We don't care what you say; you can stick your Super NES and Mega Drive, you can eat your Saturn for all we care, and shove the PlayStation up your kilt. And as for what you can do with the Nintendo 64, well, let's just say it involves a pheasant. The softest spot in our hearts is reserved for the Sinclair Spectrum.

Released in April 1982, the rubber-keyed, slim, black, 16K Spectrum was the follow-up to Sinclair's ZX81 - the first commecially successful home computer, and the brain child of balding ginger electronics genius Clive Sinclair. For a mere £125, the Spectrum offered: "Full colour, professional performance, high resolution graphics, and high speed save and loading." It also boasted of being "Teletext compatible", which may give you a better idea of its real technical capabilities. Even if it does look like a crippled goose by today's standards, the ZX Spectrum heralded a new era in home computing. More relevently, without it today's game scene would be radically different.

Rare wouldn't have produced Donkey Kong Country if it hadn't already cut its teeth producing the Spectrum hits Atic Atac and Sabrewulf. And who's to say whether we'd even have a Mario if Miner Willy hadn't paved the way?

But this isn't some stuffy history lesson; this is a lazily-constructed trawl through our Spectrum nostalgia banks. A patchwork of loosely-remembered Spectrum-era trivia and memories. Come on, join the party.

MATTHEW SMITH? He was the young games designer who was responsible for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. Following a couple of Willy "special editions" boasting extra rooms, Smith spent some years teasing the gaming press by revealing that he was working on a bona-fide follow-up to his platform classics: Miner Willy Meets the Taxman. Sadly, the naive natured pressmen of the day failed to spot this thinly-veiled reference to Smith's own financial situation. Matthew Smith has not been seen for many years.

HUNGRY HORACE? He was perhaps the the first attempt at a figurehead character for the Spectrum. His three starring appearances were all blatant rip-offs of existing arcade games. Hungry Horace was a mercilessly cheeky re-working of Pac-Man; Horace and the Spiders was an interpretation of that arcade platformer where you had to dig holes to bury your pursuers, and then fill the holes in (the name of which utterly escapes us, but may have had "Lunar" in the title); and Horace Goes Skiing, which, despite a vaguely original skiing section, otherwise stole from the road-crossing epic Frogger.

Unfortunately, the hoped-for icon status of Horace was not to be. It would seem that wheras hedgehogs and even Italian plumbers are capable of generating enough charisma to inflame the imaginations of a nation's youth, shapeless blue blobs are not.

ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME? They were the lads who settled down to become the horribly sensible and predictable Rare. But it's for the originality they generated during their Spectrum days that they'll be best remembered for. Almost every title they released for the machine - from Psst!, Cookie, Trans Am, Atic Atac, Jet Pac and Lunar Jet Man to the all-time classic Knight Lore and Underworld - was an explosion of original thought and graphical prowess. And then they started producing games for the Commodore 64 and something awfully smelly happened to them. Luckily, they still know how to produce awfully pretty games, if nothing else.

YOUR SINCLAIR? A magazine. A long-running Spectrum and Sinclair magazine. Which was far funnier than the usual nonsense you see today. Incredibly, it didn't "die" until 1993.

THE ZX PRINTER? Sir Clive was clearly having a "C5 day" when he devised the dreadful ZX Printer. This bizarre thermal device was proportionatly as bad as the Spectrum was good. It worked by literally "burning" your selected text or characters onto a strip of silver paper, which measured exactly three millimeters across. The result was a barely-legible mess.

HAVING TO BUY A MEMORY UPGRADE BECAUSE THE NEW GAME YOU BOUGHT WON'T WORK? Now there's a familiar problem. You see, PC owners - it used to happen then too. When it was released the Spectrum was available with 16 or 48K of RAM. Suffice to say it wasn't long before programmers begun to ignore the 16K Spectrum entirely. Clever old Sinclair therefore released a 48K upgrade pack, which cost approximately £5,000, and was about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Yet it was an instant gateway to such enduring classics as Kong and Ah, Diddums.

MORE VAGUE REMEMBERANCES NEXT WEEK.

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