The humble eighties were the original frontier

Prepare for a tale tinged with sadness, about lost games, wasted years, and the rebirth of an entire gaming genre. We begin back in the days when game code dripped from teenage boys’ bedrooms. When maverick designers like Matthew Smith shone like beacons of hope to all aspiring school boys with a grasp of Sinclair basic. This was the Wild West of gaming, a gold rush where original ideas were valuable currency. The limited technical abilities and memory of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 meant development times were fast, and a competent programmer could churn out five to ten games a year, earning a fortune in the process. The vibrant UK games magazine industry provided the perfect launch pad for hundreds of tiny software houses, if you couldn’t get anyone to sign up your game, then just duplicate it yourself and put out a mail order advert. Until the recent rush for digital distribution, I never thought we’d see the like of these days again.

The remarkable thing about the whole concept of writing games and releasing them yourself, was that it spawned its own genre. The ‘Software Company’ management game. These are games where you manage the development of new games, and release them into the market, usually controlling distribution and advertising. A simulation of actually running a successful games company. There were only ever a handful of these games released, the first I played was in 1984, Millionaire by Incentive.

Millionaire was a highly rated game, scoring 80% in Crash magazine. Progress is marked each month by your current residence, as your company grows you move to bigger and more lavish houses which are depicted in typical 8-bit style. Unfortunately the game is flawed, with a tipping point a few years in. The whole game turns against you, as it becomes impossible to manufacture enough cassettes without resorting to the help of ‘Dodgy Dave’ to satisfy demand and, in doing so, you leave yourself liable to huge penalties, and tumble back through the housing types till you end up back in your hovel.

The real breakthrough for this fledgling genre came from the often forgotten king of strategy games, Kevin Toms. While many remember 1982’s Football Manager as his genre gift to the world, his subsequent games contained a magic he was never truly recognized for. It’s not the graphics or presentation, but the ideas and incredible mathematical balance he managed to orchestrate so perfectly. There’s no better example than with his long forgotten 1985 title, Software Star.

Claiming a prize of just 64% in Crash Magazine, who also accused the title of having no graphics at all, Kevin’s second game saw you trying to get your games to number one in the chart for a long enough period to claim the title of Software Star. View me how you will, I make no apology, but this tiny 48k slice of magic has probably eaten up over 200 hours of my life since its release. Over the past twenty five years I’ve taken time to try and dissect the ingredients which make it so appealing, and there are several important factors.

One is the very reason it was derided at release, simplicity. A quick monthly cycle, a few presses on the keyboard and the next month begins. The ability to release more than one game at a time is very important, and so is being free to name each game individually. The random nature of monthly game development and the fluctuating size of the market depending on the month of the year makes choosing your release month vitally important too. Most important though is the pay off, the full screen chart where you see your games slowly rise to the top.

Like any game you’ve played so much though, there are flaws in Software Star too. Meet the challenge of becoming Software Star for ten months, and the target just doubles, the game doesn’t change – it’s so well balanced it doesn’t really need to – but the desire for something else to happen spoils the achievement.  As a side note, Kevin’s next and last non-football game was the equally well balanced President; I can only imagine how disappointed he was when it earned just 29% in Crash magazine.  Software Star may not have been a huge commercial success, but the genre did stumble on for a few more years, seeing the disappointing ‘Just Imagine’ by Pirate released in 1986 (59%) and ‘Software House’ by Cult released in 1988. Both suffered from being poorly constructed, making it easy to cheat your way through them.

Now, at the beginning of this ramble, I did say this was a story of lost games. Perhaps the reason why Millionaire and Software Star were so appealing to me was because in 1985, at fifteen years old, my dream was to be a games designer. With a basic knowledge of, well, basic, and a patchy ability to manipulate machine code subroutines, I began to write games. Stuck typing away in my bedroom for the full six week school summer holiday, the fruit of my labour was ‘Computer Manager’ (think I still have the tape somewhere). This game was similar in style to Software Star, but had you building computers and consoles rather than software. I anxiously sent it off to my hero Kevin Toms and waited to see if he’d release it under his Addictive label. The rejection letter was kind, but not actually from Kevin, which disappointed me greatly at the time. Undeterred I began work on my next game.

Whizkid (sadly lost) was a blatant take on Software Star, complete with animated games chart, but featuring two player turn-based play. Finally you could challenge a friend, and take your rival games companies head to head. This one was rejected by Bug Byte and, influenced by my teenage angst, I didn’t even send a copy to Kevin.  My third game was much more proficient than either Computer Manager or Whizkid. Splash Du Cash (not lost) featured exploding menus and natty presentation. Unfortunately, this management strategy game centered on schoolboy piracy, with you duplicating and selling copied games to friends. This one was, unsurprisingly, rejected by CCS and Argus Press. My 8-bit coding days came to an end, but the dream of creating a truly brilliant ‘Software Company’ management game remained.

