First tape/games you got with your ZX Spectrum

[blucey]

I very nearly got a C16 too, because I knew we had very little money and it was the cheapest option. Even when I started to unwrap it on Christmas Day I thought it was a C16. A Speccy was beyond my wildest dreams (and my mum's bank balance - she got it on HP and it took ages to pay off)

Kerry Katona gets voted Mum of the Year four times when this angel exists?!

[Nitrowing]

I know I got Horizons but my mum wouldn't buy a tape recorder because she wanted me to learn how to program, not waste my time playing games.
Took over 2 weeks of begging to get a tape recorder as I was crying about spending all that time typing and losing it all when the computer was turned off!

[dvduk]

First 2 original games I got for my Spectrum were Astro Blaster (QuikSilva) and Transylvanian Tower (Richard Shepperd)

The first was not bad at all - the second was a load of cack* which cost me 39 guilders at the time.

*technical terminology - sorry!

[firelord]

It seems strange to me but I think most ZX 48k owners had Chequered Flag and maybe Psion Chess (I don't know it Horizon Chess was Psion chess).

If this is true then Chequered flag might be the game played by most people in the spectrum (in the 80s I mean)...

[Lee Bee]

Nice nostalgic thread!

Sounds like some of you had fantastic introductory game packs to the Spectrum, especially Pete Prodge! Alas, my game pack was the Christmas 1986 Dixons Spectrum +2 bundle featuring ten mostly incredibly bland games…

Mr Micro software:



1. Treasure Island - The best game of the lot. Like a very sub-par Robin of the Wood. I remember drawing a map of it.
2. Punchy - With its disturbing speech samples, this weird game made a terrible first impression on me of the Speccy.
3. Crazy Golf - Kind of fun to look at, but incredibly dull gameplay.

Gem Software:



4. Oh Mummy - The 2nd best game of the lot. It looked like something written in BASIC but could actually be kind of exciting at times, when the mummies started coming out of the tombs.
5. Disco Dan - Horrible game that's like a bad trip.

Sinclair Research Ltd:



6. Alien Destroyer - A slow Space Invaders rip-off with enough flickering to induce an epileptic fit.

Tynesoft:



7. Ian Botham's Test Match - I played it once and switched it off quickly
8. Superfile - As a nine-year-old, I found this such a boring concept and don't think I ever loaded it



9. Witchfiend - Pretty dull adventure game. Had potential but was just too short.
10. Odd Job Eddie - This was my introduction to "Matthew Smith games". Wish I'd had the real deal instead. I spent ages playing it but it always left a bad taste in my mouth.

Re-writing history…
If I could go back to Christmas 1986 and give myself a different 10 pack of starter games, this is what I'd love to have got that Christmas …

1. Skooldaze
2. Cyclone
3. Deactivators
4. Turbo Esprit
5. WEC Le Mans
6. Robin Of The Wood
7. Contact Sam Cruise
8. Arkanoid
9. Knight Tyme
10. Saboteur!

[toot_toot]

Ridiculously happy with this Dixons pack-in for my 128K +2 in late 1987. I genuinely don't think there's been a better pack-in selection, and that's even counting the Tynesoft duffers and Harry S Price plagiarism. (Alright, maybe if you count a bunch of games from a second-hand seller and/or some C90s of pirated games, you could get better than this, but in a legitimate way, this is the best. And I realise that I'm saying that about a collection with a few dodgy Harry S Price games...)

I spent ages on Green Beret, Donkey Kong and Mikie.

Konami Coin-Op Hits

• Green Beret
• Yie Ar Kung-Fu
• Hyper Sports
• Mikie
• Ping Pong

Screen Heroes

• Street Hawk
• Daley Thompson's Supertest
• Knight Rider
• Miami Vice
• Rambo
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood
• Highlander

Ocean: Mario Bros + Donkey Kong

• Mario Bros
• Donkey Kong

128 Tynesoft 4-Pack

• Colin The Cleaner
• Blizzard Pass
• Witchfiend
• Odd Job Eddie

Ian Botham's Test Match + Superfile

• Ian Botham's Test Match
• Superfile 128[/b]

The Dixons pack was one of the best, I remember getting it when I upgraded to a +2, however the play button broke after a few months. When i took the Spectrum back to Dixons to get repaired, they just gave me a completely new one with the Dixon’s Premier Collection pack in. So I managed to keep all of the games above AND get this!



But my original rubber key Spectrum, I got for Xmas in 1984 and it came with the six pack that I think was usually for the Spectrum +



First games I actually bought (with my Christmas money) were these

[blucey]

I got that Dixon's collection with my next Speccy. It was a +2A. It came with that and a bunch of games as part of a '100 games' collection that didn't have 100 games and the only good one was Angleball.

[Wizwords]

The Dixons pack was one of the best, I remember getting it when I upgraded to a +2, however the play button broke after a few months. When i took the Spectrum back to Dixons to get repaired, they just gave me a completely new one with the Dixon’s Premier Collection pack in. So I managed to keep all of the games above AND get this!



