May the Games Live Forever

Hi!

How many Spectrum games do you know? 50? Maybe even 100? Meanwhile, there are about 20 thousand ZX Spectrum games. (You can download this image, made up of all the games’ loading screens, and see for yourself how MANY there are). Yes, I admit, more than half of them are simple crafts a bit more complicated than “Hello, world!”, on which you don’t even want to waste your time, than play them seriously. But among the rest there are quite worthy of consideration.

If you think about it, there’s no difference between a brand new game that came out yesterday and one that came out in 1985, provided you haven’t played either one yet. I’d even say that the 1985 game has a bit of a head start, since it already has both ratings and fans.

Anyway, closer to the topic

I’ve already mentioned before that we have a website Viva Games, where all (or almost all) retro games for ZX Spectrum are collected. No so long ago, we have done a colossal work to fix and restore almost 5000 (!) original game descriptions in English, Spanish, Italian and other languages, as well as to translate them into English and Russian. This titanic work took more than a year and now we are starting to gradually publish these descriptions on the website.

And to make it more interesting for you, we have hand-picked a few hundred underrated games – little-known, but at the same time original and in some ways distinctive.

These games will be regularly published in the official Viva Games group in Telegram. We have provided each of them with a small description, our summary and an opportunity to play online directly on Viva Games site.

What is the purpose of all this movement?

• For “quite good” games – it’s a chance not to get lost in history and to get a second life, because we believe that games remain alive as long as they are played.
• For Spectrum fans – it’s a chance to discover something new, and sometimes to rethink old games that you played as a kid, but without a description you either didn’t understand how to play or didn’t understand what the point is.
• For “active dreamers”, it’s a source of new ideas. Maybe you want to make a version of your favorite game for ZX Spectrum Next or write a sequel to a classic?

Besides the promised game descriptions, we are going to publish game analytics, voting, contests and other things, because few people love ZX Spectrum games as much as we do. So it going to be interesting. Join us!

By the way, this channel exists in two versions – if Russian is closer to you – here is Russian version of the channel. Oh, the Viva Games website itself is not a bit ready yet for English, but we going to fix this in a week or two.

P.S. The vast majority of descriptions are taken from open sources – from the World of Spectrum website, as well as many others. Descriptions in text format, which is inconvenient for modern web, had to be adapted manually. Thanks to each and every person who painstakingly typed these texts from the covers of physical releases. We have kept all copyright and links in the texts, thank you!

See ya in the telegram channel!

With love to Speccy and Speccy amateurs,
Alexey Khaydukov (aka Epsilon) and Evgeny Kolesnikov (aka Buddy/ERA).