The 8-Bit Experience: The Definitive Review

A biography for the unfortunate

A common thread on Affectionate Discourse is my obsession with generational difference. I think the fault lines between X, Millennial and Z (and latterly, Alpha) are fascinating in terms of tolerances and preferences, and while this has plenty to inspect with regard to the modern videogame, I’ve been increasingly concerned that primary experiences of the 8-bit era are now more commonly found under emulation or via re-issue on modern platforms. In the modern age, the Gen-X experience is now a minority one given the total population of enthusiast gamers. As such there’s a lack of innate, experiential understanding of the chronology and necessarily, a re-contextualisation of the first two decades of videogaming through unavoidable comparisons that can be drawn between old and new. 25 or so years ago, in my earliest days of videogame forum dabbling, the emergence of the retro scene stemmed from a shared history. The majority of the participants had their primary experiences in the 70s and 80s, whereas now there are two distinct generations of gamer who see those decades as a golden age from a different century, and one they were absent from¹. It struck me that perhaps there is something of a lack of personal biographies for those decades, that in the absence of a deep and dense oral history, there is instead the coalescence of some media-derived, folk-woven monomyth. One that vaguely captures the generalities but misses the heartfelt and the personally individual. Not one to rest on my laurels, I immediately realised I absolutely must therefore write at length about what it was actually like to be in the first generation of videogamers as we understand it today.² At this point, I’d like to make it clear that none of the above has anything to do with me playing UFO 50 and Shattered Space within the same week, or how that made me feel some Nietzschian-chasmic sense of the passage of time, which only served to exaggerate my ever-increasing sense of alienation from the entire fucking universe.

Having been born in 1974, the first videogame I can recall ever seeing was Space Invaders. It was an arcade cabinet, and I remember it arriving like the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey to signal the dawn of mass-market videogaming. I remember adults getting extremely excited around it, and my Dad lifting me up to see what was on the screen. Shortly after that, I remember a Galaxian cocktail cabinet and its bright colours and noises, which gave me the distinct sense that Space Invaders wasn’t a one-off. This places us firmly in the late 1970s, and I’m reasonably happy to believe they actually represent memories specifically from 1978 and 1979. It’s almost impossible to overstate the influence that Sci-Fi and space ‘stuff’ had on popular culture of the time. Star Wars was still massive, and had seeped deeply into the play culture we indulged in, even though none of us had actually seen the film. But in combination with things like the ongoing space race, the steady stream of imagery from planetary probes, the explosion of children’s books that were filled with astronomical photographs or exciting illustrations, not to mention amazing shit like 2000ad and a general explosion of Sci-Fi TV from Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century,³ it was impossible to escape. Space Invaders and Galaxian were as much part of that zeitgeist and under that Sci-Fi cloak, they were among the first smuggled vanguard of an entirely new medium.

If you talk to older heads, namely early Gen-X and gamer Boomers, they’ll tell you how mindblowing it was to see a home Pong machine and to be able to control what was happening on the television screen. For them, their childhoods were full of screens that were passive portals. Mere windows into experiences they had to sit and watch as an audience instead of a participant. Being born post-Pong, my cohort almost expected the screen to have interactivity. Particularly when seeing things like Teletext being demoed both on TV and in electronics shop showrooms, not to mention the early home computer entries from Sinclair, Commodore et al from 1980 onwards. In that short period between the dawn of commercial home computers in the late 70s and the home computer boom of the early-mid 80s, we saw the arrival of the Atari VCS/2600. Another Monolith of sorts, its presence in the same showrooms and across the media was the herald for this incoming age of mass market videogaming. We got one around 1982, and hence became my first contact with home gaming. We had the standard carts: Space Invaders and Combat. Despite many of them being four or five years old, 2600 games were prohibitively expensive. £30 in 1982 equates to £108 in 2024 money. So we never added anything to the machine, and it fell into dusty non-use. At school, we got to play with a Sinclair ZX81, mostly to mess around with BASIC. The Spectrum may have just launched, but it wasn’t ever-present just yet, nor was it seen as predominantly a gaming platform. None of these new domestic computers were. As a generation of schoolkids, we’re instead being taught that computers are coming, and that they’re going to be very important. The gaming side was almost ignored. Instead, it felt like it was paramount we were merely exposed to these new machines, as if it was some form of inoculation required to become digital citizens within the information age. In this sense, the videogame was a spur offshoot of a much deeper and wider change in society as a whole. The unstoppable digitisation of culture was underway, and videogames were seen as the gaudy circus sideshow to mask the far more profound changes that would emerge in the 1980s and mature in the 1990s.