But my original rubber key Spectrum, I got for Xmas in 1984 and it came with the six pack that I think was usually for the Spectrum +



First games I actually bought (with my Christmas money) were these

Ha, I just interviewed the guy who did Hitman. Appearing in On The ZX Spectrum soon

[+3code]

Mine was a very late +2A, with Robocop 2 and Chase HQ 2.

[Sham Mountebank]

My 48k came with the now legendary Horizon tape and the Sinclair Six Pack ( scrabble, horace goes skiing, chequered flag, make a chip, survival & Chess). On the same day we picked the Speccy up from Boots ( yes kids you used to be able to buy computers from a chemists ), I also bought Luna Crabs.

When I upgraded to a 128 in ‘88 it came with 6 awful games that I can’t be arsed to list, but I also bought Chase HQ.

That's the pack I got as well.

The first game I brought with actual money. The Tripods. On the plus side, I quickly learned a valuable lesson about not buying games before I'd read the reviews.

[Tan Coul]

Only one that came with my (newly reduced to £125) 48k beauty was Horizons, but I was allowed to pick two games the next day and walked out of Boots with Planetoids and Spectres (the latter of which was always my dad's favourite game).

[MarkRJones1970]

My mate at school, Neil Anderson, recorded for me 4 full tapes of his copies which were the 1st games I ever got for my Spectrum. Here, in an excerpt from my memoirs 'Load Dij Dij', I describe going round his house to have a proper go on a Spectrum for the 1st time. The games I talk about were in that first set of games he gave me:

"On the morning of Saturday 31 March 1984, with my interest piqued and wanting to find out more about this ZX Spectrum I'd been hearing all about, my Mum gave me a lift to a part of town I'd never been to before. It was situated in one of the newer suburbs of Northampton that didn't consist of normal terraced houses in streets like the ones I'd grown up in. I was visiting Neil Anderson's house in Hawksmoor Way, Duston, so I could see his ZX Spectrum in action. Neil was a friend from NSB and had owned one for a few months by this time and was going to let me sample its delights. I was finally going to be allowed to use a real ZX Spectrum for the first time and play some actual games.

Upon arrival I found that Neil's house was rather alien to me. The lay out was completely different to any other house I'd been in before and had stairs that were set in the middle of his living room. Both of the terraced houses I'd lived in had stairs in the
hallway that took you to the first floor. I'd never seen anything like it. Once I'd been introduced to his Mum who was probably just checking I wasn't some sort of nutcase Neil took me upstairs and showed me to his bedroom. He had his Spectrum set up on his bed in front of a huge television set just like the one we had in our living room at home. I was immediately jealous that he had a colour television all to himself and didn't have to share one with the rest of his family. He could play on his Spectrum whenever he wanted!

As I hadn't got a clue what game to sample first I let Neil make the game choices and, once he'd had a bit of a think, he typed in 'LOAD “”' and 'ENTER' then pressed play on the tape player that was set up next to the keyboard. The border on the television started to display coloured lines that danced in correspondence to the noise that was coming out of the Spectrum itself. It was unlike anything I had heard before - horrible sounding screeches and squawks that hurt my ears. I had to ask him what on earth the computer was doing. “We have to load the game in from the tape. Those lines in the border and that noise you're hearing is the data that makes up the game”, he explained. I got a bit bored waiting for the game to load. No one at school had actually mentioned anything to me about how long you physically had to wait before the game could actually be played. It felt like hours (even though it was nowhere near) and Neil didn't have much else, no books or posters on the walls, in his bedroom to look at while the games loaded either which made the wait feel even longer. That afternoon he loaded up various games for me to sample that included 'Atic Atac' and 'Jet Pac' by Ultimate, 'Pogo' by Ocean Software, 'Chequered Flag', 'Space Raiders' and 'Horace and the Spiders' by Sinclair Research Ltd, 'The Pyramid' by Fantasy Software, 'Night Gunner' by Digital Integration, 'Krakatoa' by Abbex, 'Manic Miner' by Bug-Byte/Software Projects, 'Wheelie' by Micromega and 'Spawn of Evil' by Dk'tronics. Neil amplified the sound coming out of the Spectrum through his cassette player using the ear and microphone leads so that the sounds being emitted from the tiny piezo buzzer contained within the Spectrum could at least be heard properly. I thought that the jumping noise in 'Jet Set Willy' sounded like twinkly water. “How is the Spectrum doing that?” I said to Neil. I was also well impressed with 'Atic Atac'. It looked like a proper arcade game but it was in Neil's bedroom, not in an arcade. We didn't have to put money into the machine to play it. Not only that but the graphical capabilities on the Spectrum impressed me very much. They were more detailed and less blocky than the other machines I had seen at school and at various mates’ houses. I knew nothing about the two colours per eight by eight-character square limitation at the time which, in some games, would cause the dreaded 'colour clash' and would give me a few headaches a couple of years later. All I knew was that what I was seeing was pretty spiffy."

And it was exactly 40 years ago tomorrow that I got my own ZX Spectrum! I remember it like it was a few months ago. 40 years! Oh my!
https://x.com/MarkRJones1970/status/1388943367980126212

[Andre Leao]

The ones which came with my TC 2048: Cassete de Apresentação, Rally Driver, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Formula One, The Evil Dead, Alien 8