Speccy Nation

The book I read to research this post was Speccy Nation by Dan Whitehead which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is a nostalgic look at the Sinclair Spectrum personal computer. In particular there are sections on the various classic games. The Spectrum which came in 16 KB and 48 KB memory versions was antiquated by todays standards but it did have a kind of charm. It had rubber keys and they made a big deal out of any computer like the Commodore 64 that had proper keys. It also only had 16 colors, stored games on audio tape and had clunky graphics. Practically anyone with a bit of know how could write and sell there own game and often did. It was a time when you could release a game like Raiders Of The Lost Ark without fear of getting sued. Many of the classic games if released today with modern standards probably wouldn’t be classics. Games like Death Wish 3 where the film was hardly a blockbuster. The games in those days also tended to be harder and code writers had to squeeze every last drop out of the limited memory and processor when writing a game. Games were more creative and could be done on a smaller budget so niche markets could be served. You rarely saw a 100 programmers working on one game. Games could just serve the British market for example. This book is around 100 pages so is a reasonable length. I did really enjoy this book and do recommend it. Dan works as a computer games journalist who also played Speccy games from the age of 9 in 1982.