ZX Spectrum

Yeah, which makes sense.

And the Alien game, well, actually, oddly enough, this one came out and then like a couple years later, there was an Alien game that came out on Commodore 64 ZX Spectrum and everything like that.

Literally looks like this.

Yeah.

There was another Dracula game that came out three years later in 1986.

This one, though, was specifically a text-based adventure game.

And it was released on the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC, and the ZX Spectrum.

And it essentially just took the novel Dracula and turned it into a text-based adventure game.

The thing that has fascinated me is, so you turned up on this, I think you sent me the link, didn't you, Dave?

Yeah, on one of the ZX Spectrum Facebook groups.

ZX

Spectrum Facebook groups.

So, on the 10th of January, Clive Sinclair, he did the...

The Spectrum ZX.

Yes.

And the Sinclair C5, which was his

We're going right back to Wednesday, the 26th of October, 1983.

Our game is Manic Miner by a teenager called Matthew Smith on the Spectrum.

Coming up, the number one, the telly, toys and gadgets, shop prices, the magazines, a licence row, and each version compared.

And Mark Webb is here, of course.

In your computer that October, a shop called Bustech had the 48k spectrum at a £127.95. That's about £470 now.

The 16k was £98.95, about £360 today.

470 quid of today's money for a Spectrum is a lot more than I'd have guessed.

No wonder you had to beg for months and promise to do your homework on it.

But it's still going to be interesting to see how popular this is.

With the Atari 400 and with the ZX or ZX Spectrum, we saw fairly quickly that they were marked down on Amazon and other places too.

Probably because they weren't selling a ton of them.

Or they had just a warehouse full of them.

But at the time, I was like, oh, look, we've got this.

All my friends have got Commodores, and they've got Spectrums, and they've got all the cool games.

But it's only in retrospect that I realized what an absolutely awesome machine the Beeb was.

And I think its main failure was just too expensive.

And then, weirdly, I went Spectrum, just because my friends had a Spectrum, and that was my first own, like, my computer.

And then it was Amiga, and then basically PC Master Race after that, and then a couple of consoles and stuff.

But...

I will say my time with the Beeb library, I haven't played that as much as I've explored some other machines, but I've had more than a cup of coffee with it.