If I was to pinpoint a year that I’d say was ground zero for the UK computer gaming scene, I’d say it was 1984. The year that saw the launch of the Amstrad CPC series of machines, the year of Jet Set Willy and Elite, the year that Newsfield printed the first issue of Crash⁴ - arguably the first single-format magazine to launch that was dedicated to gaming first and foremost. It was also the year that Commodore released the Plus/4, which would, in late 1985, become the first home computer that would be explicitly mine and the first machine I was able to buy games for. But in 1984 we reached that critical mass that home videogaming needed to transcend faddishness and become a permanent part of popular culture. The general explanation of computers insisted that they used floppy disks, as these were novel and alien, not to mention bespoke to the computer. However a big development at home was the abandonment of expensive cartridges in favour of the easily reproduced audio cassette. Already mundane by the early 80s, this was nonetheless the medium on which the British game industry was founded and upon which it flourished. 1984 sees Sinclair begin its peak phase⁵ as the ZX Spectrum is fixed at 48k and maintains its runaway success, with the re-cased ZX Spectrum+ model launching in the autumn and immediately outselling the rubber-keyed original by 2-to-1, according to contemporary accounts. The Commodore 64 is well-established as a direct peer and with Amstrad's huge marketing push, the CPC elbows its way to third place with 1983’s Acorn Electron taking up the rear. Atari’s 400/800 proved early on that split-SKU hardware platforms are fucked in a single-SKU market, despite being a gateway 6502-based platform for UK programmers that would find fame and fortune on the Commodore 64. Hence, the ecosystem for UK videogame is surprisingly wide and varied, offering a wonderful range of visual and audio styles.⁶ It’s such a huge contrast to the unified platforms we have today. 1984 is also the year of the iconic Imagine vs Ocean edition of Commercial Breaks,⁷ which details nicely the difference between the overconfidence of certain fly-by-night superstars and the serious professionalism of the more competently-run companies that had emerged over the previous three years. Critically perhaps to my biography, the high street is now awash with videogames. You can walk into three national chains and buy games off the shelf. Boots, Woolworths and the then all-conquering WH Smith. And finally, perhaps the most personally influential development of 1984 was the launch of Mastertronic’s £1.99 range.

My best friend had a ZX Spectrum. They’d just upgraded it to 48k and were saving for the all-important Kempston interface so they could finally use a joystick. But from our earliest days playing on it, there were two key tapes: a C90 of copied games⁸ and a Mastertronic release called Jason’s Gem. What’s particularly beautiful about 1984 is that amongst my age group, there wasn’t a critical consensus making dictats about what to play. You simply had to explore for yourself, and with only box art, screenshots and copy to go by, this was definitely a rollercoaster ride of spectacular ups and downs. Jason’s Gem was certainly on the up, being a painfully charming mix of a Lunar Lander pre-game of vertical descent while shooting and avoiding the scenery followed by a two-to-three screen platforming section that ran at an alarmingly quick pace. Now if you try to interrogate the modern monomyth of 1984 in UK videogaming, you’ll be shouted at for not beating Sabre Wulf or Knight Lore, or embarking on an epic game of Lords of Midnight. But of course we hadn’t heard of those games. We had Jason’s Gem and glorious Scramble clone Penetrator off the copied C90. As the 8-bit years progressed, games became known by word-of-mouth notoriety. Skool Daze is really cool. Elite is the ultimate space game. Saboteur is the greatest thing you’ve ever seen, and so on. This was information that came down to us from the gods - older brothers who really knew their shit. This was, of course, because they were the ones reading the games magazines and doing all that C90 copying. For us naïve ingenues, we ran the gauntlet of going to the shops⁹ with our pocket money.¹⁰

