10 PRINT "Speccy rules ok"

These being simpler times, the lure of a big tasty box was sometimes enough to forestall thoughts of theft. Being the first £9.95 game, Sabre Wulf's plush package probably crept onto a sizeable proportion of wish lists in 1984, as it was certainly out of range of most pocket money savers. Not so the cheap and cheerful £1.99-2.99 budget ranges, which would be tantalisingly displayed in newsagents and indie computer shops across the land. With a moderate amount of parental pestering (or simple autonomy, depending on your age), these games could be a fairly regular purchase. Such impulse spending was a risk however, as innocent eyes are all too easily seduced by inaccurate cover art and ludicrous blurb claims. Those 'Astounding Graphics!' all too often resembled the results of a road accident involving a lorry full of pixels.

Happily, there was a way through this minefield. The wiser Spec-chum would consult with a trustworthy publication before parting with any ill-gotten cash. These papery guides also featured the obligatory cover-mounted cassettes, showcasing delicious demos and the odd full game. A personal favourite from the magazine racks was the largely (during the later years) tech-eschewing Your Sinclair - whose gleeful self-referentiality felt like a doorway to a secret club. One in which people said 'spook!' an awful lot. Or something.

Naturally, the tiresome parochialism which accompanies all things technology-based even affected rival magazine readerships, though these squabbles would be quickly forgotten when it became necessary to rally against owners of different 8-bit platforms. Subsequently, these home computer factions would unite against console owners - a childish union which still holds true to this day.

Whatever means were used to acquire games for the Speccy, getting them to play could be another matter entirely. The dreaded 'R Tape Loading Error' could strike at any moment, though it usually chose to bomb when the ten minute counter was about to finally tick over to zero.

When this happened, it was important to remain rational. For the more technically-minded, wizardry could be attempted by applying some tiny tools to the azimuth screw located inside the tape deck on certain flavours of Speccy. 128k owners could try to load in 48k mode. Those with knowledge of BASIC could try all kinds of arcane programming sorcery. The desperate could ceremonially 'lay hands' on the tape and engage in an unspoken pact to not look away from the screen during the loading process. Violence was sometimes the answer. These techniques were of mixed value, and even if they did work, the results didn't always reflect the amount of effort put in. Chances are you'd finally manage to load Daley Thompson's Joystick Breaking Wagglefest after an hour's tinkering, only to find yourself out of pocket and sporting a severely sprained wrist.

That's perhaps being a little pessimistic. As previously noted, there was a whole lot of love put into many of these games. Companies like Ultimate and Durell became by-words for creativity, and the individual genius of characters like Julian Gollop shone through their games.

It's hard to pin-point precisely how originality was able to flourish so widely during this era. Perhaps it was down to the relatively small size of programming teams (often just a lone bedroom coder) or the crippling technical restrictions of the development systems. Whatever the case, it undoubtedly produced classics of enduring influence.

The beauty of the BASIC language meant that anyone could try their hand at joining this hallowed pantheon of game-designing legends... in theory. In practise a Spec-chum could spend all afternoon typing in several pages of code from a book or magazine, only to encounter one of two dispiriting results. Either the listings contained one or more typing errors which rendered the program useless and unusable (without the further programming knowledge necessary to locate and fix the problems), or the amazing game you'd created involved a small 'o' character trying to evade capture by several 'x' characters on an otherwise blank screen. It seemed that some kind of mathematical mastermind was actually required to achieve anything more useful. The closest an average Joe could ever really get to being an 8-bit programmer would be to buy some threadbare jumpers and not shave for a week.

Sir Clive's little black box of fun was a doorway to strange worlds, frustrating quirks and a lifetime of gaming addiction. It wasn't all piracy and social inadequacy, however. A healthy number of titles with two player modes meant there were plenty of opportunities to share experiences with a pal. Spec-chums could even play Target: Renegade in simultaneous multiplayer (take THAT, C64 owners!) and up to eight (count 'em) could crowd around Chaos like dark acolytes, if somebody didn't mind sitting on the power pack. With groundbreaking games, cheap software and a distinctive culture, the Speccy was a home computing triumph; and we loved every bit of it. Even the rubber keys.

Ok, no, those were just silly.