to my dad that it wasn't in colour so he got a sheet of clear red red plastic and taped it over the lower half of the screen so the Ferrari would appear red. ha ha ha ha Oh the joys of growing up gaming with skint parents lol!

    Edited by espibara at 15/05/11 @ 13:55

  • cynical #10 1 year ago

    @insomaniac: Those Kempston joysticks (the taller ones, with the button on top of the stick) were so wobbly/loose...they were PERFECT for Daley Thomsons Decathalon, I could waggle faster than anyone :p

  • Daeltaja #11 1 year ago

    I remember going into clothes shops and they had baskets full of budget C64 cassettes. Used to get 1 a week on our family trip to town. Found some real gems.. Good memories!

  • silversun #12 1 year ago

    Used to have an amstrad 464+ and used to get amstrad action , thoese where the days , dizzy was the best game of its time and i also like magic knight alot.

    I also got the best codemaster simulator game made (or worse lol) fruit machine simulator.

    I have seen they bringing a new c64 machine out , also does anyone know a place to buy these old games and run on modern machines like pc.

  • BigJonno #13 1 year ago

    It was a very unique experience and I feel lucky, at 28, to just be on the bottom end of the "buying Speccy games at the newsies" age bracket. When I explain it to anyone 5-10 years younger than me, I may as well be talking about living in the glory day of the British Empire.

  • DrStrangelove #14 1 year ago

    I still remember the older guys who had a C64. They were so cool. Michael Jackson was a nobody compared to them.

  • Gaol #15 1 year ago

    Yellow boxed £1.99 Speccy games. Crash magazine and the Transformers comic sitting on the shelf (with Viz just out of reach). Boxes of Garbage Pail cards and Panini stickers. Big tubs of sweets being sold in imperial measures. Rotating shelves full of Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy books. The 1980s local British newsagent was fucking awesome.

    Kids these days have the wonders of the internet and massive supermarkets. Poor bastards.

  • Artemis_Matsas #16 1 year ago

    Thank you Eurogamer for reminding me how much of an old fart i am :p

  • espibara #17 1 year ago

    God for me this Article a has a nostalgia factor of 10...................the joys of being a kid growing up skint and gaming in the 80s.

    Julian Rignall was a god.

    Back when your imagination made up for the lack of polygons and crap graphics.


    Happy times...............now feels old.
    Edited by espibara at 15/05/11 @ 14:11

  • silversun #18 1 year ago

    Got to just say for me it was my first era of gaming , so the people with atari and other stuff like that they the first few , i think i lucky to enter gaming at that point rather than first point even though that where it all started.

  • skuzzbag #19 1 year ago

    Wow £1.99 games in the 80's and we all considered that a bargain.

    Maybe the modern day 79p brigade should get some perspective!

  • flaming.carrot #20 1 year ago

    There's loads of Commodore 64 software at [link url=http://www.c64.com,]http://www.c64.com,[/link] and it seems the original software devs are quite happy to have the legacy work there. I remember being blown away by the graphic in The Last Ninja circa 1987.

  • CivilD #21 1 year ago

    I saw the Treasure Island Dizzy screenshot on the front page and had an instant nostalgia trip. Don't think I ever found the last coin!
    Edited by CivilD at 15/05/11 @ 14:25

  • lucky_jim #22 1 year ago

    Seems remiss not to mention World of Spectrum.

  • theiceman #23 1 year ago

    @Bahumet

    When i was at school in the 80's,i used to wag school (sorry dad!!),and in town i lived there was Elite,who were starting up at that time.One of their games was Airwolf,which they almost finished making.I used to go in everyday and test Airwolf for them,sort of a unofficial games tester for Elite.I used to get paid as well.

  • udat #24 1 year ago

    So many good games mentioned in this article. Fued was amazing. Legging it to the best herbs just to find your bastard brother had got there first. It actually had decent AI and properly tracked the bad guy while off-screen as i recall.

    Loved Kikstart 2 as well. In my memory it had a course designer, is that right?

    Oh, and Airwolf. Jesus. That was my favourite TV show but the game was just fucking brutal. I think I got to the 6th or so screen and never any further. Maybe bombing the re-growing defence grid thing?

