Games: the lifeblood of any computer system. If you can't sit down, bang a few keys, scream loudly and retire to bed sulking and plotting your revenge against the Mutant Carrots from Planet X....... then what's the point of owning a computer? Games released for the first generation of home computers (the 8-bit era) were often a strange mix of innovation, ingenuity and outright cloning - many were "inspired" by arcade game principles and all were constrained by the limited resources available - on some machines, 16k (or less!) of storage space was available. Then too, most games were written by small teams (or even individuals) who did all the testing themselves: as a result, games were often buggy or structured in a way which made perfect sense to the developer and left the rest of the world completely baffled... I'll freely admit that some of these games have a certain rosy tint - though it's worth bearing in mind that with the long loading times and lack of alternatives (No internet! No mobile phones! Just 4 TV channels! Films had to be rented from a video store!) meant there was much more of an incentive to focus on a single game for longer than would be likely today. In any case: welcome to a slice of history: the first ten years of the UK's game industry, as viewed from the perspective of a ZX Spectrum owner...