Roll on to 1996 and the second year of Retrogames. I was buzzing with ideas and inspiration. I was trying to source products to sell within the Retrogames fanzine, we’d released audio cassettes of Commodore 64 soundtracks, I’d started work on a VHS Video of classic games in action, but I still had the unscratchable itch of game development in the back of my mind. A grand announcement followed in the next issue: we were going to release a brand new Spectrum game. Work on my magnum opus began.

The problem of writing a Spectrum game in the Playstation era is that everybody has been spoilt. Nobody is going to compliment you on your 8-bit graphic prowess, or amazing sound effects when they can play Wipeout. The biggest problem, it turned out, was too many ideas for the limitations of the format. Even 128k wasn’t enough for the behemoth my game had become. I kept people updated in the magazine, but by 1998, I’d given up chopping things out of it, and the game and data became dormant once more.  However, the itch continued. Retrogames came about because of my love of the history of gaming, but to some extent it is a torture running a company dealing with the history of gaming, when it’s a history you so wished you’d been part of, triumphing the work of so many great programmers when your small contribution lays languishing unpublished in a box somewhere. The itch got itchier.

Roll on another eight years to 2006, and after dabbling in programming applications on the PC I found the confidence to begin work on my game again. I have no idea how ‘real’ coders work, but I seemed to write my game in fits and starts. A solid month of daily work, then a lapse of three months while my batteries recharged. The problem with stopping and starting writing a computer program is that you forget where you were and what variables do what; it takes at least a couple of weeks to just get back into the swing of things and remember what you were doing. In any case, I was in no rush; this was a genre which has lain dead for nearly twenty five years, it would be ready when it was ready, and whenever it was released, I knew it would be a landmark achievement for Retrogames to release its own game. I knew it would appeal to fans of classic gaming, but the most important thing for me was that I’d enjoy playing it how I enjoyed playing those old games it’s based on. That was all until…

Game Dev Story by Kairosoft.  It is a game sourced from Japan and released for the Iphone, seemingly un-influenced by any of our Western ‘Software House’ Management games, yet strikingly similar in style and form. Despite wishing for new members to this genre for over twenty years (Segagaga doesn’t count, it’s a mini-game collection), I’d never heard of the original 1996 PC version of Game Dev Story, as it was only released in Japan and never localized into English. There’s a PC sequel too, which is also heading to Iphone in the coming year. Its discovery was both a moment of intense excitement, and also disappointment.

The game concentrates on development, with you choosing and managing staff as a way of making better games. The pay off is watching your games develop, with each of their four facets improving through the development stage with a random element. New consoles are launched in this imitation of gaming history, and if you are successful training your staff you can create a hardware engineer and develop your own console.

Hate it when someone else gets there first?

Like every other game mentioned in this article, Game Dev Story has its faults. Due to the length of time that game development takes, it is virtually impossible to release more than one game at a time. It would be nice to hold back releases, or at least release a barrage of poorer quality titles in the Winter season to take advantage of the increased market. When you finally get to release your own console, it’s impossible to promote it effectively, and sales just tail off when you reach a predetermined market share. It’s also possible to sell considerably more copies of a game for your console than there are consoles sold, something I think they’ve tried to get out of with one of the game reviewers saying ‘I like it so much I bought three copies’.  However, Game Dev Story is certainly a big step forward from Software Star. You can still name all your games, it recognizes sequels, is sprinkled with comedy, and is just as insanely addictive as the rest of these games. Finally the genre is reborn, but what of my game, the game which was supposed to be the catalyst to jump-start this long forgotten game type.

Well, ‘Retro Battle‘ (URLs registered some years ago) is a more thorough realization of gaming history. Starting in 1977 you buy one of three vintage companies, Grandstand in the UK, Magnavox in the USA or Popy in Japan. You then proceed, on a turn-based basis, to hire staff and develop consoles and games. All players start with a simple Pong style TV game as their first machine, but can develop a new machine to replace it from the very start. The reason for choosing those three companies is because they turned out not to be big players in the history of videogames. That leaves the game free to venture forward using real companies and events, allowing the player to literally play through the history of videogaming, and hopefully learn something along the way.

