Arcadians: The BBC Micro’s Answer to Galaxian When Acornsoft released Arcadians for the BBC Micro in 1982, it represented something significant in the early home computer market—a remarkably faithful arcade conversion that captured the essence of Namco’s Galaxian almost perfectly. Developed by Nick Pelling (working under the pseudonym Orlando M. Pilchard), this fixed shooter demonstrated…
Not a Donkey Kong Clone, Honest The BBC Micro was touted as an educational tool, if you believe Fred Harris (sorry kids). Most of us growing up in the 80’s will have used one at school, either doing some rudimentary programming, or playing with maths tools such as “Turtle”. It also happened to have a great…
Daley Thompson’s Decathlon hit the Spectrum in 1984, bringing Olympic fever into British homes. Released by Ocean Software, this game had one claim to fame above all others: it wrecked more joysticks than any other title in Spectrum history. While Track & Field ruled the arcades, Daley’s digital counterpart dominated our living rooms – and…
A new kind of game for the Spectrum JetPac was one of the first of the games released, in 1983, for the 16k Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer, and developer Ultimate managed to fit a lot into the tiny memory. This game didn’t fit into any easily definable retro gaming genre, as it had a number…
Introducing a pixel perfect clone of Mr Do! Mr Ee! came from a time when copyright law didn’t seem to apply to video games, otherwise this game would never have existed. Imagine taking the latest Super Mario game on the wii, copying it, calling it Super Dave and releasing it on the XBOX. That’s what…
It’s 1981, and I’m an 10 year old boy fascinated with the emerging world of personal computers. My dad would bring home a Commodore Pet machine from work, the same shape and size as a small car, over the Christmas period. I would spend hours playing Snake (yes, years before Nokia got in on the…