  • Stoatboy #25 1 year ago

    Some random old git memories inspired by this article:

    Stopping the tape to carry on playing the Mastertronic C64 Space Invaders loader instead of the game it was meant to be loading.

    Reading C & VG cover to cover in WHSmiths because all my pocket money was needed for games.

    John Menzies and Rumbelows.

    Writing flashy adverts for my local computer shop on the Commodore 64s and Vic 20s in Woolworths (which also disabled the run/stop key).

    Having to lean on my datasette to get my pirate copy of Ghettoblaster to load.

    Buying C15 cassettes.

  • Fletche #26 1 year ago

    BMX Simulator was excellent, 2 players, instant replays when you crashed, me and my mate back then used to play this all the time alongside Chaos. Also just downloaded Booty to play on my phone, great game apart from the music which drove you insane after a short while

  • Mister-Wario #27 1 year ago

    I grew up with the PS1 as my first console and so I often look for old PS1 titles when I'm in town. My Gamestation always has a good selection of old PS1 titles on offer (are people still trading them in? A bunch of Saturn games materialised last time I was there) and they're dirt cheap, often three for a fiver, so more often than not it's a case of "what the hell". Last time I got Transport Tycoon, a hilariously outdated sim game, Scrabble, and Wipeout 1. There's a primal thrill about buying games and books and things really cheap, although where to store them all becomes something of an issue. Anyway, great read.

  • BigJonno #28 1 year ago

    I wonder if there is any way of getting the feeling of that era across in video game form. Digital: A Love Story managed it for the Amiga and the woolly, pre-web days of the internet, so it's not entirely outside the realms of plausibility.

  • raytrace #29 1 year ago

    yeh Kik Start 2 was an utterly majestic game and in fact when I first saw trailers for Trials HD the first thing I thought and the reason I was interested was cos I thought it would have Kik Start 2's greatness

  • Atropos #30 1 year ago

    Action Biker was absolutely awesome. I still have the tape somewhere, must get it for an emulator and finally complete it...

  • SvennoJ #31 1 year ago

    I grew up with a MSX but I didn't have any lunch money. Apart from the games I got from my parents, a lot of games I played were 'copies'. It was just too easy and tempting to copy a tape in a dual tape deck. Unmarked tapes with a list of index numbers where the next game starts, the shame.

    I did get a book with listings in BASIC for simple games. It was a lot of work to type these listings over without any mistakes, but it got me interested in programming. Together with my dad and a guide to BASIC on MSX we were soon modding and adding to the games. Not long after I started writing my own games, including a version of pac man where the power ups are bullets you can use to shoot the ghosts.
    Edited by SvennoJ at 15/05/11 @ 15:35

  • mingster #32 1 year ago

    kempston joysticks were not shite. The tall waggly ones with a button on top were quickshot joysticks they were shite.

  • SYS64738 #33 1 year ago

    28 days delivery eh... I remember waiting for the jap import of Super Shinobi on SMD for a good 3 months... coming home from school and no package arrived, calling the importer who again and again told me it'll probably in next week. Now I get annoyed if a package doesn't arrive within 3 days...

  • Arsecake_Baker #34 1 year ago

    What's a high school?.........old my arse!

  • Obli #35 1 year ago

    Kikstart 2 was a favourite of mine and my brother's. Yes, it did have a course designer.

    The most memorable thing for me about the Commodore 64 is the music. It is still absolutely fantastic... proper game music :)

    £1.99 in the mid-eighties is probably not so cheap. But those carousel racks of games was fantastic. As the article mentions, picking a new game based on the back of the box was a real gamble but often a gem was revealed. I recall the colour coding - yellow = Spectrum, red = Commodore and what colour was Amstrad? Green?

    Panther was another good budget C64 game with great music :)

  • Kaminari #36 1 year ago

    Thank you, Martyn. I always cheer up when I read about the Spectrum.

    You should make a retrospective about how the isometric genre single-handedly saved the European videogame market back in 1984. Which reminds me that I discovered cult titles like Revolution (by the great Costa Panayi), The Final Matrix or even The Great Escape thanks to budget compilations.

    Those were the good old days indeed!

  • BM #37 1 year ago

    I remember going round to a friends of my brothers and playing on Konami Soccer on the MSX. I still remember thinking computer games could not get any better than at that moment. Looking back, it was still pretty damn good for it's time.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edTZDggWVzI

  • Bander #38 1 year ago

    A great article. My memories of that time were very similar.