Unlike the other games in the genre, ‘Retro Battle’ is very data heavy. Building a console or computer allows you to choose the CPU, memory, sound and graphics chips, and as technology progresses, these options change throughout the game. Game development is data heavy too, with different genres more popular at different periods, like fighting games in the late 1980s for example, and facets like packaging more important in the 16-bit era than later. It’s possible to release up to ten different games at the same time, and these can be in a variety of formats, including your own. If you want to release games on the NES, you’ll be paying licensing fees to Nintendo, so if your games are huge sellers, you’ll help them grow too.

Then there are the all important charts: a top five for consoles, a top twenty for games, with each entry starting at the bottom and slowly pushing upwards. It’s the pay off that worked so well in Software Star, and one of the most important parts of my game, even more so, because Retro Battle allows two player turn-based play. Even if you manage to survive to 2010 and finish the game, you’ll still want to play it again and again if you’ve got someone to challenge you.  And yes, I realize in this world of MMORPG real time worlds, two player turned-based text strategy games sound a bit naff, but hey. My dream was to create a game which followed real events; the Spectrum comes out in April 1982, the Electron in November 1983, but what happens around these predetermined events is influenced by how successful you are in the game.

Perhaps Commodore gets squeezed by player two’s format and the Spectrum lives on, re-invented for the 32-bit era; perhaps the Sega Saturn decimates the Playstation and Sony pull out of gaming. Why not abandon console development, and just put out quality games on your rival’s console, helping to narrow the markets of all the other manufacturers? All eventualities to be calculated, making each game just as exciting as the last. A data heavy software behemoth (again), which, while currently in a running state, still needs a lot of development to get it to perfection.

So, what will happen to Retro Battle Now?  Good question, though I ask it myself. Lifting the lid on this project is something I’d never have done if Game Dev Story hadn’t been released. That it has been greeted so warmly and enthusiastically is proof that Retro Battle really could have a dedicated following. I have such an intense vision for how this game should be and getting it perfect is not going to be easy, particularly for me. The graphics are cobbled together, the program is crude and, I think, over complicated. At the beginning of last year I naively wrote to Microsoft hoping to be able to present it to them. I toyed with contacting Peter Molyneux who I met back in 1995, and whose passion for innovation I admire so much. I never did. And even by 2006 gaming had moved on – PC isn’t the right format anymore – to be successful this would need to be an IOS game, or a Facebook game. The cards are stacked against the game ever seeing the light of day, unless of course, an inspired developer happens to be reading this… you know where to find me.

For the old fart generation...

A gamer’s life was once so different to what it is now. Here I am, nearly 40, and already in the unenviable position to say to the Playstation generation, ‘you don’t know how good you’ve got it’. And in the same breath, fully realise that actually we had it best, and I wouldn’t change it for all the world.

This is the story of a world yet to embrace gaming.  A world where bigger boys would grab your copy of Sinclair Programs and show the girls in class what a speccy twat you were. A world where like minded brethren clustered together in damp corners of the playground, trading TDKs, and plotting against C64 rival tribes. Some of you won’t even be able to comprehend this, but it was a time before…. release dates.

I know, how on earth would you cope today if you didn’t know what game you were going to get for Christmas. You couldn’t have that hot title on day of release because you had no idea when that was. Back then, magazine reviews had real purpose; not like today, when you read Edge to see if they agreed with you (they still haven’t reviewed Black Ops!). There were no previews either, back then – the first sign of an impending release were the adverts. Ultimate ‘Play The Game’ adverts were the worst, they could generate near orgasmic excitement, but all the info you had was a pretty picture. All you could do was wait until the next issue of the magazine and hope there was more information.

And what did you get in the next issue of the magazine?  The advert again, exactly the same.  Sometimes it would take (particularly with Ultimate) six months for the game to finally be reviewed in the magazine. I actually used to walk two miles to a newsagent on the edge of town which stocked Crash magazine one day earlier than the local WHSmiths, and would then anxiously sit entranced on a bench, rapidly flicking through it before the long walk home.

Now you’ve had six months of adverts, you’ve read the emphatic review probably twenty times, when do you finally get to buy the game? Hard to believe, but this was quite a magical time for us gamers. Every single day, me and my friends used to visit our local games shop and see what had come out. Every day there were new titles there to see, yes, every day. Sometimes we would get to the shop too early after school, and one of the guys there would be at the distributors picking up the day’s releases. We’d hang about until he got back with the spoils, then walk out because he still didn’t have any of the titles we were waiting for.

