One problem about the all-conquering Nintendo Entertainment System: the games were really really really expensive. They were costly enough for American families, and in the US you at least had the option of rental, where kids could easily persuade their parents to take an NES cartridge home for a weekend. In the UK you were expected to pay full whack for the exprience – 40 bloody pounds! – and Nintendo didn’t want rentals to be a thing in Europe.
So, a lot of British kids in the late eighties and very early nineties ended up playing startlingly cheap games for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and, erm, that was it. (The last Oric owner died of dysentry in 1986.) You could buy games for about £1.99 or £2.99 (as Alan Partridge once said, the last penny was just pricing rhetoric). None of them may have exactly been Super Mario Bros 3, but the better ones were a lot of fun – and by the end of the decade, a lot of formerly full-price games were being re-issued on the budget labels for the same cost as the new stuff.
This all lasted up until around 1992 or 1993 at the latest, when ongoing tech developments in gaming could no longer be ignored. That was the point where we were confronted with the first Nintendo console that actually did big business in Britain (and it had the proper Super Famicom look, rather than the weird boxy-and-purple shit that some lad threw together in America), not to mention the arrival of Street Fighter 2, and the early promise of 3D gaming, in the form of games life Wolfenstein and Doom…
…Ah yeah, those two. Hugely influential, of course, with the latter still widely played and modded. The interesting thing about those two games were that, like the budget games on the dying Spectrum scene, you could get those for the literal cost of packaging and distribution from certain UK shops / US stores, or even copied from disc to disc like people in the then-recent past did, tape-to-tape. Hmm…
It seems that, when you think about it, there are some startling cultural links between these two very different platforms. Both the ZX Spectrum and MS-Dos PCs were a lot of people’s introduction to computing and gaming in general. Both platforms had games that could be obtained very cheaply, sometimes essentially for free. And both of these platforms are derided by console gamers.
I’m not painting all console owners with the same brush of course, but there the reactions to the weirdness and eccentricity that you can find in both American-made Dos games and British Spectrum games seem quite simliar to me. Sometimes the reaction is appropiate (“What the hell is this?!”) and sometimes less so (insert rant by man pretending to be James Rolfe here). And both types of games are often considered to be not “proper gaming”, or not serious enough to be considered to be worthwhile.
Yes, there is a stereotype of a commerical Dos game of the 80s / early 90s – a big old box, designed by people with giant Conehead brains, a ring-bound manual that you will need to understand every arcane text command you’ll have to type in to deal with an invading Roman army, or to conduct the investigation into the murder of a 1920s industrialist. Those sorts of things absolutely existed – but there were smaller games as well, cheaper and odd little things.
Games which struggled against the bare technical specs (4 colours for “graphics mode”, beeping instead of sound effects) to emulate, however simply and crudely, an arcade experience in the home (or office, when the boss wasn’t looking). Again, that’s not entirely alien to the experience of playing anything on the ZX Spectrum (8 colours, with another eight that were the same but dimmer; the exact same kind of beeping for sound). And both platforms required you to type in things to get something to load instead of just putting in a cartridge. Granted, with Dos games it would load in a few seconds, as opposed to having to wait around maybe five minutes for something like this on a Speccy 48K.
There were plenty of other differences as well, but overall I can’t help but feel that the one big shared cultural link these days between the United States and the United Kingdom isn’t that all our politicians need to be locked up somewhere very very secure; rather that many of us above a certain age grew up playing very cheap and often quite peculiar games in roughly comparable economic circumstances.
That’s a bit of a mouthful for the end of this article, so I’ll conclude instead with a Youtube clip that may be relevant…