Retro video games have never been more popular, mostly because gamers have never been older. The home-computer generation of players are now in their 40s and 50s, and as we get older, we’re spending more time down memory lane. Who wouldn’t want to replay the classics of their youth on mini versions of the original consoles and computers, or even on a phone?
The ZX Spectrum – released in 1982 – had only eight basic colours, a rubber keyboard and 48K of RAM (your 4GB RAM phone has nearly 90,000 times more); nonetheless, some still view it like others view the Beatles. Games such as Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg and Atic Atac were truly original, unlike anything seen before. But some remember it just as fondly for being, well, a bit crap.
The Comp.Sys.Sinclair Crap Games Contest (CGC for short) has run almost every year since 1996. The idea is to write the crappest Spectrum game possible. Described by its contestants as an institution in the Spectrum community, this year it’s being hosted by 44-year-old Jamie Bradbury from Hull. “I got involved about seven years ago, when I came back to the first computer I had as a kid,” he says. “I always wanted to make my own game; it was an unfulfilled childhood ambition. Now, I’ve got the bug. It’s fun to cook up the stupidest possible idea and enjoy the misery of whoever has to review the damn thing.”
“What makes the CGC entertaining is the self-deprecating, sardonic British humour,” explains 43-year-old Paul Collins from Reading, who first entered the CGC in 2000 with Pear-Shaped (“a simple maze game where you try to collect as many pears as possible”) and Crap Football, featuring a digitised Des Lynam. “There are ideas that can’t possibly work, eg Sim City: The Text Adventure or Blind Flight Simulator. Or names that are just funny, like Whack a Nun II and European Sandwich Hunt.
“It’s mad that CGC has been going on for over a quarter-century… It’s definitely an institution shared by the Spectrum community. I’ve got some ideas for this year, but I’m quite lazy so I don’t know whether I’ll get them done.”
Bradbury’s previous entries include Isle of Jobo, where you play a corrupt PM who desperately tries to trouser as much cash as possible before being ousted from government. “This was before it happened for real!” laughs Bradbury. “The loser of the comp is the guy who accidentally makes the best game. The forfeit is you have to host next year’s comp. Which is what happened to me.”
“It’s always been the rule – whoever writes the least crap game, as punishment for not being crap enough, gets to host next year’s competition,” 44-year-old Jim Winston-Smith from Cambridgeshire tells me. Winston-Smith hosted 2021’s CGC after his game, Corona Capers, was crowned the least crap at 2020’s CGC.
“I wanted to host it, which is why I put in so much effort. It took me 11 whole days,” he continues. “It was a bunch of mini games I wrote while we were all being held under house arrest in April 2020, with various coronavirus themes. For example, you have to shoot a bat before it gets into a bowl of noodles.”
Winston-Smith says 62 people entered the 2021 CGC. His role as judge involved reviewing the games. “I like to do it properly, so would spend enough time playing each game until I’d thought I’d seen everything. Usually, I’d seen everything in five minutes,” he says. “Entries included Mono-Rail Simulator, where you control the signals and points of an urban mass transit system that somehow runs on batteries; Zonkey Kong, a downgraded Donkey Kong; and Ricky Gervais’ Simon, a take on the classic Simon game where you have to repeat a sequence of Ricky Gervais’ laugh at three different pitches.”
The origins of the CGC hark back to a 1983 compilation tape called Cassette 50 by Cascade, which featured 50 games such as Barrel Jump, Fishing Mission and Race Track. It was billed as “hours of entertainment for all the family at a fraction of the cost”, and came with a free Timex calculator watch – but the games turned out to be legendarily awful. “Most were so poor, they would have been rejected from magazine type-ins,” says Winston-Smith. Computer game magazines of the time would print listings of game code that readers could type in to play primitive games – if they managed to perfectly copy the code, that is, which almost nobody could.