    I did exactly the same thing with my lunch money. I had a budget of £6 to last a week, and it almost entirely went on games and games magazines (often with a cover mounted tape). A school day was only 6-7 hours long after all, and I thought I could go without food for that long quite comfortably. Ultimately I weighed less at 18 years of age than I did at 11. I was an overweight kid at the outset, but not obese. I hadn't even noticed the loss until somebody called me 'lanky' during my sixth form days and I thought there was some mistake. My primary health/appearance concern was spots rather than my shape.

    Mastertronic and those that followed were marketing geniuses by getting those cheap games into so many places, and I think this was the reason console cartridge games didn't really take off in the UK until much later than they did in the US and Japan. They simply couldn't compete for price or availability. It took until the Megadrive/SNES era of big sprites and parallax scrolling in full colour for many gamers to say no to increasingly dated graphics and long loading times, although the Amiga and Atari ST were a preferable alternative for some. That, and Mastertronic of course bailed from the cassette market when they became Sega's distributor and eventually turned into Sega Europe, along with other publishers like Codemasters getting into console development also.

  • RobTheBuilder #39 1 year ago

    180 was great!
    I used to love that game, the comedy darts players and the impossible last opponent.

    My favourite other budget game was Squirm, a weird but addictive PacMan type game. It was so annoying at times I broke several joysticks on it...

  • O11Y #40 1 year ago

    I could never get Dizzy to run on my ZX Spectrum. I sometime shed a tear at the memory of all the days I spent playing football in the park, when I could've been experiencing it's egg-filled goodness.

  • Ferral #41 1 year ago

    I remember turning the cassette deck upside down on quite a few of the C64 games to try and get them to load. If you remember one came out near the end of the C64's lifespan where it had a set of lights and a tuner so you could tune the deck heads for each specific game. I eventually bought a 1820 disc drive (the Vic 20 model), nicknamed the breezeblock due to its size and shape and an Action Replay cartridge so when I bought a game that wasnt a multiload I could back it up onto disc.

    I used to love Kickstart 1 & 2 and also Clumsy Colins Action Biker. Some of the budget games were great, Zamzara that was released on Hewsons budget label is one I remember well. It looked like it could have been made by Thalamus with the quality of the graphics.

    Another great game was Hawkeye where they done the gold tape competition to win something or other. The thing I remember most though was in the T&C's on this game which were always printed on the inlay card, it said something on the lines of the usual limited warranty, dont damage etc. However the last bit of it actually mentioned that eating the tape would void the warranty!

    To think Mastertronic now do the Sold Out Range of software all these years later.

  • drhickman1983 #42 1 year ago

    The first games I remember playing were a couple of Mastertronic games. Chiller and Devils Crown. You can find them on World of Spectrum (an authorised Spectrum emulation site). They're not, to be fair, very good.

    But the Spectrum for me really was defined by the Dizzy games. I remember one year I got a Dizzy box set, with 4 cassettes, featuring Dizzy 1-4, Fast Food Dizzy and possibly another non-platform Dizzy spin off. It was awesome, though I never actually finished any of the games at the time (Treasure Island Dizzy was free to download of Codemasters wesbite a few years agp, that game was still tough).

    Codemasters also created the Seymour games. Not quite as good as Dizzy, but played exactly the same (albeit with "real world" settings). I remember one of the fetch puzzles was to bring somebody some scissors to remove a hang nail.

    But yes, those days of buying a game in the newsagents for a couple of quid were awesome.

  • Baines20 #43 1 year ago

    Used to love chucky egg!! And jet set willy! Ahh the good ol days lol

  • Psychotext #44 1 year ago

    Man, good times.

    :'(

  • Lawlost #45 1 year ago

    My Dad bought an Amstrad CPC 464 I could not believe it at the time all my mates had Speccys or Comodores, so could not borrow or swap games. Mastertronic were a lifesaver I loved Nonterraqueous, anyone else remember that guiding that funny little ball through the levels? it was this one http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Nonterra...

    Edit for link
    Edited by Lawlost at 15/05/11 @ 18:45

  • Ryze #46 1 year ago

    Hey! Twin Turbo V8 was FANTASTIC on the AMSTRAD CPC.

