HalfTimeSayers
Player Valuation: £35m
ZX81 anyone? For games, you had to buy a magazine from the paper shop, spend 17 hours typing in the code: “20 Go to line 10 etc”. The final bit was to type run and press enter. If you had put a single space out of place it threw an “Syntax Error” error but didn’t highlight where you were wrong, so you had to check every single line.
You would then be rewarded with top down racing game where your car was an X and other cars where O’s. The sides of the track where / | and \’s, scrolling down like you were just pressing enter repeatedly.
Parents would always refuse to let me leave it switched on overnight, so you’d have to type it all in next time you wanted to play it. Not actually sure what else those type of computer were actually for. It was pre plug in cassette players for loading from tapes, no printers. No internal storage. No clue why we had one, but I’ve gamed at every opportunity ever since.
Funny how everyone hated on the advent non-physical games and lack of trade ins, when that’s how it was 40 years ago before Ataris and Spectrums, where you knew if it said OCEAN on the cassette box, it was probably a banger.
You would then be rewarded with top down racing game where your car was an X and other cars where O’s. The sides of the track where / | and \’s, scrolling down like you were just pressing enter repeatedly.
Parents would always refuse to let me leave it switched on overnight, so you’d have to type it all in next time you wanted to play it. Not actually sure what else those type of computer were actually for. It was pre plug in cassette players for loading from tapes, no printers. No internal storage. No clue why we had one, but I’ve gamed at every opportunity ever since.
Funny how everyone hated on the advent non-physical games and lack of trade ins, when that’s how it was 40 years ago before Ataris and Spectrums, where you knew if it said OCEAN on the cassette box, it was probably a banger.
