Created by Texas Instruments in 1978, the Speak & Spell became one of the most recognisable and popular educational toys during the 1980s. As its name suggests, it was intended to help children learn how to spell. Spelling is one of those areas that was hard to turn into a toy, since it’s not like you could print “Spell Librarian” on a card and give it to a child, since they’d then have the correct spelling right there in front of them. Again, as the name suggests, this problem was solved by making the toy speak.

Speak & Spell used a technique called speech synthesis in order to make itself heard. This was a very new area of technology back when the toy was created and was not without its flaws (indeed, even today synthesised speech is quite often blatantly obvious due to mispronounced words) so whilst it was incredibly clever, it was also not exactly that easy to be able to make out what word the device was actually asking you to spell. You often got quite a few wrong answers simply because you were entering the correct spelling of the wrong word.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about then head over to the Speak & Spell Online site, which features an emulator of the Speak & Spell which whilst it may not be functionally complete (its missing game modes for example) it sounds exactly like the original.

This little problem didn’t stop the toy doing very well indeed, and it lasted right into the Nineties. It was also successful outside of the USA because it had been given a modular design. Cartridges containing new libraries of words could be plugged into the unit, and cartridges were also made for languages other than English. Other languages that were maded available were French, Spanish, German, Italian and, perhaps surprisingly, Japanese!

The Speak & Spell also gave rise to two other similar products. First there was the Speak & Math (or Speak & Maths if you’re British) which took the same speech synthesis technology and applied it to mathematics. The Speak & Math looked almost identical to the Speak & Spell except it was grey instead of orange, and obviously had number keys instead of letters.

The Speak & Read (which I must admit I don’t ever remember seeing) aimed to help children learn to read, and looked even more like the original Speak & Spell, except for its colour scheme, as it was yellow rather than orange.

In later years the toys were redesigned and given a new screen, replacing the old original pocket calculator style green segmented display with a black and white LCD version. The toys were also made a lot thinner in the process, but somehow the redesign lost a lot of the charm of the original.

For most of the Eighties, in the UK at least, there were four main contenders – the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro – but there were many more besides including the Dragon 32, the ZX81, the Vic-20 and today’s spotlighted machine, the Oric-1.

The Oric-1 was created by UK computer firm Tangerine Computer Systems, although it was marketed under the company name of Oric Products International. It was aimed fair and square at the ZX Spectrum end of the market, as it was of a similar size and shape, and came in both 16K and 48K versions, just like the Spectrum did, and was even sold for just about the same price.

It did also improve on the Spectrum in many ways too. First it had a better keyboard than the original Spectrum (although that wasn’t really that hard an achievement!) although it has to be said the keys were a lot smaller in size. It had better sound capabilities and a higher resolution screen too.

One thing it did keep in common with the Spectrum though was an unreliable method of loading and saving programs, that being a standard cassette tape recorder.

The Oric-1 hit the market in 1983 and sold over 200,000 units in the UK and France. This was enough to allow further development of the system and the following year saw the Oric Atmos born to the world.

The Oric Atmos looked like a great improvement externally, primarily due to it having a far far better keyboard than its siblings. However, whilst its operating system did see some improvements there was actually very little else to distinguish the Atmos from the Oric-1.

Whilst Oric Products did announce further systems beyond these, including the Oric Stratos and Oric Telestrat, neither really took off. The company went into liquidation the day after the Stratos was demonstrated for the first time in public, and whilst the Stratos did eventually get released under the auspices of French company Eureka, it never caught on and the Oric name became consigned to the great computer industry list of also rans.

In 1986 Japanese arcade game company Taito did something similar when they released Arkanoid. The game was based heavily on Atari’s earlier Breakout, which came out some 10 years earlier. In Breakout you controlled a bat at the bottom of the screen which you used to bounce a ball around. At the top of the screen were some bricks which smashed when the ball hit them, scoring you points.

Arkanoid took this idea and evolved it, with the main addition being power-ups. Sometimes when you destroyed a brick, a capsule would fall down the screen. If you caught this with your bat (which in Arkanoid was actually meant to be a spaceship called a Vaus, but to all intents and purposes it was a bat) you were awarded a new ability, which ranged from making the bat bigger or smaller, making it sticky so the ball could be caught, splitting the ball into three or my personal favourite, giving you the ability to fire laser bolts to destroy the bricks.

