My nephews have been visiting recently. Aged 9 and 11, they are just as into video games as I was into computer games in the mid-to-late 1980s.
While they’ve been visiting, we’ve played a few Nintendo Switch games together, the biggest hits being Le Cartel’s marvellous Heave Ho and the port of Burnout Paradise. But for the most part, they’ve had their faces buried in their hand-me-down mobiles, playing free-to-play games.
I asked them to show me their favourites, and I was dismayed by what I saw: tedious physics-based sandboxes where crash test dummies ragdoll to their deaths, endless busywork games with multiple currencies, loot boxes, and daily login rewards that feel less like a game and more like a second job. Interstitial ads interrupt the flow every five minutes. They live in a world of microtransactions and grind-heavy mechanics designed to keep players on a treadmill rather than letting them have fun. And they’re fine with it. To them, that’s just what games are.
Naturally, being an old fuddy-buddy, I said things were better in my day. So my nephews challenged me: “What was so great about games in the ’80s, then?”
Well, nephews, I’m never one to turn down the chance to wallow in nostalgia. Challenge accepted. Here are 10 things I fondly recall about playing games when I was 11.
The original platform wars
Forget Sega vs. Nintendo or PlayStation vs. Xbox. Back in the UK, it was all about ZX Spectrum vs. Commodore 64—or, if you like, blocky graphics vs. anaemic graphics.
The one thing both camps had in common was a mixture of hatred and reluctant sympathy for the poor Amstrad CPC owner.
Joystick waggle
Long before the Nintendo Wii became synonymous with the term “waggle,” a million Kempston Cheetah 125+ joysticks met their demise due to excessive thrashing. In my home, the culprit was often Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and its sequel, Daley Thompson ’88.
The Kempston looked sturdy but offered little resistance to the tantrum of a frustrated 11-year-old.
Games on tapes
Before exploitative mobile apps. Before digital downloads. Before Blu-ray and CD. Before disks and cartridges. There were cassette tapes.
Although waiting seven minutes for a game to load was a real pain, it was offset by the ease of, well, piracy. All you needed was a tape-to-tape cassette recorder and boom—you had a homemade bootleg collection. Every kid had two piles of cassettes in their bedroom: their legitimate purchases and a stack of Maxells and TDKs adorned with hand-drawn cover art.
Colour clash
Colour clash—or, more accurately, attribute clash—was a unique quirk of ZX Spectrum games, caused by how the machine stored bitmap and colour information separately in memory. Commodore 64 owners used it as ammo in the great platform war, but Sinclair enthusiasts embraced it as a badge of honour. Developers who found creative ways to work within these constraints were celebrated.
That said, trying to pick out the right team in Match Day 2 could be an absolute nightmare.
POKEs
These days, my nephews will happily use their pocket money to unlock cheats and features, assets, or timing boosts. Back in the ‘80s, we hacked the system by typing in reams of BASIC code before loading a game.
These ‘POKE’ commands unlocked a treasure chest of game-modifying delights—unless you made a typo, in which case the whole thing crashed. Fun!
Budget bargains
Budget games helped popularise home computer gaming in the ‘80s. While ‘proper games’ could cost anywhere between £7 and £10, budget labels such as Mastertronic and Ricochet ensured a steady stream of titles were available at local newsagents for a paltry £1.99.
They weren’t always good, but they weren’t always bad either. And most importantly, they were always affordable.
Loading times
Rather than describe what it was like to wait for a Spectrum or Commodore game to load, just watch this video and marvel at how a few minutes can feel like an eternity.
That’s nostalgia, right there.
The best game names
We now live in an era where video games sometimes take themselves too seriously. Titles sound like they have been AI-generated from a keyword list—think Champions League of Heroes of the Eternity Storm: Deluxe+ (coming later this year, that one).
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s, we had some of the oddest, maddest—and sometimes incredibly literal—game titles imaginable. A few favourites:
- Horace goes Skiing
- Way of the Exploding Fist
- 3D Deathchase
- Everyone’s a wally
- Fat Worm Blows a Sparky
- Three weeks in Paradise
- Heavy on the Magick
Tell me we weren’t the winners here.
Crappy arcade conversions
The arcades were big in the ‘80s. Games like Gauntlet, After Burner, and Out Run were the staple of any day trip or after-school excursion.
Fortunately, some publishers—usually US Gold—decided to bring these hits home. Unfortunately, we decided to buy them, too. There were some solid attempts—Domark’s Star Wars being a highlight—but most were atrocious. The ZX Spectrum port of Double Dragon was particularly infamous.
Still, there was the occasional gem. US Gold’s home conversion of Out Run wasn’t great, but it had one saving grace: rather than attempting to recreate the arcade game’s astonishing soundtrack, they simply bundled the whole thing on a separate cassette tape. Nothing quite beats driving through East London in a Triumph Dolomite with Passing Breeze booming in the background.
Great movie tie-ins
Despite the horrors of arcade conversions, the ‘80s did give us some fantastic movie adaptations. Domark’s Star Wars trilogy stood out, alongside a range of solid movie tie-ins from Ocean Software especially, including The Untouchables, Batman: The Movie, and RoboCop.
RoboCop was a particular favourite, featuring impressive digitised speech. Wait—was that “RoboCop” or “Purple car” you just said, Murphy?
Please enjoy Jonathan Dunn’s glorious title music from the ZX Spectrum 128k version of the game.
Obviously, I played just as many crappy games as a child as my nephews do now, but I take some solace in the fact that games taught me to be patient while something loaded—rather than to expect to use my pocket money to reduce a resource timer. Hopefully, the good stuff—like Heave Ho and the Burnout Paradise—will leave a longer-lasting mark on these kids.
Image credits: Computing History, Crash Magazine, Hardcore Gaming 101, World of Spectrum