    No idea how the Speccy version turned out though!

    @theiceman

    Looks like you missed out on some crucial English lessons!

  • EMarkM #47 1 year ago

    Surprisingly, the answer did not lie with piracy.

    Bullshit! ;)

    To paraphrase The Shawshank Redemption, "every school had a kid like me...a kid with a twin deck".

    Copy a game for a mate, and a copy for myself as payment.

    (Ahem) for backup purposes, I should add...(koff)

    Great article. More like this, please.
    Edited by EMarkM at 15/05/11 @ 18:52

  • Mayhem64 #48 1 year ago

    Thrust. Greatest budget game ever. How Firebird chose to release that at £1.99 I don't know when they could have easily gotten away with it at full price...

  • monkfishjoe #49 1 year ago

    All this talk makes me want to get the old Speccy (ZX +2) down from the loft...

    Roll on the horrid sound and eye blistering sights of those leading screens!

  • spidermanalf #50 1 year ago

    Love this article, again at 35, this was my era, used to wait ages for games to come out at budget price, or buying compilation boxsets with about 6 games in. For the C64 I was all about Thalmus and System 3.

    I also had a datel cart, I remember ordering it and a few days later getting a piece of paper in the post I had to get my mum to sign promising not to copy games.

    And you should've got quickshot pro joysticks!

  • PixelPirate #51 1 year ago

    budget game i just kept playing over and over was Blinky's scary school. Best 1.99 i ever spent :D

  • Vortex808 #52 1 year ago

    Oh man, there's some blasts from the past there! Thrust and kikstart were great. I bought numerous mastertronic games. Most were misses, but i got some good ones too.

    They were a great way to try a few extra games between your birthday and xmas when at school though. Plus a lot of swaps with mates.

    When you had elite, you didn't need too many other games though.

  • fiery_jackass #53 1 year ago

    it's pretty surprising that the article didn't mention Nonterraqueous (and that it took 48 comments to get to it) as that was something of a turning point, quality-wise, for Mastertronic. Great game

  • sega #54 1 year ago

    I'm betting budget games are the main reason most kids in the UK missed out on the earlier games consoles such as the NES and opted for home computers instead.

    Back then a NES game cost around £30 - £40 but you could usually get the same title, in 16-bit, for closer to a fiver on the Amiga. I loved those days - gaming was so cheap. Then the Megadrive came along and it was goodbye cheap games for me.
    Edited by sega at 15/05/11 @ 20:28

  • [STARS]TyranT #55 1 year ago

    A HD Dizzy Collection - collecting all the titles in one awesome download package.

    Yes. Please.

  • smurphs #56 1 year ago

    I had a spectrum +2, in grey. Alan sugar was a smart one, reboxing the humble spectrum with some slightly posher plastic and charging double for it. Still, the extra memory did mean that Treasure Island Dizzy used some 'synthesised speech' on the load screen that sounded like a dying cat with laryngitis. Happy days.

  • EMarkM #57 1 year ago

    Quickshot II for me, that could be repaired using part of a Baked Bean can to actually be better than factory parts!

  • peori #58 1 year ago

    @INSOMANiAC "Yanking your joystick too hard (oo err!) and leaving four plungers on the table. happy happy joy joy."
    Reminds me of the replacement stick I got for my C16(+4!), made by or called Speedking I think it was. You held it like you were jacking off a tiny dog.
    If you pushed left or right really hard trying to finally beat Manic Miner it'd slip out of your sweaty palms violently.
    I punched myself in the face many a time. Great stick though :p

  • AceGrace #59 1 year ago

    I've just refurbished my Spectrum +3 disc drive (new drive belt) and bought a scart lead for it.

    I can honestly say it is the first time I have seen a spectrum screen clearly.

    I'm off to play Nodes of Yesod! :-)

  • fluff_the_tiger #60 1 year ago

    Ahhhh.... ATV Simulator was quite good if I remember correctly - or ABSOLUTELY FANASTIC!

  • peori #61 1 year ago

    I never did finish Tom Thumb :(

  • Masarin #62 1 year ago

    Ah, fond memories. Great article. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please do an article about Borded of the Rings, The Boggit, The Colour of Magic and do interview the fabulously funny creator Fergus McNeill. Did I say please?

