ZX spectrum coding trouble

 1993

It was summer. I remember it being a really nice day. Sunny but not blazing hot. Weather you could sit out in. I was 9 years old. Might sound daft, but in those days Manchester United used to win trophies regularly. 

I was in love. In love with my ZX Spectrum computer. This was before PlayStations, Mega Drives or even Master Systems. I didn’t have a PC either. Just this beauty. It had a beautiful grey plastic casing, with a dash of rainbow in the logo. You didn’t download the games from the internet, nor did you even load them from a CD or floppy disk. No, you loaded them by pressing play on a cassette tape, then by crossing your fingers and toes, waiting for 45 minutes and prey that  it would load. 

More often than not, it refused to play ball. Even when it did load whichever game you’d just bought from Woolworths for £2.99, the games were very primitive. The graphics were terrible and only had about 8 colours on offer. You couldn’t save the games either. None of this mattered. I still loved it. 

I lived and breathed for one game in particular. World Soccer League. This was where the ZX Spectrum was actually very advanced. They had foreseen the desire by the billionaire owners of modern football to create a nations wide football tournament- similar to the one abandoned by the scab clubs in 2020. The league was split into two divisions and your club would play teams from around the globe in the quest to be first division champions. 

The fact that the game play was a star moving across a green screen and that the players names were all made up mattered little. I just couldn’t stop playing it- I dressed up in a managers coat when the games were on and fully believed I was guiding Manchester United to international glory by beating AC Milan in the San Siro. You could actually save your game to a tape, but this was a huge risk with life changing consequences should the game fail to save. To avoid this I would leave my spectrum plugged in all day whilst I was at school and pray that nobody had unplugged it during the day- my grandma had been known to unplug it whilst carrying out an impromptu mid day hoovering session. 

As with all Spectrum games however, WSL was very temperamental and many a time refused to load. Imagine my amazement when in this sunny day during the holidays which I mentioned at the start of this piece, whilst it was loading, I accidentally pressed a button that brought up the entire game code on my television screen. I thought it was Christmas! As long as I typed this code in, I’d never have problems loading my favourite game ever again! The only problem was that this code was enormous. Enormous like a telephone book. But I didn’t let that stop me and so proceeded to write out the entire code onto my trusty A4 pad. 

After a while I was desperate for a break so I went downstairs with my pad and explained the catch 22 situation I found myself in. All through the explanation she nodded slowly, not fully comprehending the oddity she had raised. Then finally uttered, 

‘Ah. That’s nice. Good for you.’ Then continued with her book. I had work to do. 

After a couple of hours it dawned on me that I was chipping away at a mountain and it would have taken weeks to copy down. Then how would I even type the code in? I thought 30 minutes loading time was alot, but it would pale into insignificance if I thought about the time it would take to type it in. 

The whole exercise became obsolete soon later anyway. My infant, dribbling younger brother clearly not appreciating the gravity of the situation, crawled into my room and mashed the keyboard with his pudgy hand. The code was gone in an instant. 

It’s strange what you remember. I have no idea why I remember this and not the millions of other things I must have done during that summer holiday. I did long to be a creator and make my own games, but I had no idea how. I also think this was the first seeds of me thinking about writing. I wanted to be an author. I still do. Shame nothings come of it.