Whatever Happened to Emily?

(Posted Jul 1, 02:41 PM)

We’ll, here’s a blast from the past. Gerard Sweeney from the World of Spectrum website, a site dedicated to that ancient machine the Sinclair ZX spectrum, got in touch with me a couple of days ago to say that a program I wrote for the 16K ZX Spectrum at the age of twelve and had published in a Sinclair Programs magazine way back in 1984 has been added to their site.

Emily's Tantrum
(Click to see image in its full-sized glory)

The program was called Emily’s Tantrums, and – there is no way around the fact – it was truly, truly dire. If you want to have a go, it can be downloaded here, but you’ll need a Spectrum emulator to play it and it’s not really worth the trouble. Anyway, for all of the game’s abject awfulness, it is pleasing to see Emily cropping up again, twenty four years later, and to be reminded of times when Clive Sinclair was the nation’s great hope, when the name of Bill Gates’ Microsoft Windows was not yet known, and when the world waited with breathless anticipation for the launch of the Sinclair C5 electric car…

 

  1. I had a game published in one of those magazines too. Those were the days… I think it was for the Texas Instruments home computer. It was like PacMan except about cleaning waste from a nuclear reactor. I definitely remember that I particularly enjoyed animating the mushroom clouds.


    — Frank O'Connor    Jul 18, 05:07 PM    #
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