Indo Speccy
A £10 "untested" rubber-keyed Speccy bought sight unseen in East Java, a government import ban standing between me and a bag of axial capacitors, and a £36 chip for a £10 computer.
It’s a fair swap, not!
In playgrounds all over the UK in the 1980s, children would be swapping game cassettes, loaning game cassettes, or selling game cassettes.
One day a friend in my class introduced me to his friend in the year below, as he had a ZX Spectrum. He offered to lend me Dynamite Dan, which I accepted. After taking it home and loading it for the first time, I really took to the game and really wanted to keep it — see the full review for why.
We did not have one of those Amstrad twin-cassette stereo systems, and “The Key” failed to copy the game. I knew I had to return it, and had no real problems doing so. However, my brother had other ideas, and to this day I have absolutely no idea what was going on in his head. He took the game to another friend’s house and swapped it for Engineer Humpty, without even loading or playing it — it was swapped purely on the strength of the cover picture!!! (Review here — it was, at least, a real game.)
My friend refused to undo the swap. In the end, I gave one of my own games to the original lender as compensation — Super Mutt, if memory serves me correctly (review).
More like this
Look at me everybody, I’m a computer programmer!!!
My brother typed in a Hello World loop from the orange Sinclair manual. I changed one line, hit RUN, and turned around for an audience that wasn't there.
The Golf Course
A whole issue of INPUT magazine, typed in blind and left to render for the length of a coffee break — and a brother who wanted to know why none of it was a game.