In 1982, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum found its way into our family home. I knew immediately that I wanted to be a computer programmer, whatever they were.
But when I wasn’t hacking in BASIC, I was playing some of the first home computer games.
Manic Miner, and later Jet Set Willy 2 (I missed the original Jet Set Willy completely, for some reason) introduced me to the platform game.
The Hobbit introduced me to the text adventure, and it was no coincidence that the first game I ever wrote was a text adventure (although this was also because it was easier, and because I can’t draw sprites to save my life). The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy wasn’t released on the Spectrum, but I remember playing this, the cruellest of text adventures at around the same time. The Babel Fish Puzzle still makes me shudder to this day.
Anyway, it has been possible for a few years now to play all of these games on your Windows PC through an emulator – SPIN for the Spectrum, and WinFrotz for the Infocom series of games.
Solutions for most games have also found their way online. Here’s a walkthrough guide to completing The Hobbit, and here’s one for finishing Hitch Hiker’s. But a little-known feature of SPIN is the ability to record and play RZX files. These files record input events, to play them back at a later date. So start recording, play the game, stop recording, and save the RZX file. Now you can watch yourself play the game whenever you like. And because it’s just a recording of input events, rather than a video recording of the game, it’s only a tiny file.
The RZX archive hosts countless of these recordings of people completing the games that infuriated me as a child. Now I can finally see what happens at the end of The Hobbit without having to actually sit down and play through it myself. And I can even watch someone complete Jet Set Willy 2 – a feat I had previously assumed was impossible.
Ah, nostalgia…
