8-bit wars

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Thu, 11 Oct 2012

Photos courtesy of Replay Events

The guys organising the Play Expo event in Manchester this weekend have roped me in to revive a thirty year old playground argument about which was better, the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64.

I'm not sure what the point of this exercise is, as the question was settled years ago (Spectrum, of course), but, like some kind of medieval battle reenactment, four of us old duffers (myself and John Gibson on the side of good, and Jeff Minter and Andy Walker representing pure, fat-pixelled evil) are going to return to the playground and argue the toss all over again, in front of an audience of bemused iPhone and Xbox360 owners this Saturday.

The photo above shows what happened last time I met up with a well known Commodore 64 programmer - Jon Hare and myself nearly came to blows with our 8-bit weapons of choice at the BAFTA video game awards earlier this year.

Hopefully Saturday's event will be more civilised.

Say hello if you see me at the Expo. I'll be the old man with a beard (like that narrows it down!).

» Play Expo website

Tags: zx spectrum, commodore 64, 8-bit, event

Permalink to this post: http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros/blog/view.php?post=687

What?!? Comparing Spectrum to C64 is like comparing a Nokia 110 to an iPhone 5... or a 1950 TV to a brand new hi-def TV... you just wouldn't.

If you wanted smaller pixels, colour clashes and all that, you just needed to enable that mode on the C64 ... and you could maybe immerse your speakers in a bucket of salt to make C64 sound as bad as Spectrum too ...

C64 was the best. End of story.

Comment by Guest Bob, added Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:18:07 GMT

Your name is going down on "the list" Bob.

Comment by Ste Pickford, added Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:25:23 GMT

I had both and an amstrad cpc464 .. loved them all, though some games played so much better on the c64 (last ninja a prime example) at the same time you just couldn't play a dizzy game on anything other than a spectrum, the amstrad had the very best version of elite outside of going all silly and actually buying an acorn and I had the best of all those worlds, looking back I was pretty spoilt for my entertainment.. eventually my brother got given a nes and now he's living under the stairs where he belongs.. freak.

Comment by Guest Chris Bailey, added Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:59:15 GMT