The Story of Vova, or Why Another Game Contest is Needed

If you don't want to read the whole story and want to get straight to the idea of this contest, click here.

Somewhere in the distant 80s of the last century, in a small town at the foothills of the Siberian taiga, lived a boy named Vova who loved playing computer games. Before he had a computer, he dreamed of building one himself – he studied electronics, collected microchips and other radio components, and out of curiosity, avidly read incomprehensible technical books for high school students.

But then happiness arrived – his parents saved up some money and, seeing Vova's suffering and efforts, bought him an inexpensive computer that could be connected to a regular TV and a cassette recorder, allowing him to play real color computer games.

At the time, they didn't realize that this computer would significantly influence Vova's entire future life. Because it was a crude but fully functional clone of the popular ZX Spectrum computer of that era.

And what about Vova? For a while, Vova played games from the cassette that came with the computer. Then, after he'd had his fill, he started looking for like-minded people in his town, exchanging games with them, breathlessly copying games from tape to tape, and even trying to program something on the ZX Spectrum, taking his first steps in IT. The internet wasn't available in his small town yet, so there weren't many games the boy could play. He couldn't imagine then how small a part of the iceberg was visible from his window.

Time passed, the boy grew up, graduated from university, and chose to further his development in internet technologies. He got a job in a technical specialty and earned good money.

But then, on a rainy day in 2005, a married man named Vladimir accidentally stumbled upon a website that had gathered many ZX Spectrum games in one place.

In a nostalgic impulse, Vladimir spent an entire evening exploring this site. It had all the games he played in his childhood, but it also had many more he hadn't played. Although, that's not the right comparison – it had not just more, but significantly more. It had 10, even 50 times more. And Vladimir felt an unbearable urge to play all these games.

But playing was very difficult. Firstly, you had to download the game from the site to load it into an emulator. The games downloaded into one folder, and you had to search for them there. This sounds short and simple, but if you want to browse just a hundred games, these simple actions take a lot of time.

Then Vladimir applied all his IT experience, gained from working as a web developer, and created his own website where you could play games without downloading them. Additionally, the site had a convenient game list that suggested games he hadn't yet checked out, and he could save viewed and liked games into folders. Moreover, Vladimir understood that he wouldn't have much enthusiasm to browse games if the gameplay constantly reset to the beginning, so he implemented a game saving mode on the server, so that accumulated game progress would never be lost again.

That's when Vladimir realized how vast the ZX Spectrum world was. In total, around 25,000 different games were released up to the year 2000, not counting versions with different loaders and localizations. And he understood even more how many interesting games had passed him by in his childhood. Despite their humble appearance, they could seriously engross an unwary retro gamer.

Indeed, young Vova didn't have the opportunity to get all these games. Only the games that were commercially available were brought to his small town – those that had appealed to some other people (let's call them sellers or marketers), and they based their choice on the external appearance of the game cassette, the game's intro screen, or its title, without understanding the game's content or its gameplay qualities.

And all the other games were left aside. Unknown, unplayed, and forgotten.

So why do we need another contest?

And then Vladimir realized something else. Game development for the ZX Spectrum is a special kind of art. Almost no one nowadays would develop for the ZX Spectrum to earn a living. People come here to create. It's a miracle when you cram an entire world into 48 or 128 kilobytes and 15 colors, a world capable of captivating a curious player for hours, or even days!

Now, around a hundred, perhaps two hundred people worldwide are developing games for the ZX Spectrum. Incredibly, through their efforts, a hundred new games for the ZX Spectrum, or even more, are released each year. And the saddest part is that out of these hundred games, only 10, maybe 20 become "popular and promoted." But it shouldn't be this way. Because every ZX Spectrum game is a diamond, into which the authors pour a piece of their soul. And in every game, one can find its own special charm.

We decided to create an annual ZX Online Awards contest to support and popularize all games developed for the ZX Spectrum nowadays. So that no game is abandoned in the backwaters by marketers and sellers, so that every game has the right to be played and appreciated deservedly.

This year, we are holding a trial contest, ZX Online Awards 2022, with only 33 games developed in 2021 participating. This is far from all the games from 2021, but we believe that only the game's author should decide whether to participate in the contest or not, and in a short period, we couldn't contact every author to offer them participation.

The awards ceremony will be held in several categories. Not everyone will receive prizes, of course. But this doesn't mean that only the "very best" will get prizes. That's the point – to evaluate games from different perspectives. Some games are truly beautiful, while others have no graphics or music at all, but are nonetheless no less interesting to play. Simply put, we will be looking for "diamonds."

Perhaps you would also be interested in participating in this event. Why not? You don't even need a physical Spectrum for this – all games run in an online emulator right on the voting page.

P.S. All names are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.