Insert Coin to Continue, Part 3 - The World at Their Feet (1983-1990)

The British are coming, and they have some very rum ideas about how to write a football video game.

When it came to Britain’s entry into the world of home computing, the first generation of games may well have been skewed towards the strategic and the adult, but the influence of the arcades was also there from the very beginning. Clive Sinclair’s vision for the ZX Spectrum, which was released in 1982, might have been that this computer would be a serious machine for serious jobs, but this arguably noble aim was always likely to be undercut by market forces. 

Early ZX Spectrum games were serious in nature. Flight simulators, chess and other board games. But by the end of 1982 third party software development companies were already springing up all over the place, and the pester power of the teenager would prove to be one of the driving forces behind the Spectrum’s huge sales throughout the decade.

But first of all, a quick recap. At the birth of the video games revolution, consoles had failed to quite get the hold in the UK that they had in the USA. There were also home computing communities in both countries, but the British market leant very heavily towards the home computer market. 

The introduction of the ZX Spectrum in the summer of 1982 had been a game-changer in terms of affordability – they started at £129.99 for the 16kb version – and pretty soon the market was flooding with alternatives. The Commodore 64, with a bigger memory, far better sound, but also considerably more expensive, also landed in 1983. These two were followed into the market by the Amstrad CPC, which launched in 1984 and was particularly popular in France.