Speccy Simon

By 1996 the ZX Spectrum had long stopped being a commercial platform. What kept it alive was a community of hobbyist coders who wrote for their own satisfaction and circulated the results through diskmags, bulletin boards and tape compilations. Speccy Simon by Lee Tonks belongs squarely to that late British wave.

The name points at Simon, the electronic memory toy sold worldwide through the late seventies and eighties. The device plays a sequence of colours and tones and the player repeats it back, with one extra step added every round. It is a pure short-term memory test, where the opponent is your own ability to hold a growing pattern in your head.

The Spectrum suited that idea well. An eight-bit machine with a single-channel beeper and a colour attribute grid can render coloured panels and tones without breaking a sweat, so the author could work within a few kilobytes and put the effort into timing and responsiveness instead. Late homebrew output tends to share those traits: small scope, one clearly defined rule, and no gap between loading and playing.

The publisher field lists Blood, which at the time meant a scene label rather than a company in the usual sense. Distribution happened outside retail, through tape compilations and file archives.

On OldGame.cz the game runs straight in your browser with no emulator to install. It is a few minutes of play rather than an evening's entertainment, but as a sample of what people were still making for the Spectrum a decade past the platform's peak, it earns its place.