You see, just because the game had been advertised for six months, received a Crash/Zzap/Sizzler/Smash review, that didn’t mean you could buy it yet. In what, truly, seems a laughable situation today, games would often not come out for another six months after the review. Coming back to my Ultimate example, I remember waiting a full year for Knight Lore; then a similar situation with Alien 8 and Nightshade. In an interview years later, Chris and Tim Stamper, founders of Ultimate and Rare, laughed about how they’d completed work on Knight Lore, Alien 8 and Underwurlde already when they released Sabre Wulf a year earlier. They just wanted to hold back the releases to build up anticipation. Well it certainly worked, but was very frustrating too.

It was the lack of consistency between companies which kept us on our toes. Ocean would advertise one month, review the next, then release the next. A three month cycle, but when they held back one of their releases you’d go into panic, like you’d never be able to buy it. A sprinkling of heavily advertised but unreleased games (Psyclapse / Bandersnatch / Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens) helped maintain the fear that some of the games reviewed in the magazines might never be available to buy.

Don’t go thinking the situation changed when 16-bit came along; we continued without proper release dates right into the early 1990s. I was still walking into the games shop with my fingers crossed in the Amiga and ST era. If it wasn’t for Sega and Nintendo and their Japanese way of organising everything, we’d probably still have no clue when we could buy something today.

But, while we can smile at how silly it all was back in those early days, it was also incredibly exciting. The anticipation of a new title being released is so much greater if you have no idea when it will appear. When you finally saw that new ‘Wally Week’ title on the shelf, in the flesh, well… it was a real rush. Now we just plop the new release in the trolley on top of the potatoes.

These days I have a wry smile at the hysterical rants when games like GT5 get put back a few more weeks; you don’t know you ‘bin born lad.

The good news for Sony is that the Move controllers, while requiring an elongated set up, are far more accurate than I imagined. In the table tennis game within ‘Sports Champions’ for example, when the Move controller is turned into a bat on screen, it moves with every nuance of your wrist. The response time is pretty incredible, giving a faithful one to one representation of your movements on the screen. However, it’s only after you’ve played a few games, or one game in my case, that you realise it’s too realistic. I wasn’t about to go down the leisure centre and play table tennis, so why on earth do I want to stand (you can’t sit down and play accurately) in front of the TV and pretend to play. The other events in the game rarely creep above average; the much heralded Gladiator battle event is for me the worst of all of them. To make matters worse, ‘Sports Champions’ is the king of the initial Move compatible crop.

However, the changing coloured lights in the rubbery ball on the top of the Move controller are very groovy. Play with your friends and the console assigns a different colour to each player, so you’ll never forget which character you are, but imagine my disgust when I realised that ‘Start the Party’ doesn’t actually allow simultaneous play. There’s potential in this title that just wasn’t fully realised; it’s glitchy in places, and its laboured turn based play was a nasty surprise, particularly when I purchased four Move controllers specifically for this title. The third Move game was one for my kids, and to be honest, they loved the new version of Eyepet for at least two hours. Sadly for that little fuzzy bundle of fun, he’ll now live in his plastic case on the dusty shelf of doom until my next games clear out.

There is no killer-ap for Move, and unlike the initial Wii games, there is no brand coherence in the titles released so far. A disparate bunch of poor sports simulations and cash-in kids games are certainly not going to propel motion controlled gaming into the core player’s domain. Despite the existence of quite a few great titles, and being a die-hard Nintendo fan for years, I avoid the Wii because of its controllers. In conclusion, i’ll do the same with future Move games.

But I need to come back to my initial headline. There has been a lot said about the cost of Kinect, however, because it can handle multiplayer straight out of the box, it’s actually much cheaper than a four player Move set up. Microsoft are saying you CAN now play sitting down, and you WILL be able to talk to it in Europe next year. Molyneux says Milo isn’t just a tech demo, and that it doesn’t matter that Microsoft cut the spec on the production models when compared with the demo versions. Fair enough, but what does matter is that Microsoft were to slow to release it. Any serious gamers who have got caught up in the new wave of motion controlled hype have probably already bought Move and, because Move is so disappointing, they will now avoid Kinect like its stinking motion-plus.

Wii sales have fallen to record lows across the globe, and you can pick up Wii games for less than a fiver, but hats off to Nintendo. They created a buzz about something new and original, then they saturated the market with it. They took the industry by surprise, rode the curiosity wave and churned out the top selling home console on the planet. Next hardware cycle though, don’t be surprised if Nintendo abandon motion control all together. The wily kitsune is now honed in on the buzz for 3D with the 3DS; they’ve decided it’s best to appeal to the hardcore again, and I can’t wait for their next machines. What’s the betting that when Sony and Microsoft finally create their 3D consoles, 3D is seen as old hat. Some companies innovate, some companies imitate, what a great shame that motion control wasn’t really worth imitating at all.

