‘It’s fun to cook up the stupidest idea’: the people competing to make the worst computer games possible

The annual Crap Games Competition has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years. It all began with an April fool’s joke in a magazine called Your Sinclair …

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.

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