The Rubber-Keyed Wonder

OK, so maybe a 2¼ hour documentary populated by 1980s computer nerds doesn't sound so hot, but actually for those of us of a certain ages this is really quite a fascinatingly engaging nostalgia trip. I was never into computer games as a kid, nor am I now, but my best pal at school (Paul) was what passed for an anorak back then and constantly raved about his ZX80, then a ZX81 and then the pièce de résistance with 48k memory and it's colour games - the Spectrum. That was the console that finally got us out of the local chippy which undoubtedly made much more cash from kids playing "Asteroids" than it ever did selling fish suppers. What we have here is all kick-start funded, and a great deal of effort has gone into piecing together an history of not just the evolution of the British micro-computing industry, but also of the game. It was ultimately the games that helped them sell millions of units to ordinary families up and down the UK in a similar fashion to that other icon of British design at the time - the Mini Metro. The contributors are a wide range of folks ranging from the coders to the designers, the marketeers and the players. Criticism goes hand in hand with enthusiasm and the rise and rise of this two-bit operation located in a small office in Cambridge is rather faithfully recounted here. If you are a gamer, then you'll recall the cassettes and the floppy discs that all now belong in a science museum (or a dustbin), all the angular characterisations and the desperate analogue audio that the mere memory of drives me mad. The research is to be commended. Where these magazine articles and boxes complete with intricate and space-age cover designs came from is astonishing, and as the history of the enterprise gathers pace it really is quite an interesting look at just how a small concept can end up off the scale. You don't need to be a player to appreciate this, but if you were remotely dextrous in the 1970s/1980s then you might enjoy this. I did.