The average pocket money in 1984/85 was £1. Mastertonic’s genius act in pricing down to £1.99 meant you could buy a game every two weeks. Of course this was deliberate, but the change in pace and access was momentous. For me, compared to the Atari 2600 and the two games we had forever, it was like being freed from prison. With my trusty Commodore Plus/4, I was out buying all the Shaun Southern classics I could, as he released plenty through Mastertronic. Critically, it engendered the buying behaviour that would make me a lifelong collector. As Mastertronic was joined by a suite of other budget labels at the same price point, there was a sense of having so much to try, so much to see, that the landscape was vast. The pace of change also meant that games just a couple of years old would seem incredibly outdated, so this constant influx of new titles, which you could buy on a fortnightly basis, was intoxicating. Initially, 8-bit pricing was quite bonkers, where the premium price would wobble between £5.99 and £14.99, before settling into a £1.99/£2.99 budget tier and a straight £9.99 for premium games and compilations. And the compilations were the real treasures of the era. My first memorable encounter was Ocean’s They Sold A Million, which on the Spectrum introduced me to both Jet Set Willy and Sabre Wulf. We were well into the arcade conversion years, and hence we were all getting an education in the arcade by which games were making the jump onto our computers. I remember my Spectrum friend getting Elite’s Hit Pak for his birthday and us getting to grips with Bombjack and the really quite impressive conversion of Capcom’s Commando. By 1987, I had a Commodore 128¹¹ and Ocean was beginning a round of mega-compilations of its licensed titles, so with a small cohort of secondary school friends we could amass quite the collection. There was a distinctly unique joy in spending birthday and Christmas money on these big-ticket comps, for they very rarely disappointed. You’d always find two or three games that made the purchase worthwhile. Ocean’s Magnificent Seven brought the bangers at full force: Head Over Heels, Wizball, The Great Escape, Arkanoid. All superb, and all backed with gorgeous loading screens and Galway’s wonderful loading music. And that was one of so many great compilations in the 8-bit years. Beau Jolly’s 10 Computer Hits series were full of highlights, but other publishers soon caught on. Durell would eventually release all of their best hits in a truly lavish package, including Saboteurs 1 and 2 on one giant comp and proto-Grand Theft Auto street racer Turbo Esprit.¹² Hewson did a four-pack with Zynaps and Exolon’s C64 versions but also the sublime Paradroid re-interpretation, Ranarama. Other independents would shove together the likes of International Karate with flawed gems like Nexus. It was through Beau Jolly’s comps that I got to play Jeff Minter’s games for the first time, too. These compilations certainly balanced the risk but they also taught the passionate and attentive player that old games were still good. That the past very much had a value. As mentioned earlier, the rate of change was dizzyingly rapid. Games would have development cycles measured in weeks - the average seeming to be just six from inception to tape duplication. I think it was Andrew Braybrook that remarked on how long his games took. He managed pretty much two a year. If it wasn’t for the compilations, I would have missed out on a lot of genuinely good games. While the home copying network was always in effect, it couldn’t be relied upon to be comprehensive, so the comps took up so much of the slack. By the end of the 8-bit magazines in the early 90s, many of the greats in the grand 8-bit catalogue had been rereleased as covertapes on each issue and thus, the 8-bit compilation was over. In a tragic turn, only a few decent comps were released for the 16-bit computers and the entire concept seemed to fade from memory shortly after that.¹³ But there wasn’t a pre-owned market back then and it’s perhaps a genuine tragedy that high-street videogame retail killed the compilation by dint of opening a new retail channel to maximise its income at everyone else’s expense.¹⁴

The back end of my 8-bit experience is an utterly quixotic and individual one, but such was the spirit of the times. By the end, I’d been lucky enough to get a disk drive for my Commodore 128 and this opened up an entirely new sphere of 8-bit gaming. The US disk releases were on another level entirely. I’d learned to type by playing text adventures¹⁵ on my Plus/4 with incredibly basic verb/noun parsers, but with the disk drive I was able to play an Infocom adventure at last, after many years of reading about them. It was the lesser-celebrated Hollywood Hijinx but nonetheless it had that legendary parser and interacting with that felt like accessing the future. The other big notable was Richard Garriot’s Ultima IV, which after Mercenary and Elite was one of the most impactful games I have ever played. Its delivery of a colossal, explorable open world full of adventure was fucking stupendous. A real dazzler of a realisation of what videogames could be. If you tire of my constant moaning about horizons, or my undying devotion to Bethesda open-worlders, then it’s Ultima IV you need to blame. By 1989, I was out of the 8-bits for a brief 18 months as a grey importer, improbably getting hold of a fucking Megadrive after selling the Commodore 128, the disk drive and beloved collection to a friend for £250. It easily covered the cost of the £180 Megadrive and copy of Super Shinobi on top. I bought two further games with the proceeds from a Saturday job; Golden Axe and Thunderforce III. Tiring of playing £40-£50 for a single game, I sold my Megadrive to another friend for £100 and his ZX Spectrum +2, replete with a shitload of games. That’s right, I was retro in 1991, motherfuckers.