Like HRH by 8th Day, Di's Baby pokes fun at the royal family. However, Prince Charles shooting photographers and Diana trying to avoid an epidural was enough to get it banned. Sadly, this meant its stablemate, 'Seal Cull' didn't actually make it to release.

How do you get Pikachu on a bus? Pokemon.  Not exactly side splitting, but remarkably the only  game related joke I can remember.  While Hollywood has been cashing in with hilarious movies  for decades, and the BBC sells more Comedy DVDs than any other genre, the world of games still struggles to make you smile, let alone belly laugh.

That’s not to say that games haven’t tried.  Comedy is subjective – what one person finds hilarious,  another finds disgusting.  There are so many subtle varieties of comedy yet, disappointingly, games  always seem to go for the gross and disgusting.  The earliest comedy game I can recall is Pimania by Automata, a humble text adventure on the ZX81, featuring the PiMan.  The humour is gentle and off-beat and the game was a huge success thanks to its £6000 Golden Sundial prize; PiMan’s future was assured and he featured in most  of Automata’s subsequent releases, as well as a long running comic strip in PCW magazine.

However, even in those early days, I’ve always seen the PiMan as looking like something  you’d see scrawled in a pub toilet, like a man with a penis on his face. I’m sure his creators, Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold, must have been trying to make him look as filthy  as possible without actually adding any pubes!  For me, the only thing actually funny about PiMan was the music published on the B-side of the games, crude and poorly produced, but it always made me giggle. But then, I was young, and still thought farts were hilarious.

Looking at the early days of 8-bit gaming, it’s easy to confuse comic intent with a genuine shock factor. One of the first Spectrum adventure games I played was ‘Soho Sex Adventure – Herpes or Bust’ by Malan Software. At the tender age of twelve the abhorrent language and themes were quite breathtaking. It wasn’t all bad news, this ‘Roy Chubby Brown’ of adventure games did teach me a lot about STDs. I can only imagine the designer of the game was some sex crazed boot boy skinhead, who used computer programming as therapy for his tourettes. While many of us cherish these pioneering days of gaming, now with kids of my own, I’m glad of today’s game rating system.

Leisure Suit Larry was the first mainstream comedic adventure to really shock, but was it actually funny? For me, going through the motions of Larry buying a condom remains a golden gaming moment, his embarrassment compounded when everyone in the shop overhears the convoluted transaction

It’s something we all did, we’re not proud of it, but we can acknowledge it was often funnier than intentionally comic adventure games. Yep, we all typed rude words into text adventures to see what the response was. Most parsers would ignore you, or say they didn’t understand, but when one like Urban Upstart volleyed abuse back at you it was comedy gold.

One of my funniest text based Spectrum experiences was thanks to a random song generator included in ‘It’s only Rock n Roll’ by K-Tel. Because each line kind of flows into the next, the results are often hilarious:  ‘Give me more of your love, You need to make it grow, Jump on it, You never wipe your nose..’

There is now a very long tradition of comedy adventure games, from Bored of the Rings and Leisure Suit Larry right through to the often hilarious Broken Sword series, but to make an arcade game which is laugh-out-loud funny has been a challenge grasped by few.  Jeff Minter’s animal themed shooters always had titles to make you smile, like Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, but I always felt disappointed that the comedy didn’t really seep into the games.  Mikro-Gen’s collection of Wally Week games were something of a videogaming sitcom, but when the similarities between Wally in the games and Wally in 1980s episodes of  ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ became obvious, his credibility was severely tarnished.

A comic device often used in arcade adventure games is the ‘do nothing’ technique.  If you stop controlling your character and wait, they do something unexpected, like lay down and sleep, eat a sandwich or pop out a yoyo.  One of the earliest exponents was IK+, wait a while and your character’s trousers fall to the floor,  however, every time you tried to demonstrate this to a friend you were playing against, they would just pummel your face while your hands were off the controls.

Toilet Kids on the PC is one of those games which is only funny because it's so weird. It's a top-down shoot-em-up set down a toilet, because the game's hero is sucked into the bowl. Much poo throwing ensues and, yes, the boss on the cover art is holding two turds

By 1985, riding on the boom of official game licencing, came a wave of TV comedy related games.  The first of these was The Young Ones by Orpheus, a licence perfectly pitched for that generation of gamers. Far from funny was the cash-in-quick 9.95 price tag, and a poorly written sub-standard game. Similarly themed, but of far better quality, was Virgin’s ‘How to be a complete Bastard’ starring Adrian  Edmondson. It’s often funny, and very odd, with some of the game seeing you control your character as a gas cooker!

