ZX Spectrum Games

Sinclair Research released the ZX Spectrum on 23 April 1982 at £125 for the 16K model and £175 for the 48K. It was built to a price and it showed: a Zilog Z80A at 3.5 MHz, a rubber keyboard, and a display that stored colour separately from pixels. Every 8x8 block of the 256x192 screen could hold only two colours, one ink and one paper, which produced the famous "attribute clash" — the smearing of colour that happens when a sprite crosses a character cell. The 48K model's sound was a single-channel beeper driven directly by the processor, so playing music meant the CPU could do little else. The 128K models of 1986 finally added a proper three-channel sound chip.

Constraints that built an industry

Those limitations produced a distinctive design culture. Ultimate Play the Game — the Stamper brothers, later Rare — turned the machine's weaknesses into a style with Atic Atac, Lunar Jetman, PSSST and Tranz Am. Mervyn Estcourt's Deathchase fitted a convincing sense of speed into 16 kilobytes. The isometric adventure became a British speciality, seen here in Fairlight, and The Sentinel pushed the Z80 into filled 3D landscapes. Budget publishers selling cassettes for £1.99 kept the platform alive for years, and the Dizzy series — Magicland Dizzy, Kwik Snax — became its mascot. Arcade licences like Chase H.Q. and Target Renegade sold in huge numbers, alongside sports titles such as Daley Thompson's Supertest and International Match Day, and oddities like Split Personalities and Cybernoid.

Playing ZX Spectrum games in your browser

The Spectrum is our most completely playable platform in proportional terms: 4,406 of the 5,212 titles in the catalogue boot straight in the page. The emulator handles the Z80 and the display hardware, including attribute clash, which is part of how these games are supposed to look. Nothing is installed and nothing is downloaded — and you skip the five minutes of screeching tape loading that the original required.