And that is my 8-bit biography. Of course, I could probably write 20,000 words on all the games¹⁶ I’d want to talk about within that period, and perhaps more of the sociology of growing up as a videogame fanatic as the industry that makes them grows up alongside you. But I hope you can understand the key points of why that era is so incredibly special to those who experienced it. Perhaps one utterly critical point remains under-explained here; that relationship with the arcade. What it provided, which we do not have today, is something to aspire towards. An example by which we can compare the qualities of the home product. And in thinking about the notion of where the horizon in videogames lies, the arcade certainly helped to push our expectations and imaginations of where things could go. We dreamed of what might be possible on a regular basis and our natural inclination was to be carried along on a wave of eternal, unstoppable progress. A wild, multivariate wave of possibilities and prospects, which were only ever going to get brighter and brighter as we saw hardware - both arcade and home - become ever more powerful. The ever-expanding bubble of all the games carried a sense of acceleration in its expansion, that at the threshold, wonders were popping into existence that we never expected. It was like being in a state of continual surprise, much like the idea that something as opulent and gorgeous as Space Harrier or Outrun could become Afterburner’s jet fighter in the Sega blue skies and eventually Galaxy Force in space. We were climbing a vertiginous slope, a racing curve upwards that seems, in the modern age, to be arcing into gently inclined plateau.

To participate in the 8-bit experience was to feel part of something new and exciting and fresh. As we grew into teens, we’d feel that again in music as the 90s dance revolution took off. And yet again as public access to the Internet exploded. Again, the sheer propulsion of the culture, the sense of glorious momentum, is something I treasure the experience of as much as I do playing that grand lineage of games or dancing in all those sweaty raves. Much like the age of Steam, the 8-bit era is glorified because of how distinct it is from the modern equivalent. And much like those heritage lines that run genuine steam locomotives, if you haven’t experienced it directly, you perhaps don’t understand the nature of them, and the phenomena they lead to, quite as well as you could. But the best part is that when you do approach a past you never were able to experience as a tourist, the bumps are as much part of the fun as the smooth bits. I remember the first time I impatiently felt a steam train slowly build up to full chat, but once in full flow the sound, smell, the microsensations of propulsion, the thrill of the speed, all added up to a sense of enlightenment. I suddenly understood where the romance came from. I urge you foreigners to the 8-bit lands to try the same. Go to the exhibitions, go to the festivals and the museums and see if you can capture some of the romance for yourselves, for these aren’t just nostalgia wells for the old to wallow in. They are places where you might just capture that sense of just how much fun it all really was.

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1. To grasp this as an old person, recall the idea of the 1950s for children of the 70s. Back To The Future et al. The late 1980s saw twin revivals in 50s teen culture and 60s psychedelia, although the latter was connected more specifically to the burgeoning rave scene.

2. Of course, you can argue that CompSci students at MIT in the late sixties were the first gamers but I'd argue that you're a bellend if you do so because ACTUALLY the first gamers were playing frantic deathmatches in Noughts and Crosses in the late 1940s.

3. Buck Rogers was a huge moment in having access to sci-fi action every Saturday night. Removed from the flittish settings of Dr Who, where spaceships weren't always guaranteed, or Blake's 7's interpersonal melodramas and adult-oriented dark arcs and arguing, Buck Rogers offered remarkable universal appeal. I rewatched the lot a few years back and was struck by the sheer fun of it all, not to mention some really quite nice Sci-Fi concepting. And, much like Battlestar Galactica, a guaranteed dogfight every fucking week.

4. Alongside multiformats Computer and Video Games (1981) and Personal Computer Games (1983), Crash's position as a single-format magazine dedicated to gaming indicates the strength of the culture, not to mention the mag's  success fuelled the launch of Zzap 64 (1985) and Amtix (1985) and eventually, Newsfield's attempt at a 16-bit multiformat, The Games Machine (1987).