More licenced comedy games followed, from Monty Python, Viz, Simpsons, South Park, and more recently even Little Britain.  Unsurprisingly, none have offered many laughs.  Rather than getting the writers of the programs involved in making the games, they’ve left the design and story to the developers, and lets be honest, your average computer programmer wouldn’t go down well at Jongleurs.

If any arcade game was to actually try and make us laugh, it had to be British.  In 2001 our prayers were answered when Rare gave us Conker’s Bad Fur Day.  The concept of a fluffy kiddy Nintendo game hiding a profanity splattered adult romp was ingenious in itself.  The game’s mixture of funny accents and clever writing does actually provide many laugh out loud moments – the giant poo-boss wh0 sings operatically as he pelts you with turds, surely remains one of gaming’s landmark achievements.

Thankfully, someone at Nintendo must have fallen asleep the day this proposal landed on their desk

It is also fair to say that added reality has made games more funny and you can’t write about comedy in games without mentioning Grand Theft Auto.  While early GTA games rely on crass one liners to inspire mirth, recent versions are packed full of funny moments; what other game would allow you to go to a mafia meeting wearing a full rubber gimp suit?

If you try and think of your funniest gaming moment, nine times out of ten, it will be when you were playing side by side with another player and something funny happened unintentionally.  The human connection during multi-player games certainly seems to be the greatest source of gaming hilarity while any other funny moments are usually things that you and you only find funny.  Personally I like that cheesy wink you get after the shooting in Hyper Sports, or the way the commentator says ‘You’re wrrricked’ in Destruction Derby by Reflections on PS1.  Until someone develops a game in co-operation with some genuinely good comedy writers, and then turns it into a commercial hit, we’ll just have to keep on scouring dungeon walls for jokes and flushing the toilets in first person shooters.

There may be more power in my phone's sim card and more memory in a cotton bud... but these beauties were the mutt's nuts when I was a kid!

My first experience of loading was a bit of a shock. I’d previously played games on cartridges, or on TV games which didn’t have software at all. When I finally moved on from self typed ZX81 program listings, and invested in my first game cassette, I was in for a shock. Forget the satisfying noise and colour of a Spectrum classic, the ZX81 loads in silence, certainly the early games had no loading screens, or any way of knowing your tape was loading at all. That’s taking anticipation to a whole new level, a blank white screen, staring at the cassette deck as the tape gets towards the end. Will the game suddenly errupt onto the TV, or will you just get that click, as the play button pops up to signify the end of the tape. With my old battered Lloytron cassette deck, it was just as likely to be either.

The loading experience on the ZX Spectrum was something else entirely. You could hear every byte of code as it pumped its way into the machine. Red and blue borders for the headers, then the thirst quenching blue and yellow as the main code flowed through the cables. There were multi-coloured loading screens, which made quite a different loading sound to the game code itself. First there were those ticky bits while each pixel line was drawn onto the screen. Then the satisfying ‘Bluuuuurrrrrrr’ as the colour swept like a wave from the top of the picture to the bottom. If you had the loading volume wrong, then the colours appeared in the wrong places, a flashing psychedelic mish mash which usually ended in an ‘R Tape Loading Error’.

And yes, loading volume, two words which mean little these days, but would strike fear into the souls of 1980s Speccy fans. Enter hyperload, Turbo-load, Impossa-Load. These new loading styles were meant to speed up the loading process, but were really to help irradicate tape piracy. Some looked like normal loading methods, but instead of the familiar blue and yellow flashing border, a natty red and black, or green and blue. These loaded at a similar speed to normal tapes, but some games, (I hate you Bobby Bearing), seemed to have their code recorded onto the tape at double speed. The results were super high pitched loading speeds, often only audible to dogs. Your average school boy’s ‘market-bought’ cassette deck just wasn’t up to the job, and volume level became so hyper critical it would often be far more challenging to get a game to load, than it ever was to play. If the instructions said to type in ‘Load “” code’, rather than the normal, ‘Load “” , you knew you were in trouble.

See that's the problem... the volume level should have been set to 7.8 instead of 7.7 and it would have worked first time. Honest.

Move the crackly volume control to roughly 7.5 on the dial, start the tape, almost got to the loading screen, adjust to 8, got to the loading screen but crashed half way through. Go to 8.5, got nowhere near the loading screen. Delicately nudge it down to around 8.2 on the dial, got to the very beginning of the loading screen, then stopped. Ok, now try just under 8, this time it gets to loading screen, colours in the loading screen, but uh oh, colours all wrong and crash! Try something different, chuck it a 6. Doesn’t get to the loading screen. Review situation, try delicate finger nail adjustment to 7.7. Loading ok, gets to loading screen, colours it in – correctly. Feeling confident, dare to look away from the screen for almost three seconds. Still loading, dare to stand up and stretch. Still loading, but tape getting near the end.