One of those magazines was the beloved Your Sinclair – which is also deeply involved in the Crap Games’ Competition’s origin story. After years of torturing readers with pages and pages of hexadecimal code, it started taping cassettes to the cover instead. Every games mag soon followed suit, turning the newsagent’s shelves into a cover tape war to see which magazine could pack in the most games and demos (and, in case of Your Sinclair, occasionally songs – one of its writers, David Wilson, released a 1989 single via the Your Sinclair cover tape, under the alias Whistlin’ Rick Wilson. Improbably, it ended up getting played on BBC Radio 1.)
In April 1988, as an April fool’s joke, Your Sinclair reviewed a nonexistent game called Advanced Lawnmower Simulator (ALS for short), awarding it a YS Megagame, the highest accolade. The next month, the full game appeared on that month’s cover tape. This elaborate prank was the handwork of Your Sinclair staff writer, Duncan MacDonald, who later went on to work at PC Zone with Charlie Brooker, and sadly died in 2017 (his novel, South Coast Diaries, has been published posthumously). The instructions are simple. You just press the M key, and the mower mows in perfect lines. Every so often, it breaks downs and it’s game over. It’s as simple as it is funny.
“Under normal circumstances, I’d have never hired someone like Duncan,” says Teresa “T’zer” Maughan, who edited Your Sinclair from 1987-89. “I knew he’d be totally unreliable – I think he was living out of his camper van – but he was so funny and gifted … I probably gave him a lot of slack. Jeremy Beadle and Bill Beaumont weren’t happy about some things Duncan wrote about them. We did a lot of things you wouldn’t get away with now.”
Despite the fact that it was obviously a joke, Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was a big hit with the readers, who sent in their own versions, updates and sequels in hope of appearing on future cover tapes. “It was like the Marvel multiverse,” says Matt Bielby, who edited Your Sinclair from 1989 to 1991. “Someone wrote Football Janitor and you thought: this isn’t going to be a lawnmower game at all. But the job of the football janitor is to mow the pitch. Clearly it caught the imaginations of lots of people.” The readers couldn’t get enough, so a callout was made for them to start sending in their games – lawnmower-related or otherwise – that were as deliberately crap as possible. Lo and behold, a new regular feature was born – Crap Game Corner.
I wrote these features. Somehow, age 14, I got a job writing for Your Sinclair while still at school. My job description included reviewing games and taking screenshots (at first, with an actual camera and a hood over the telly, until someone worked out a more technical method). I appeared in a photo love story, and spent years writing the tips and doing all the bits no one else wanted to do (a career I still haven’t escaped). The dichotomy of Crap Game Corner was the longer it went on, the crapper the games became, and the more delighted the readers were when I slagged them off. (Games were rated up to 100% Crap Factor).
And now, via the Crap Games competition, people are still striving to write the worst possible Spectrum games 30 years later, inspired by Cascade’s Cassette 50 and the Your Sinclair readers who would send me their terrible games. “I only really started to learn the comp’s history when I became host of this year’s competition,” says Jamie Bradbury. “I did read Your Sinclair as a kid, and remember Advanced Lawnmower Simulator – though I was too young to get the joke and spent ages trying to figure out how to mow the whole lawn.”
Entries this year include a crap game version of Cocaine Bear, where you play a bear on a coke-fuelled murder rampage; a boxing game, Face Punch; and ChatGPT for ZX Spectrum. There’s only one thing for it … I’ve got to enter this competition myself. It’ll be a full-circle moment. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to program, so I’m going to need the help of Jim Winston-Smith. “Hey, Jim. I’ve got a great idea!” I write. “Why don’t we make a 2023 update of Advanced Lawnmower Simulator, and enter it in memory of Duncan MacDonald?”
The job took about five minutes. There’s an updated mower menu. The house is 3D-ish and has sprouted 21st-century solar panels. “In Duncan MacDonald’s honour, I wanted to make sure there was still enough of his code left that everyone believes it’s the same game,” says Jim, who ironically has never in his life owned an actual lawnmower.
And the review? “Jim has crafted a love letter to grass, to mowers, to the destruction of our planet,” says Bradbury on the official CGC2023 webpage. “But, also to the Crap Games Comp throughout the ages, to Your Sinclair, to the original ALS and, perhaps too, to Rich Pelley himself.”
