There’s a Metafilter post today about the Sinclair ZX81, which reminded me of one of my Twitter threads from 2020 that got deleted when I shut down my account. We were packing up the house for the move to Germany, which meant Rodd was cleaning out his office. And suddenly he unearthed this rack of cassette tapes…

It turns out that Rodd’s sister’s partner Chris was a big ZX Spectrum enthusiast back in the day, to the extent that he became a reseller of local and imported software for it. (For the youths, the Spectrum was introduced in 1982. Instead of disk drives, software was saved onto and loaded from cassette tapes.) Chris eventually gave his old Spectrum to Rodd with a lot of cassettes. Rodd later gave the computer back, but he kept the tapes for some reason. There were some absolute gems in there.

Planetoids! (And also Missile.)

“PLANETOIDS – an exciting, real-time reactive machine-code game in which you must destroy and avoid the passing planetoids in space. Beware of the lurking alien ship which can destroy you with its cluster bombs. In full high-resolution colour with sound effects.”

3D Tunnel. I love the artwork here. It looks like something a kid would draw on their notebook in biology class. Also, wow, $25 AUD would have been a fair bit back then!

“Another fast moving 3D game from the author of the 3D Monster Maze and Defender for the ZX81. Flapping bats, scurrying rats, leaping toads, crawling spiders all appear live in the 3D Tunnel. The last object is . . . . . . . . . . . . . . !”

Adventure B: Inca Curse. I’m guessing Raiders of the Lost Ark had made quite a big impression on a lot of kids.

“In this adventure you find yourself in a South American jungle near an as yet undisturbed Inca temple. Your aim is to get out of the temple with as much treasure as you can and your adventure is complete when you have returned to the jungle clearing.”

JGS Presents Famous People Play Poker. I think the crappier cover art here is reflected in the bargain price.

Here’s the instructions. I really wish it had listed who the “famous people” were!

And now we come to the more niche games: General Election.

I am trying to imagine the person who would have been excited by this game.

Collector’s Pack. This one isn’t a game; it purports to be actual useful software!

“This comprehensive program allows collectors of stamps etc to hold e.g. 1500 records of up to nine items on one cassette and keep the details up to date, examine the details held and keep the records sorted into order.” On the other hand, I can exactly imagine the person who would be excited by this application.

Biorhythms. Hilariously, one of the first programs I ever wrote for myself was a biorhythm calculator on my TI-85 calculator in high school.

“When will you be at your peak physically, emotionally and intellectually? Find out all about biorhythms through this easy to follow computer explanation. Get your computer to work out your biorhythms and those of your friends.”

You don’t get a lot of installation instructions on these cassettes. I do like that they tell you it takes nearly a full minute to load each program!

And here is the jewel in the collection: THE HOBBIT. “The Hobbit is a super-program that is a milestone in computer software. You will face dangers, excitement and adventure in words and graphics. Meet all the characters from The Hobbit and talk to them in ordinary English! The Hobbit program brings you the future in an exciting and challenging fantasy!”

The Hobbit comes with a pretty significant instruction booklet, and I scanned a few of the pages. The developers even invented their own DSL called Inglish that allowed the player to type full sentences. I particularly liked this disclaimer at the end:

“Due to the immense size and complexity of this game it is impossible to guarantee that it will ever be completely error-free. A great deal of time has been spent testing this program to ensure it will behave as described within these instructions. If, however, any problems are found we would like to know about them so that future versions may be corrected. We would also like to hear any comments or criticisms you have about the game.”

I found that very charming, and I ended up doing more research about the game on Wikipedia. It turns out that it was produced by Melbourne House, an Australian video game development studio. I noted with excitement that one of the designers was a woman, Veronika Megler. When I looked up her page, I was stunned to see that she’s a data scientist at Amazon. Given that I too worked at Amazon (at the time), I couldn’t help but look her up on the internal directory. And there she was! (She lives in the US now.) So what the hell – I sent her a message on the company Slack. She very kindly replied and was delighted to see my photos of her game as well as the others. She asked what we were going to do with them, and I admitted that we had no idea. She made the excellent suggestion that we could donate them to ACMI (The Australian Centre for the Moving Image), who have an ongoing effort to preserve old video games. We agreed, and she hooked us up with a friend of hers there and we ended up shipping them to Melbourne.

Pretty neat, eh?