SILENCE. Sound has stopped coming from the tape, but the border is still flashing, it’s still waiting for more code. Time for anxious staring at the tape deck, not much tape left to run. The delay seems like a decade, then Brrrrrrrr.Bip, Brrrrrrr,Bibablibablib. Screen goes black, 1982 Sinclair Research… Grrrrr. Time to try it all again using the other side of the tape.

Of course, us Spectrum fans at least had some control over the loading, the Commodore 64 offered a whole new wonderland of tape based fun. Firstly, they had no volume control, which generally meant games were even less likely to load. What they did have though, was loading music. For many, Imagine’s Hyper Sports was their first experience of loading music. Suddenly loading didn’t seem so tedious, the music not only giving you something to listen to, but also giving you firm belief that something was actually loading. Some games even had their best music for loading, most notable is Rob Hubbard’s amazing Sanxion theme, far better than the actual in-game music, you could only hear it in its entirety if you turned the tape off and stopped it loading the game. Towards the end of the C64’s 8-bit supremacy, you could play with the music as a game loaded, or even play a simple mini-game while you waited for the real game to load.

Don’t get carried away though, the C64 was a nightmare to load from too. Enter the Azimuth alignment kit, basically a cassette, screwdriver and cut-out cardboard arrow (!) to enable you to fiddle around moving the head around inside the tape deck. Then there were the loading times, until the mid-1980s, most C64 loading was in silence, so you never knew whether the game was loading or not. Thanks to the slow player and huge (at the time) 64k memory, some games took over ten minutes to load. One of my favourite C64 games, Software Star, actually took thirteen minutes to load. When I was a teenager, that was enough time to read a comic, eat your lunch and have a poo. Once you’ve waited that long to load something, there’s also a great reluctance to turn it off. I’d leave my C64 on for days on end, just to prevent having to load a game again.

FINALLY! A home computer that came with its own dedicated cassette deck! It DOES work well... right?

Eventually though, while on the surface C64 loading got sophisticated, the benefits were limited. Tape counters which counted upwards would just continue rising well after the tape deck had stopped itself. Descending tape counters would click back round to 999 once they got to zero. Worst were the games which had a counter which would get to zero, then the screen would go black. Those wise enough not to reset and start again, would find out that the game actually had lots more loading to do, but this time in silence without a counter.

It’s probably something to do with the placid nature of the British that we perservered with cassette loading for so long. In the USA and Germany, they quickly moved over to Disc based formats. Indeed, Commodore stated that the American public wouldn’t put up with loading from cassette, i’m not sure if that meant they thought we Brits were stupid, or just more patient.

In contrast to days gone by, the 3.5” disc loading times on mainstream 16-bit formats, Amiga and Atari ST, were a breath of fresh air. However, it didn’t take long for games to outgrow the format, and loading to seem like an issue all over again. The popularity of adventure gaming meant that soon we had 15 and 16 disc graphic feasts from the likes of Sierra, Delphine and Lucasarts. Disc swapping became a chore written about in magazines. Pushed to the back of many 16-bit gamers memory is the blood curdling terror you experienced when after twenty hours of play, it turned out that Disc 9 of your ‘legendary dungeon quest’ had a read error. The pain ran so deep, it meant that even if you got the faulty disc replaced, you’d never return to the game again.

I may build a shrine to the N64... and if the kitchen has to go to make room then, so be it. We can eat out a lot.

Perhaps this long history of waiting means i’m less tolerant of loading inadequacy than I ever was before. These days we have to wait for PS3 games to download updates, load, then install, then restart! This series of delays often tops even those lengthy Commodore 64 tapes. Loading is possibly also the primary reason why I herald the N64 as the greatest console of all time. This last great cartridge based console still mesmerises with its instant rush of great gaming.

In conclusion though, loading wasn’t just a vital part of the fabric of 8-bit gaming, but a fascinating experience in itself. Often stressful, it was also exciting, just watching that tape wirring around in its player. It is that link between sound and a videogame that I still find beguilling. Early 1980s Pop stars were releasing games on the B-side of their singles; radio stations were broadcasting software at 1am in the morning! I always wondered if I connected a microphone to the ‘ear’ socket of my Spectrum, could I actually sing it a game? Could I hum a loading screen? I guess there’s only one way to find out…

In the 80s, the covers offered the opportunity to see beautiful women in the buff, but the reality was always very different!

