ZX GOLDEN YEARS

The Plus was essentially an old Spectrum housed in a QL-style keyboard. There were no new features to speak of, nor was there an increase in memory. It was released in October 1984, by which time all the major retailers had already stocked up on the old model - all, that is, except WH Smith, who had presumably been tipped-off by Sinclair in advance. The rest of the high street was stuck with thousands of computers that had been rendered semi-obsolete. Furthermore, reports were filtering back to the press about the unreliability of the new Spectrum. Sinclair's reputation with retailers, press and public was beginning to crumble.

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After the success of its 1982 game Arcadia, Imagine had spent the following year advertising extravagantly and making impressive boasts about forthcoming projects. It even made the national press with a story of how 16-year old programmer Eugene Evans was earning £35,000 a year and owned a car he was too young to drive. Imagine burnished its image by renting plush offices in Liverpool, the heartland of Britain's software industry, and filling it with piles of computers, ranks of young programmers and a car park full of sports cars.

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In the run-up to Christmas 1983, Imagine had bought the entire capacity of the country's largest tape duplicator, but its efforts to foil the competition backfired disastrously and the New Year left it with a warehouse full of unsold stock. In desperation, prices were dropped, enraging retailers who were expected to sacrifice their profits.

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A series of misguided ventures (such as the dongle-based 'mega games') and a failure to address the company’s underlying problems sealed Imagine’s fate. In the aftermath, it became clear that Imagine had never been the company it had claimed to be. The expensive cars and offices had all been rented, the advertising never paid for, and its image a self-invented sham. In fact, few of Imagine’s games had ever been as good as its publicity promised, and in the end the only bubble to have burst was that of its own hype.

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Nevertheless, the national press seized on the story with doom-and-gloom predictions about it marking the end of the country’s brief fascination with home computing. To make matters appear worse, it was a year in which a record number of software companies went bust, although the reason for this decline wasn't, as widely suggested, down to diminishing interest levels.

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A difficult time

The pace of development over the previous year had seen a proliferation of software houses, all eager to get their hands on a slice of the cake. Unfortunately, the cake was smaller than the hype around it suggested and the market became flooded with software of dubious quality, fighting for the custom of an increasingly discerning public. Major retailers found themselves stocking up with sub-standard games they couldn’t shift, and were reluctant to buy in new titles until they had done so. This bottleneck impacted on distributors and in turn on software houses that couldn’t get new releases into the shops. As the cash dried up, many companies slipped into bankruptcy and rumours of a crisis began.

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The lesson high street shops learnt from this experience was to deal in more mainstream games and avoid riskier, less obviously marketable titles. This helped sort the wheat from the chaff, but also made it difficult for original games to find their way onto the shelves, let alone sell. A prime example was Automata's Deus Ex Machina. Despite heavy advertising, critical praise and an industry award, it sold just 700 copies in its first two months of release. It was an unusual and demanding game, but the decision that it was not good enough was made by shops, not customers. By controlling the supply, retailers governed the demand.

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This state of affairs didn't lead to a terminal decline and many superior games still found their way into the shops, even at the height of the crisis. It did change attitudes within the industry, though, encouraging a more professional approach among established players and putting such a squeeze on smaller companies that they either went bust or turned to mail order and specialist shops to sell their wares.

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Most Spectrum owners were probably unaware of the extent of these upheavals in the software scene, or even that there was a problem at all, since there were more impressive games released in 1984 than ever before. Playgrounds across Britain became marketplaces for copied software, playing tips and game-hacking POKEs. Pocket money that had previously been blown on sweets and comics was now saved towards new releases. Saturday morning shopping trips, once a drag, became exciting opportunities to check out the latest releases and maybe part with some of that cash.

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Gaming innovation

Arcade shoot 'em ups had dominated the previous year, but it was the platform game that ruled the roost in 1984. Jet Set Willy, Matthew Smith's follow-up to Manic Miner, was the most eagerly awaited game of the year and became an instant classic, despite being devilishly difficult (partly due to the infamous 'attic bug'). Other superior platformers included Gremlin's excellent Wanted: Monty Mole and the lovable Chuckie Egg from A&F. 

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