Learn more about why home computers were the norm for video games in Great Britain, and how this had a huge effect on how games were designed and distributed.

In most of the world, the latest and greatest video games are played on specialist game consoles, which often shape how a game looks and how it is designed.

It is why optimisation for how a particular console works is a pivotal part of any games design degree, but whilst this has always been important in the United States, Japan and many other countries central to the story of video games, this was not always true in the UK.

Whilst games consoles were available in the UK as early as 1973, thanks to the Magnavox Odyssey, they were not the primary way of playing games in the UK until the 1990s, when the Sega Mega Drive, Super Nintendo and especially the Sony PlayStation were hugely successful.

Instead, the main way to play games was via the home computer, most notably the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which both had games released for them for over a decade, long after they had been abandoned in other regions.

Why was this the case? The answer lies in the first proper Spectrum home computer, the Sinclair ZX80. More specifically, it lies in the home computer’s £100 asking price.

At a time when the Commodore PET was six times that price, and many computers cost thousands of pounds, a home computer was cheap enough to be a present and could theoretically be used as a business or education tool.

The late Sir Clive Sinclair wanted his computers to be used for education, so he included a lot of programming guides and educational software, but games became what the computer was best at and what sold the most.

The cheapness and limitations created the UK’s video game scene, as both amateur bedroom coders and professional game designers were on the same level, games were typically sold on cassette tape for as little as £1.99 in newsagents, and imagination was far more important than graphical fidelity.

It would take over a decade for this to change, partly due to the bankruptcy of Commodore in 1994 and the takeover of Sinclair by Amstrad in 1986.

To this day, the UK has a very strong games design scene, built around imaginative concepts and new ways of interacting with game worlds.