5. Despite attempting to launch the fatally-flawed QL, 1984 saw Sinclair reap a turnover of £77m - a big, 30% step up from the £54m it turned over in 1983.

6. Imagine going into an electronics retailer and seeing a Spectrum, a Commodore 64 and a Vectrex all in a row. The sense then was that the brand related to the output in completely distinct and individual styles, with no real notion of objective superiority between them. It really came down to matters of aesthetic taste, rather than the modern mode of chasing visual parity with each other at increasing resolutions and framerates.

7. There is an hilarious claim from arch-bellend Bruce Everiss (in 1984, a high-up at Imagine) that piracy killed the company. Of course it didn't - he's just trying to claim that if everyone who pirated Imagine games had bought them then Imagine might have survived. But the irony is he made this claim in the early 2000s, on the independent gaming forum Rllmuk (of all places). Imagine the laughs when the Commercial Breaks episode emerged on YouTube a few years later, featuring an incredibly wise and sage David Ward, the boss of Ocean who saves the Imagine staff from joblessness, happily making the case that home piracy is to be completely expected and accounted for, being part of the culture from which the videogames industry relies on for product. Ward's target was commercial piracy on a large scale, yet it remains to be proven what effect this had on Imagine, if any.

8. There is a completely forgotten and ephemeral folk culture of these home-piracy tapes with their curated collections and wonky tape counter indices. I remember seeing them in every Spectrum owner's house, with their handwritten contents and occasional outsider art illustrations. Of particular note were the counter readings, where a tape recorded on one recorder's counter didn't necessarily match a the recorder used to play it back. Naturally, small errors would exponentiate the deeper you got into the tape, leading to counts that may land you in the middle of what you wanted to load. It wasn't uncommon to see original counter readings scribbled out with updated ones written nearby. A peculiarity of the ZX Spectrum, it was rare to see two Speccy households have the same tape player. Oddly, this goes some way to personalising the machine to an extent that platforms with standardised tape players didn't have.

9. I genuinely miss the days of going game shopping with friends that had different computers to mine. It would expose you to entire catalogues of titles unique to those machines. With a lack of foreknowledge from games media, it had an adventurous quality of taking punts on gut feelings from copy and screenshots. Perhaps our utter disgust at modern ills like loot boxes comes from having gambled on our happiness every two weeks on which £1.99 promise would come true.

10. There is a lost experience for teens in taking a bus into town, buying a game and then reading the instructions etc on the way home. This was such a fundamental part of the gamer experience in the 1980s that we forget how modern audiences probably haven't read an instruction leaflet for decades. Taking gens Z and Alpha into account, there will be some who've never owned a physical game, and hence never had the sense of a material connection the things they play. One wonders what becomes of the collector in that context. Are they doomed to be prospecting miners of a past they never knew?

11. One of the deepest spiritual experiences of my entire life was opening up a second-hand Commodore 128 for Christmas and then getting a second box full of Commodore 64 tape games. It was a Christmas of profound joy and communion with a three-year videogame collection to explore. A truly wondrous time. It was a couple of weeks later that I finally tried the C90 that lurked within the retail copies, whereupon I discover the sacred text Uridium.

12. In a wild, very Britsoft connection, Durell's licensing of the Lotus Esprit eventually leads, via the legendary Shaun Southern, to the Lotus Turbo Esprit series on the 16-bits. A wonderful example of how a single car can get two fabulous games.

13. I think the final round of compilations came in IP round-ups. I remember buying a the Fallout collection in the very late 1990s for PC as the last one I bought.

14. Until, of course, you're spending millions on warehouses filled with used copies of annualised football games that will never, ever sell.

15. Again, another tragic loss to gaming mainstream. Interactive Fiction was on an equal tier in the 1980s, with every games magazine having a dedicated text adventure section. The experience of playing them was nearly universal, too. It'll be hard to find an 80s gamer that hadn't banged their heads against The Hobbit or Ocean's Never Ending Story, or any of the Brian Howarth titles that seemed to exist on every conceivable format. For a US-centric view on text adventures, see this Google Tech Talk, which is bookended by Jason Scott's insights but contains the whole of the excellent documentary he made, Get Lamp.

16. That's 20k words per game, you know.