Tristan Donovan, a U.K. writer who has contributed to Edge and The Guardian*, has just released a new book called* Replay: The History of Video Games.
Wired.com is pleased to share several excerpts from this exhaustive, wide-ranging book. Previously, we looked at the development of Nimrod, the first gaming computer, and the beginnings of French videogame design. In this final segment, we get the (frequently bizarre) early history of professional game development in the United Kingdom.
Excerpt: Replay: The History of Video Games
The Sinclair ZX80 home computer was creation of British inventor Clive Sinclair. Affectionately nicknamed “Uncle Clive” by his fans, Sinclair was the living embodiment of a British boffin with his thin spectacles, balding scalp and ginger beard.
He built his reputation during the 1960s and 1970s by making super-cheap versions of the latest cutting-edge consumer electronics, from cut-price hi-fis and portable TVs to digital wristwatches and pocket calculators. The low price was sometimes reflected in unreliability, most notably the digital Black Watch that didn’t work and almost bankrupted his company due to the volume of returns, but items such as his pocket calculators brought expensive electronics to the mass market.
In keeping with Sinclair’s belief in low-cost electronics, the ZX80 cost just £99.95 fully assembled, or £79.95 if bought as a kit to assemble at home with a soldering iron, but it offered features comparable to rival systems costing hundreds of pounds more. It quickly became the U.K.’s biggest- selling home computer. The success of the ZX80 marked the moment when affordable home computing became a reality in Britain.
The ZX80 was the machine that the U.K.’s legions of would-be computer enthusiasts had been waiting for. “Machines like the Commodore PET and Apple II were a bit too far out of reach for the average interested school kid to buy,” said Jeff Minter, a Basingstoke teenager who had fed his interest in home computers by making games on his school’s Commodore PET until the ZX80 arrived. “Uncle Clive gave us affordable computing for the first time in the shape of the ZX80.”
By the time Sinclair released the cheaper, more powerful and even more successful ZX81 in March 1981, many of those who bought the ZX80 had reached the same conclusion: They should make and sell games. And since few shops sold games, they copied their games onto blank cassette tapes and sold them via mail order. (The ZX80 used cassettes to store and load programs. While the U.S. was already starting to move away from cassette storage by the early 1980s, computers with disk drives were rare in the U.K. until the latter half of the decade, mainly due to cost.)