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A Piece of PIAS

Published 15th March 2026

Computing / Internet / Videogames

I don’t let the old Acorn/RISC OS fanboy in me out very much any more. At least, not in polite company. But I have to admit, when reading a blog post recently from somebody around my age1, which was complaining about how unsafe they felt buying computers from the US due to the Trump administration, a little voice popped into my head, unbidden.

“YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO BUY BRITISH IN THE 90S AND YOU DIDN’T, IT’S TOO LATE NOW!”

Ahem. Slightly unfair, of course – Acorn’s machines had plenty of US involvement, not least with partners like VLSI – but I still think there’s a reasonable point there when it comes to the software stack. And anyway, being slightly unfair is the whole point of being a fanboy.

Still, I should dial this rather unpleasant part of me back to something useful. So let’s travel a little further back in time to my BBC Master days. Specifically the release Play It Again Sam 6.

Play It Again Sam 6 advert

Play It Again Sam 6 advert, from the January 1989 issue of Acorn User

Play It Again Sam was that magic thing: a win for both company and consumer. Take four old games Superior Software had the rights to, package them up with minimal effort, charge the same amount as a single game would, and watch the money flow in. Crucially, if you already had two of the games, the releases were still a bargain. The 8-bit incarnation ended up running for 18 installments between and 1987 and 19932, and sometimes there was even a brand new game included.

So given that value for money, along with loving my BBC Master more than life itself, I owned every single release, yes? In fact, no. I think Play It Again Sam 6 was the only one I owned. And while I had a “healthy” collection of pirate games – including some games which appeared on various Play It Again Sam releases – I certainly didn’t own every game featured on them, legally or otherwise. Nowhere near.

I think maybe this is something that’s easy for us to forget as adults. (Or at least, the kind of adults who read this site.) Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a Jayne Mansfield kick, and have been tracking down as many films of hers as I can reasonably watch. This means obvious fare like The Girl Can’t Help It, through to less obvious films like The Challenge, and onto true obscurities like The Fat Spy.3 This has involved ordering some truly odd DVD releases. As my friend Darrell said: “When you’re onto the Spanish bootleg DVDs you know you’re in deep.”

But as a kid, I didn’t have the resources to do this kind of collecting. And no matter how much I might love any given thing, the very idea of owning every single release of something was just incomprehensible.4 Not only would I never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation, but of course I would never own every single Play It Again Sam compilation.

After all, I was never going to own every single Donald Duck VHS release either. I’d just wear out the single one I had.

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  1. Deliberately left unlinked, I ain’t interested in a fight. ↩

  2. Plenty of websites claim that Play It Again Sam 18 was released in 1992, but I don’t believe this is the case. The issue is blurred by the fact that Superior essentially stopped advertising its 8-bit range in the Acorn magazines the start of 1993; but until then, the latest compliation they were pushing was 17. Given that, the 1993 date feels most likely.

    There was also a Play It Again Sam 19 released in 1997, released by ProAction, but this is distinct from the original Superior Software compilations, in my opinion. ↩

  3. The Fat Spy currently holds the record for the worst film I have ever seen. ↩

  4. The closest I ever came was Blue Peter annuals, and a) you could get them cheaply at boot sales, and b) that was as much pushed by my parents as much as anything else. ↩

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Rescued.

Published 22nd April 2025

Internet / Videogames

Jason Dyer’s All the Adventures project – “Wherein I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order” – is undergoing a particularly amazing time at the moment. So far he’s covered 192 full games from 1982 alone – 32 of them since the start of this year – some of them very obscure indeed, and usually in multi-part articles. It brings into sharp focus those people who simply pretend to write blogs.

Jason doesn’t just limit himself to games which were published. For instance, take Time Warden by Simon Wadsworth, a game vaguely inspired by Doctor Who. Simon wrote about it on his own site:

“This was my second full adventure. I submitted it to Bug-Byte, as I had done with The Scepter, but it was never published. It was written using the same source code structure. I’d forgotten all about this game until sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes looking for my copy of The Scepter.

In this adventure you play the Time Warden. While you have been away on vacation and the Key of Time has been lost on the planet Syrius 5. You have 250 turns to recover the key before the end of the Universe.”

Luckily, Simon didn’t just talk about it on his site – he provided a download link to the game, which Jason used to write his post. Not that you can actually directly download it from Simon’s site any more… or, indeed, even read about it. The site went offline at some point in 2019. You can only access it now through the Wayback Machine.

Meaning that when Jason wrote about Time Warden, he’s writing about something rescued twice: firstly, an unpublished game scraped from an old cassette by its author… and then secondly, scraped from a defunct website through the Internet Archive.