  • russ_258 #63 1 year ago

    Hungry Horace.....goes skiing!!

  • Timotei #64 1 year ago

    @Kamanari

    "The Great Escape"

    By jove that was an awesome game, as was it's successor The Lost World, that T-Rex was truly terrifying.

    Other mentions go to Myth, Target Renegade, Head Over Heels, The Last Ninja, Gunship and Rolling Thunder.
    Edited by Timotei at 16/05/11 @ 06:26

  • Scimarad #65 1 year ago

    I love Feud! I can still remember that bloody music...

  • mashk #66 1 year ago

    I didn't spend my dinner money on budget games, that was spent in the arcades putting endless 10p pieces into Bad Dudes. I did however steal money from my mum's purse.

    Sorry Mum.

    Mashk aged 35.

  • TonyCB #67 1 year ago

    slightly off-topic but my mom's face still goes grey when she remembers the day she barged into my bedroom to find me playing daley thompsons decathlon, as she could only see me from behind she thought the worst..... :)

  • andromeda #68 1 year ago

    Nodes of Yesod was one of my favourites, Charles' lovely animation kept me entertained for a few weeks and then the game itself lasted me so much longer still!

    You don't really get those pure thrills these days ;- finding a THIRD ALCHIEM of a similiar colour, the first time your moon mole munches through a wall and reveals the crystal-y caverns..

    Perhpas we aren't bouyed as much any more because

    a) we're older, we've seen it so many times before.
    b) we didn't have the tech/stunning gfx that we're used to today that instantly saps our 'thrill meter'

    discuss.

    or don't !

  • Johnsters #69 1 year ago

    I remember buying Spy Hunter for my Spectrum 48k from Boots!!
    They used to have a good supply of games. Very few I ever completed. Maybe head over heals, but I programmed the 100 lines of code in for the inviciblity cheat!!!!
    Best xmas ever was when my Speccy died and my paperround paid for a C64. I went into boots and bought rambo, California games, Sanxion, last ninja 1 and a US gold compalation.
    I was just amazed with load music. Me an my mate would record the music to listen in our Saishio Personal cassette recorders (cheap Dixons own brand Walkman)

  • Link020 #70 1 year ago

    Great article reminded me of the days with the spectrum playing booty, jet set willy and the greatest fighting game ever IK+

  • chiz #71 1 year ago

    I Remember having to adjust the heads on my cassette deck to get Masertronic games to work. For some they just didn't load at all if they were not changed. Probably a crap cassette deck.

  • Bigglesworth #72 1 year ago

    God damn I love these retro articles - takes me right back to the days. I remember getting one of Mastertronic's games - can't remember which one, now - playing it part-way through until it crashed, leaving me in the Speccy's BASIC line editor with a listing of the source code the game was written in! Class.

    And the younger generation here wonder why us oldies moan and bitch in every Digital Foundry comparison thread... =)

  • Peregrin #73 1 year ago

    You'll find me in the comments section of Will Porter's BBC Micro retrospective, quietly sobbing about the price of BBC B games. (expensive enough to require parental approval; which generally wasn't available for games containing guns, violence or non-educational elements)

  • SAMagic #74 1 year ago

    @[STARS]TyranT : I believe two different people hold the copyright to Dizzy, so there's next to zero chance of it happening. Boo. :(

    Still, someone should make a spiritual successor and get it out on XBLA. When I was young I thought it was genius to combine puzzle-solving and platforming.

  • gintoki #75 1 year ago

    Space Raiders for lunch - class. I pulled the same trick myself a few times

  • andyk #76 1 year ago

    POKE 35899,0

  • kangarootoo #77 1 year ago

    Ah memories. I used to have notes on the best volume and tone settings to get speccy games to load, and if every game in a compilation pack worked you considered yourself lucky.

    Kikstart 2 was opne of the best games of its generation on any platform. It had a track editor ffs! it was exactly what a sequel should be - take the original, polish the mechanics till they shine, and only THEN start thinking about extra content.

