There can’t be many all-time classic videogames that originated on the Sharp X-1.
But Bousou Tokkyuu SOS (literal translation “Runaway Express SOS”) is definitely one of them. Or the only one of it. Of them. Whatever. But anyway.
It’s been almost two years since I wrote the totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100 – also compiled and written by me – was published in 1991.
Obviously stuff has continued to happen on the Speccy scene since then, so it’s now, in some senses, not quite so definitive. Or at least it wasn’t, until I updated it, which I’ve just done, so now it is again. Of it. Or something.
(I appear to have a debilitating compulsion to write top 100s for no very good reason. There’s also this one, and I’m currently working on yet another as a distraction from the wretched state of politics, so fans of subjectively-numbered lists of extremely old videogames should definitely stay tuned.)
I also wanted to have it all in one post rather than five, so now if you want to see the videos of the original arcade games you’ll have to click the titles of each entry – only the Speccy videos are embedded within the article, so the page SHOULD now actually load up without falling over.
There are loads of new entries, a few position adjustments – don’t get TOO excited, Bomb Jack fans – and a bit of general tidying, but I haven’t rewritten the entire thing because it’s 33,000 words and I’m not a lunatic, although those two facts are mostly unrelated. So if you haven’t seen it before, go and get a cup of tea and some biscuits, because this might take a while.
The 16K ZX Spectrum was definitely the ginger stepchild of the family of micros that defined home computing in the UK in the 1980s. With far less memory available to coders (just 9K) than a 16K ZX81, the £125 cost of the entry-level model – shockingly the equivalent of £416 now – didn’t get you all that much bang for your buck when it launched, even by the standards of April 1982.
The vast majority of purchasers wisely chose to save up the extra £50 for the 48K version (£175, or a hefty £582 in 2023 money, although still peanuts compared to the Commodore 64’s launch price of £1,327 equivalent), and the 16K Speccy very quickly fell out of favour. In fact it was withdrawn from sale after barely over a year on the shelves, with old stocks cleared at £99.
(There are no official figures for how many of the 5 million Spectrums sold were 16Ks, but Home Computing Weekly reported in May 1983 that 300,000 machines in total were sold in the first year, and in August 1983 Popular Computing Weekly reported that the 48K had outsold the 16K by two to one, so we can make a reasonable guess at somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 units of the 16K in the year and a bit it was on sale, or roughly 3% of all Spectrums.)
But even in its very brief life (the vast bulk of these titles were released in 1983), the 16K machine amassed a library of fun games that left the catalogues of many better-specced computers in the dust. And for no particular reason other than that 40 years have passed since it abruptly met its fate, we’re here to celebrate them.
So sit yourself down with one of the last cans of Lilt (or don’t, because it’s full of poisonous artificial-sweetener chemicals now), get ready to fondly remember a few old favourites, and hopefully also discover some lost gems for the first time.
Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (below, 20-1)
20. GAUNTLET
Arcade: 1985, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold
Gauntlet was probably the first ever Spectrum coin-op conversion that I saw and thought “That is to all intents and purposes arcade-perfect”.
Because US Gold’s big Christmas blockbuster title for 1986 – oddly coded by Gremlin Graphics – looked like this:
Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (below, 40-21), Part 5 (20-1)
40. PING PONG
Arcade: 1985, Konami
Spectrum: 1986, Imagine
This one was quite hard to place. It’s almost certainly the slimmest game in this entire chart, offering just five stages of perhaps the simplest sport in existence without even the superficial novelty of different opponents.
On the other hand, if you’re going to execute something as exquisitely as this, how much does that matter?
Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (80-61), Part 3 (below, 60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (20-1)
60. PANG
Arcade: 1989, Mitchell Corporation
Spectrum: 1990, Ocean
Look, nobody’s more surprised than me.
I was expecting this to be challenging for the top 10. The triumphant Arkanoid-style updated return to the Speccy of the arcade game that started out years earlier as Bubble Buster/Cannon Ball has it all – the graphics, the music, all the levels, even a decent splash of colour.
Part 1 (100-81), Part 2 (below, 80-61), Part 3 (60-41), Part 4 (40-21), Part 5 (20-1)
80. CRYSTAL CASTLES
Arcade: 1983, Atari
Spectrum: 1986, US Gold
On first glance, Crystal Castles looks like an awfully big ask for the Spectrum.
A fast-moving, colourful, trackball-controlled game in a diagonal 3D perspective looks like an obviously impossible feat, so when you see what a mostly-fine job Andromeda Software made of it, it just makes it more annoying that the ship was substantially spoiled for a ha’porth of tar, in the shape of the almost total absence of sound.
Recently, just for fun and to pass the time now that I’ve retired from political journalism, I thought I’d compile a totally definitive list of the 100 best arcade conversions (both official and unofficial) on the ZX Spectrum, to mark 30 years since the original Your Sinclair All-Time Top 100, also compiled and written by me, was published in 1991.
(Phew, made it with eight hours of 2021 to spare.)
There’s a whole torrid story attached to the undertaking, but meh, some other time. Here’s the entirety of the chart in one place. It takes about a thousand years to load as a single page because YouTube is such a big whiny baby, so I’ve split it into five.
Part 1 (below, 100-81)
Part 2 (80-61)
Part 3 (60-41)
Part 4 (40-21)
Part 5 (20-1)
*27
So, yeah. It was on this day in 1991 that the first ever proper issue of Amiga Power (A Magazine With Tatty Shoes, or something) hit Britons’ newsagents’ shelves.
>>SUB: PLEASE CHECK IMAGE
And while vast numbers of old games magazines are now available to read as lovely friendly PDFs or similar that you can load up onto your computer or electro-tablet and flick through page by page in a gratifying manner, AP inexplicably isn’t.
Or is it? Or IS it? OR IS IT?
If there's one thing we all love here at WoSland, it's a good old-fashioned All-Time Top 100. And from a critic's standpoint, we've long thought the gold standard was the 1991 Your Sinclair chart for the ZX Spectrum. Not for its writing, or even (so much) the games themselves, but because the list showcased an incredible breadth of game types, such as we never thought we'd see again in mainstream commercial gaming.
That was until iOS arrived, of course. Now, for the first time in 20 years, it's once again possible to create a legitimate one-format Top 100 in which there are barely any two games in the same genre. And to prove it, that's just what we've done. But there's something even more special about this particular list.
There are lots of great writers. Even within the professional community, let alone the general public, you’ll have a hard time getting two people to agree on who was the best ever. Was it Shakespeare? Orwell? Joyce? Sega Zone-era Jonathan Davies? The arguments echo timelessly through the ages.
I’ve got many heroes and inspirations of my own – Steven Wells, Miranda Sawyer, Barbara Ellen, Craig Kubey, Rosie Boycott, Douglas Adams and more. (Including the fictional composite entity Lloyd Mangram.)
But the greatest writer of all time is someone whose name I don’t even know, and who to earn the accolade only had to write a single word.
Ask a thousand people what the best videogame of all time is and you’ll only get back a tiny handful of names (with variants) – Super Mario, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty, Naughty Ones, all the usual suspects. But ask the same thousand people what the worst game ever is and you’ll get a thousand different answers.
It’s time someone stood up and made a decision.
Hello. I am the Rev. Stuart Campbell,
a semi-obsolete neo-culture journalist.
Click here to contact me, if you want.
Lightforce (FTL, 1986)