Blogs are dead. Apart, of course, from all the amazing blogs out there.

Memory Poisoning

Published 28th October 2024

Adverts / Videogames

One of my favourite games when I was a kid was The Seventh Star, a text adventure for the BBC Micro. Not that I was any good at text adventures. Or any games full stop, really. The number of games from the time I actually completed can be counted on one hand.1

So I never even came close to finishing it. Nor did my older sister. Which is why it’s slightly sobering to find this playthrough on YouTube. If I’d known what to type, a game which I failed to complete over years… could have been over in less than 20 minutes.

And yet there was something disturbing, as I watched that video recently. Because as I did, I was aware of part of my brain self-destructing.

As the locations of the game flitted past – some of which I remembered, some of which I definitely didn’t manage to get to at the time – I knew I could never quite remember the game as I did as a kid ever again. The memory of seeing the game completed in 2024 instantly squashed many of my memories of the late 80s and early 90s. The memories of which of the locations I managed to actually see then, and which were brand new to me in 2024, is already fading in a jumble of confusion.

*   *   *

If there’s one thing men of my age are very good at, it’s watching old adverts from their childhood on YouTube. Which is why I was surprised a few months ago, when I randomly came across this Monster Munch advert… and was pretty sure I really hadn’t seen it since the 80s. I was instantly dragged back through the decades.

And yet watching it again, right now… I simply can’t capture quite the same feeling. As with The Seventh Star, as soon as I saw it in 2024, it instantly pasted itself across my memory afresh. I’m not so much dragged back through the decades, as just dragged back a few months, when I first came across the advert afresh.

That feeling can never quite be recaptured. I can’t drag my brain back to the point before I reexperienced these things. And there is an ever-dwindling source of material which I a) still remember well enough as a kid, b) had a huge gap between watching them as a kid and as an adult, and c) haven’t already gone back and killed my old memories by watching them again.

Surely neither The Seventh Star or Monster Munch were really designed to induce this much melancholy.

  1. I think The Devil’s Domain was the first game I ever finished. ↩

!Lander

Published 22nd August 2024

Computing / Videogames

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who, when they retire or otherwise change careers, want to entirely forget about the kind of work they used to do. Then there are the ones who take the chance to do more of it, but on their own terms this time round. (I guess there is also a third type who are somewhere between the two, but please don’t spoil my slightly-stretched rhetoric.)

Mark Moxon is definitely in the second category. I first heard the name back when he edited Acorn User in the 90s, when I was an avid reader. But these days, instead of editing Acorn magazines, he’s doing deep dives into old Acorn games instead. And when I say deep dives, I mean really deep dives. Mark calls himself a software archaeologist, and I can think of no better description for what he does.

Moreover, the games Mark looks at are true classics, by any interpretation of that description, and not just within the context of the BBC Micro. Games such as:

  • Elite (1984) – David Braben and Ian Bell’s masterwork, and one of the few games where the word “iconic” can be applied without shame.
  • Aviator (1983) – Geoff Crammond’s flight simulator, with a ludicrously sophisticated flight model for the time.
  • Revs (1985) – Geoff Crammond again, this time with a racing simulator. In fact, widely regarded as the very first proper racing sim.

Mark’s latest deep dive, however, is a step away from the BBC Micro, and into the world of the Acorn Archimedes. We’re talking about Lander (1987), the demo bundled with the Archie, written by David Braben. This eventually became the game Zarch, ported to other platforms as Virus. But there’s a very specific reason why Lander in particular is so important.

Lander gameplay, a craft flying over a landscape made of squares

A different screenshot of Lander, showing a different coloured landscape

As Mark says:

“Braben famously wrote Lander in around two months, starting his work on an ARM1-based ARM Evaluation System that was hooked up to a BBC Micro as a second processor, before getting his hands on a prototype Archimedes A500 in early 1987. As a result the code feels almost minimalistic. There’s practically no cruft, there’s no hard-to-follow code that’s been twisted for efficiency’s sake, and instead there’s the landscape and the player and the particle system and the mouse-based controls… and not a great deal else. It’s very zen, not least because the ARM1 instruction set that Braben ended up using is, by design, simplicity itself; there are no MUL instructions anywhere in Lander, as the latter only appeared on the ARM2 in the A500, so this is not only the first ARM game ever written, it’s quite possibly the only game ever written for the first version of the ARM chip. Given how the ARM processor powers an awful lot of the modern world, that’s quite something.”

The very first game written for the very first iteration of the chip which almost certainly powers your mobile phone. That’s your important historical shit, right there.