    I didn't have a joystick for "my" speccy as I recall. When we got a C64 I was using an original Atari 2600 stick, replaced later by a Competition Pro - the only stick of import back then :)

    P.s. piracy was rife when I was a kid. Speccy games would copy in normal twin deck stereos. And C64 turbo loader tapes were quite common too. Though I probably did buy moreC64 games than I copi9ed, thanks to the £1.99 ranges.
    Edited by kangarootoo at 16/05/11 @ 14:02

  • adzengland #78 1 year ago

    Tusker on C64. Class.

  • gallow #79 1 year ago

    I used to do the same thing with my dinner money at school - I was given a pound each day - 25p for the bus and the rest for dinner. Well I walked home as it was about 20-25 minutes. But unlike you I went to the local happy shopper post office (PO) and bought a packet of custard creams a day for 18p and moved way up the scale from being a skinny primary school kid (more to do with eating like a horse at home rather than the custard creams though). That way I could buy budget games for the Spectrum and lots of treats on an evening.

  • mkreku #80 1 year ago

    I can't believe noone's mention the Wico Redball yet. That joystick was so sturdy it will outlive me. And my grandchildren.

    I used to have a Spectrum ZX 16K.. before I switched to a Commodore 128. When I should have had a Spectrum ZX 48K and a Commodore 64. Yes, I still make bad choices: I drive an Audi :/

  • kimchibaka #81 1 year ago

    Ah, Happy Shopper custard creams for lunch, those were the days!

    Codemasters did some really polished stuff for the price. I had a Multitap 2 (think it was called) on my Amstrad, and you could go in and change the machine code of the game while it was running. Seem to remember 3D was the value to look for to try to switch infinite lives on. I always recall you could change the text of Rockstar Ate My Hamster to whatever obscene delights your schoolboy brain could manage...need I really say that hilarity ensued?!

    Some of the games of the era could really do with a retrospective all of their own, I hope this article isn't a catch-all. Head Over Heels was incredibly ambitious, and perfectly realised. I have very fond memories of Mercenary, Gryzor (arcade perfection!) and so very many more.

  • airdam #82 1 year ago

    People don't appreciate what games were like back then, waiting downstairs while your game loads, only to go up and find it crashed. The game picture screens that scrolled onto screen while loading, or you may be lucky to get "invader loads", playable space invaders whilst you wait. We also had the bad things, such as loading levels using the "press 000 on your tape counter and press play on tape" method and rewinding to this point at game over...ahhhhh the good old days. Pass me my cheetah joystick and load up daley thompson decathlon.

  • quantumsheep #83 1 year ago

    Ultimate Play the Game.

    My god, those guys were legends back then!

  • Tyronne #84 1 year ago

    Reading things like this make me glad to be an old gamer, as the physical feeling of holding in your hand the latest mastertronic or firebird title for pocket money prices is simply not the same as downloading an app to your mobile.

  • Redeye #85 1 year ago

    Gaol (#16) - Quite possibly the most outstanding comment I've ever read here. *applauds*

    A truly fantastic era that threw out some legendary titles, and some of these comments have plastered a massive nostalgic smile all over my mug. HD Spellbound? MAKE THIS HAPPEN. :D

    *also remembers the 28 minute load time for the Atari 8-bit version of Mr. Do!, and is happy to have left such insanity far, far behind :o *

  • deiseach #86 1 year ago

    I still remember the shock when I saw darts on the telly for the first time and the announcer bellowed "WAAAAAAN HUNDRED AND AYYYYYY-TEEEEEE!!!!" There was me thinking they went "scrunch-flob-bleeb".

  • deiseach #87 1 year ago

    @EMarkM

    Bullshit! ;)

    To paraphrase The Shawshank Redemption, "every school had a kid like me...a kid with a twin deck".

    Copy a game for a mate, and a copy for myself as payment.

    (Ahem) for backup purposes, I should add...(koff)

    I think you might be right. I don't pirate these days because I find the time spent downloading and configuring the download isn't worth my oh-so-precious time. Morality doesn't really come into it. But Time seemed infinite when I was 12. I'd doggedly spend hours blowing on the tape or giving it a shake, convinced that some deus ex machina would get me past the evil "Read Error B" message that my Amstrad was spitefully throwing back at me. What a pity no amount of reading the manual could tell me what "Error B" was . . .

  • jbmac7788 #88 1 year ago

    What a brilliant article......good god I feel old!