Clearing all the blocks in Breakout rewarded you by refilling the screen with blocks so you could try again. Arkanoid did the same, but instead your new screen full of blocks would be arranged in a different pattern, some abstract, some resembling other objects such as one of the aliens from Space Invaders, another Taito game.

Other smaller additions were that some bricks needed to be hit more than once to destroy them, and some couldn’t be destroyed at all. There were also funny little shapes (presumably aliens) slowly moving around the screen which always got in the way of the ball just as it was heading straight for the last brick, or had just bounced off your bat.

Arkanoid went on to itself be ported to home computers with some rather good officially licensed versions, and indeed has been unofficially cloned many times itself. It has also spawned several sequel games, including most recently a version for the Nintendo DS.

One year my jaw dropped immediately when I saw Sega’s Space Harrier. There was a big crowd around the machine and rightly so, as Space Harrier was certainly a game to behold, not just because of it’s then amazing graphics, but more because of the hydraulic chair that you had to sit in to play the game.

At the time those simulator rides where you sit in a capsule and get tipped about whilst watching a piece of video (usually of a rollercoaster or a high speed car chase) and Space Harrier was basically that kind of idea scaled down to accommodate just one person.

Once strapped into the game’s chair, you had a big aircraft style joystick between your knees to grab hold of. Pulling the stick unsurprisingly moved your on screen character (a cool looking dude in red shirt and blue trousers and armed with a huge gun that also somehow enabled him to fly) but it also tipped the chair you were sitting in up, down, left and right, thus putting you off your game in the process.

The game itself looked truly awesome too. The graphics were made from extremely large bitmapped images which the game scaled up and down to give the effect of the character flying into the screen. Giant rocks, robots and one eyed woolly mammoths came hurtling towards you, and all you had to do was line up your elliptical bullets with these foes to blast them out of the sky, whilst avoiding both them and their returning fire.

Impressive as all this was, the truly amazing bit was when the screen was filled with the end-of-level boss, a giant two headed dragon which snaked it’s way up, down and in and out of the screen. As you shot it in the head its body would gradually change colour until you had hit it enough and it burst into flames.

The game also sounded good, as the chair contained speakers placed right next to your head, so the music and the sampled speech declaring “Welcome to the Fantasy Zone, get ready!” came blasting through and almost deafened you from the shock of it the first time you played.

I remember watching other people playing for ages before I plucked up the courage to have a go myself, partly because I was wary of the moving chair, but also partly because I was afraid that I would be rubbish at the game itself. As it turned out I got through the first three levels before my credits expired, so I did OK, if not brilliantly.

Except of course it isn’t. Not really. Sure Commodore are bringing back something that looks like a Commodore 64, right down to the little red power LED at the top right of the machine, but look closer and you’ll notice the keyboard isn’t quite right (four cursor keys and five function keys – I remember having to use shift to move the cursor up and left) and the ports on the side and back of the machine look distinctly PC like.

Yep, it is of course modern PC components somehow squeezed into a C64 shaped shell. That said, it isn’t quite as clean cut as being a Windows based PC. I’ve read that it presumably can run Windows, but when you buy it you get a version of the Linux operating system, whilst we’re waiting for Commodore OS to turn up.

This is where it becomes perhaps a little more interesting, as Commodore OS is supposed to be a new modern operating system (presumably based on Linux) with the ability to run software from any of the plethora of Commodore brand computers from the Vic-20 through to the Amiga.

Speaking of those latter two computers, it’s also the case that both the Vic and the Amiga are to be likewise souped up and turned into PCs. The Vic machines kind of look like long thin laptops without screens, whilst all that is currently being shown of the Amiga range are large boxy looking cases into which it appears you can insert whatever PC gear you want.

So will these machines be a success. Frankly, I was a big Commodore fan as a kid (indeed I kept my Amiga going right into the mid nineties, when most other people had long abandoned ship) but even I don’t think this is ever going to be much of a success. Somehow I feel a bit cheated, almost dirtied by it all, and I would almost rather that they just re-released that original 8-bit wonder machine as it was, but then I still have mine in the attic so I wouldn’t buy that either.

If you’re curious to learn more then head on over to the Commodore USA website for more information.