Write for our new site they said, give it a retro edge they said, go on then I said, but now all I can think of is scantily clad ladies, and that kind of fiddly lacy underwear girls used to pretend they were wearing back in the 1980s. The reason?  No, I’ve not been watching repeats of Dempsey and Makepeace; I’ve just processed another order for a 1989 Amiga strip poker game.  Their popularity never ceases to amaze me, we have over 20,000 games on our site, a diverse range which covers every conceivable game type, yet pound to a penny, list a ‘nudey’ game, and it’s sold within a week.

These customers are buying them through the internet, meaning they already have access to an entire world of adult entertainment, yet still want to play these rather feebly constructed stripping games, where rogue pixels and human nipples are barely distinguishable.  I’m pretty sure though, that these ‘nudey’ fans aren’t buying these games for titillation, they’re buying them for the ultimate memory trip. A visceral reminder of their journey to sexual discovery, and of course when they first learnt to use joystick and keyboard at the same time.

If you were born in the late 1960s or early 1970s, then you may have similar memories of 1980s adult gaming. Your Mum is downstairs, making your tea, you’re hot and sweaty from running home from school, frantically loading up a copied game from a world worn Lloytron audio cassette. Four attempts later, “Sex Invaders” finally loads, and you’re moving a tiny pink penis left and right, shooting spunk bullets at the floating bush monsters. Mum comes in to see if you want beans or not, and you knock your Spectrum on your floor while desperately trying to turn it off. “What were you playing?” she asks, three ridiculous explanations later, she’s confiscated your Speccy, and is sending you to bed straight after Crossroads.

The first proper ‘nudey’ game on the Commodore 64 and Spectrum was Animated Strip Poker by Knightsoft back in 1984. There were no photos, no digitization, no, there was a hand drawn lady, who to be honest, looked a bit like your friend’s Mum. She stood there in a black dress at the side of the screen while you muddled your way through the card game. Legions of school children must have learnt to play poker this way. Finally win enough money, and she takes off her dress. Now, this is where the animation comes in, I can still picture it in my mind, she turns sideways and fiddles with the strap around her neck before the dress falls to the floor. Then she’s facing forward again, in her bra and knicks, awesome! Months of practice later, and you finally get her naked, finally reveal that solid black triangle of pubic hair which someone drew – with a ruler by the looks of it! Quick, pull your trousers up, Mum’s coming up the stairs.

Even on our most desperate days, images like this are sure to encourage impotence yet the collage of pixels brought many a hot flush to young 80s lads

The adult adventure game was a completely different beast, usually they only consisted of text, but taught you things that even your older cousins didn’t understand. In 1984 I pretty much scared myself out of ever having sex, thanks to my hours playing Herpes or Bust by Mallan Software.  Whoever wrote that game had such a natural gift for bad language, and such a wonderfully sick mind, it makes Leisure Suit Larry look like Dale Winton at a hair plaiting competition.

Queen of the 1980s stripping game has to be Sam Fox. Her legendary 8-bit debut featured real digitized graphics, those beautiful chocolate brown and grey skin tones on the Commodore 64 are still something to behold. Unfortunately it was reported that thousands of copies were returned to games shops, once eager buyers realised she didn’t take her pants off.

Japanese roller girls had teenage boys captivated back in 1988 - so what's changed?

‘Nudey’ games continued into the 1990s on the Amiga and Atari ST, but grotesque willy fiddlin’ games, along with digitized two minute hardcore treats released through the public domain scene, certainly stemmed the flow of full price titles. One notable game though, was Teenage Queen by French company,  ERE Informatique. This arty strip poker game takes the style of Japanese anime. While the pictures may all be hand drawn, they are typically erotic. However, any teenage sexual enthusiasm quickly ebbs at the end of the game– and not in the nice way -  as the hilarious reward for finally completing the game sees our teenage queen take off her skin, and reveal she is in fact, a robot. Zip it up sicko! Mum, hide the toaster.

It may make me sound like an old git, but isn’t this just another example of how easy kids have it these days. Any sexual fantasy, in top quality high resolution, all at a prod of the world wide web. Somehow though, the struggles of seeking gratification from our humble 8-bit machines seemed far more rewarding. And who knows, maybe the ‘nudey’ genre will become main stream once more. The huge quantity of PC Flashware and Iphone apps featuring girls in their undies shows there is still a market there, but as Sam Fox will tell you, it’ll only grow if the pants come off