  • MinerWilly #89 1 year ago

    I loved 180 , and in particular the digitised speech on the Speccy and that dog that used to pee on the bar !! Kickstart 2 was amazing and had a full track editor long before games like LBP where called "revolutionary" ?
    Anyone remember another excellent budget classic called Booty ? You where a cabin boy and you had to avoid all these pirates oh and if Dan Dare was on budget (im 50/50) then that was a magnificent game .

  • PureRespite #90 1 year ago

    Ah, those really were the days. I've still got a beloved Dragon 32 resting peacefully in my loft.

  • Garfy #91 1 year ago

    I now have the Kickstart music stuck in my head..

  • Desheep #92 1 year ago

    I miss loading music.

    I don't miss having to pray that my tape heads weren't out of alignment.

  • thesonglessbird #93 1 year ago

    Heh, this brings back memories. I remember when I was about 10 I waited for my parents to go out somewhere so I could ring the hint line for Magic Land Dizzy... they'd forgotten something though and came back while I was on the phone. Got bollocked!

    Never had any problems with tapes full of copied games though. Piracy was so easy back then!

  • SirRodSpode #94 1 year ago

    Lovely article and comments...so much so that after many years of reading Eurogamer I signed up so I could comment too!

    We had a 48k Speccy which my Dad bought with a bunch of games and a tape recorder. All those games including, Jet Pac, River Raid, Pssst, Cookie and Flight Simulation loaded fine. However when I started buying magazines with cover tapes none of them ever worked! This caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth. This went on for years until one day I happened to try a different tape recorder and suddenly no probs. WOOHOO.

    I desperately wanted a 128k Speccy because some games were out of reach to us 48k mortals (or required the dreaded multi load). I finally got hold of one - 128k+3 at that! It came from a car boot sale with more games than I imagined possible for £30 all in. I bought this interface thing which allowed you to load a game from tape, do a memory grab and then dump it to disk for quick loading next time....bliss. Sadly by this point it was the early 90's, all the other kids at school had an Amiga, SNES or Megadrive and my bro and I were languishing in the previous decade. Underprivileged youth :p

    Talking about prices, £1.99 in 1985 is now equivalent to just under £5, which is where the top of the line iOS and Android games are, so I think we definitely are in a new era of cheap gaming. Saying that, people who complain at £40 for a full price release for today's consoles need a history lesson....in 1992 when Street Fighter 2 first came out for the PAL SNES it cost £65...that's over £100 in today's money!! (not to mention the massively higher cost of development for modern games.)

    Anyway, very happy memories and good times. Thanks for sharing chaps.

  • Scoops #95 1 year ago

    Great article which allows us old folk to come on and remember the world as it used to be. I am sure it is the modern day equivalent of your grandad talking about the war all the time.

    Three points however I feel the need to bring up:

    1 - Buying your weekly budget game was always a hit and miss affair as you just didn't know what you were getting - Kinder Surprise like really but sometimes the games were actually worth it. On the plus side I did get Booty and a wild west one whose title I can't remember which were great. On the downside I bought a game called Voyage into the Unknown by Mastertronic which was truly insipid. You could actually do anything in the game if I recall and it crashed with a BASIC error. I have nothing in my heart but hate for that one (there must be another person out there who made this error of judgement?)

    2 - Crash! ran a joystick review which led me to buy the famous WICO reball - still in the attic and truly bullet proof despite the leaf switches which at least means it doesn't drive you as mental as a microswitched one which does nothing but click, click, click, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK......

    3 - Airwolf. ...... Rock. Bloody. Hard. I maybe got to the third screen. I think this game would be banned today and put younger gamers off for life such was its difficulty curve (which was pretty much shaped like a wall going up a very long way). I did enjoy looking at the hologram on the cassette inlay though - very nice....

  • Lawlost #96 1 year ago

    I remember Airwolf you needed a surgeon hands. Anyone else remember TLL (Tornado Low Level) such a good game

  • Lawlost #97 1 year ago

    Monty mole....
    Edited by Lawlost at 17/05/11 @ 21:59

  • GTFRoundsdown #98 1 year ago

    Spellbound on Amstrad 464, the glorious door creeking sound, and the absolute joy of being one of the few games to complete! Happy Days!!!