Now, technically it isn’t a real Space Invader, as the shape isn’t quite right, but it’s close enough that you get the idea. A shame they didn’t make a whole range of moulds including the bases and player ship so you could make your own edible version of the classic arcade game. You could use Cadbury Mini Rolls for the bullets!

I did a little poking around for other such gems and came across the Heat Changing Space Invader Mug as well, which is one of those mugs which has the heat sensitive printing on the side that magically appears or disappears when a hot drink is poured into the mug. In this case the mug shows an image of a bunch of invaders when you add your favourite hot beverage.

Also available is a Pacman version, which as you might expect has a permanently visible maze layout and power pills which appear and disappear.

You’ll be forgiven for never having heard of the ColecoVision if you’re not from the US, since whilst it was available in the UK and Europe it was a very rare beast to find in the shops, which is a real shame as the system was actually very good indeed, capable of producing arcade quality versions of some of the biggest names in videogames at the time.

I only ever managed to get to play on a ColecoVision once. I used to go to a weekly computer club and one of the other attendees had brought their one along to show off to everyone there. The machine itself wasn’t much to look at, little more than a big black rectangular box, with two wired in controllers with a funny little knobbly joystick and a keypad of 12 big square buttons. There were also a couple of buttons on the sides of the controllers too.

However who cared what the console looked like? It was the games that mattered, and the first game I saw running on it was the best version of Donkey Kong I had ever played on a home machine (until MAME came along of course). Seeing this near perfect version of one of my favourite arcade games made be instantly fall in love with the ColecoVision.

The chap who owned the ColecoVision had a couple more games for us too see, but I was already hooked after seeing Donkey Kong. The games he had were Zaxxon, a diagonally scrolling isometric 3D shoot ‘em up (another near perfect arcade port) and an original title based on The Smurfs. Both had graphics and sound which knocked the spots of my Commodore Vic-20, and I came away at the end of the evening feeling very jealous.

The ColecoVision was first released in 1982, and over the next couple of years went on to sell at least 2 million units. Sadly, it never got a real chance to thrive, as in 1983 the videogame market suffered a huge decline and many companies decided to cut their losses and get out of the games business over the course of the next year or so. ColecoVision was no exception and it was phased out in the summer of 1985.

Text Adventures (also often referred to as Adventure Games in the past, or as the rather grandiose sounding Interactive Fiction nowadays) were one of the first forms of video games to be created, which is hardly surprising given that they only required to be able to display text which was all a lot of early computers could do.

Despite having no graphics, many text adventures would actually be surprisingly absorbing, sucking you into their depicted world by having your imagination fill in what the locations actually looked like. The text was often written in the second person, which is probably best illustrated by a typical example.

You are stood in a dark room. You can see a table with food and drink set upon it. On the wall there is a heavy shield and a sword. There are exits to the north and east.

What do you want to do?

That last part was a prompt for you to enter some sort of command into the game, which was normally in the form of a verb followed by a noun, although later adventure games let you enter complete sentences to describe the things you wanted to do.

So, faced with the above description, what would you enter? Well, you might be inclined to “Eat Food” for example, but it didn’t take long to realise that you were probably better of entering “Examine Food” first, which might reveal that the food is mouldy and covered in maggots. “Take Sword” or “Take Shield” would probably be good bets, and then once you’d got bored with the room perhaps “Go North“. Get the idea?

Other commands which became standard text adventure parlance were “Look” which would redescribe your current location, “Inventory“, which would display the items you current had, and “Help“, which at its least useful would offer a list of commands you could enter, or if you were lucky might offer a tidbit of advice about what you should do next.

The first text adventure game is credited as being called simply Adventure (or Advent, given that the computer system it was written on only allowed filenames of six characters!) and was created in 1975 by Will Crowther, who created the game for his kids to play. It later became known as Colossal Cave.

There soon emerged software companies that concentrated on making nothing but adventure games. Adventure International was one, founded by Scott Adams, and another was Infocom, famous for the Zork series and the adventure game version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Later games appeared which whilst they were still purely text based in terms of the actual game itself, also featured graphics to depict some of the locations you had visited. One of the most memorable examples of this was the ZX Spectrum game based on Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Eventually graphics took hold completely though, and with the advent of the mouse as an input device the text adventure evolved into the point ‘n’ click adventure, with some of the most successful examples being those created by Lucasfilm Games (later to become LucasArts). Probably the most famous of these are the Monkey Island games.