As for Lander itself, you can play it in your web browser here. I’ve often talked about my uncomfortableness with the word “dated”, but even I have to admit that early 3D games tend to fit that description more than a lot of things. But I tend to think Lander still looks beautiful. Maybe because the landscape itself, made up as it is of huge squares, evokes a sense of pixel art regardless.

Or maybe it’s just the mouldy old Acorn fan in me talking.

Ersatz Gaming

Published 15th April 2023

Internet / Videogames

I’m going through a bit of an odd phase at the moment with games, of pretty much any description. I realised it late last year, when I found myself stuck on the final level of Portal, despite beating it years ago. I also found myself stuck in the Forest Temple in Ocarina of Time, despite beating that years ago too.1 I have so much going on in my life at the moment that Switch Sports Golf is about all I can manage. Figuring out puzzles is entirely beyond me. My head is too full.

But I still need that hit of seeing a puzzle solved, even if I have to get someone else to do it for me. So one constant joy over the past year has been Jason Dyer and his All the Adventures project, described as: “I play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order.” This is clearly an utterly ridiculous thing to attempt. Fantastic.

I tend to dip into Jason’s extensive archive on a fairly random basis, rather than reading everything from the beginning. And recently, a set of connected games by mostly the same author2 has been keeping me company. These are very unusual – a set of first-person adventure games made between 1980-82, for the TRS-80. No overhead view or text adventures here. The closest thing I’ve seen in my world of the BBC Micro is Acornsoft Maze, but the similarity is really very superficial. It’s a whole different type of game.

The games in the series, linked to Jason’s write-ups, are:

Now, I’ve never touched a real TRS-80. I did spend a little time emulating one a while back, just for fun, but didn’t end doing that much with it. I didn’t really need to. Articles like these scratch every single itch I have for a bit of adventuring, without actually having to put the work in to map mazes and suchlike. (Something I was invariably terrible at anyway.) I was never, ever going to find the time to play these games, but reading Jason it is almost as much fun.

You might think this kind of thing would be ideal to do on YouTube instead, and I suppose for many, it would be. I think doing it as a blog does have some real advantages, though. It really does allow Jason to go into detail regarding how the puzzles are constructed, which a Let’s Play would find difficult to encapsulate, and a more general review would probably skip over. It’s this construction detail which I find so immensely pleasing about these pieces, and by the end of the final game in the series, you really do feel like you’ve learnt something tangible about how games work, rather than just being taken on a pleasure ride through nothing.

These articles are the gold standard for writing online, as far as I’m concerned. What better thing is there to write about than something obscure and under-appreciated, and actually analysing it properly? In a world where so many write about the same boring thing over and over again, stuff like this is an utter joy.

It’s something anyone writing shit on the internet can aspire to. There’s a whole world of stuff out there. Find the bits that haven’t been poked enough yet. And poke ’em.

  1. Incidentally, in the most cliched thing I will ever admit to on this site, years ago I ended up getting stuck on the Water Temple in Ocarina, and never got past it. Bah. ↩

  2. The first three are by William F. Denman, Jr. and Frank Corr, Jr. The final one is by William Denman only, although it reuses some graphics by Frank Corr. ↩

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Small Fries

Published 8th October 2022

Internet / Videogames

An interesting thing happens to people who are very successful in their chosen line of work. Often, when they retire or just move on, they never want to talk about the field they worked in again. Maybe it bores them now. Maybe they were never truly interested in the first place. Either way, it’s stymied a fair amount of research for Dirty Feed: people who achieved great things, but are more interested in walking their dog these days.

Then there’s the other type. Those successful people who still clearly love what they did. People like Ed Fries, who writes an amazing blog about vintage arcade games… and was Vice President of Game Publishing at Microsoft for much of the initial XBox years. The kind of person who shatters any notions that huge success requires a destruction of your soul.

Ed’s pieces are fascinating; just read his brilliant pieces on the first arcade game easter egg, or fixing old games like Gran Trak 10. Each is a wonderful mix of research, history, and practical electronics. One of my favourite things about his writing is his acknowledgement of other people in the research process. It’s something I always try to do here on Dirty Feed; to point out that this kind of writing doesn’t always spring out of nowhere, but is often the result of people working together.1

But here’s the real reason I want to link to Ed’s work here. His blog currently consists of just six articles, written between 2015 and 2021. On average, one a year, although there was some concentrated work in 2017, and his writing has slowed recently. But each of those articles is wonderful, and each of them forges new ground in our understanding of its topic. You won’t find six better posts anywhere on the net.

And it’s a reminder that blogging – or just writing, or whatever you want to call it – can take many different forms. Despite my occasional sarcasm, it’s not something you need to show up every day to do, or even every month. One in-depth post a year, if that’s the best way you write, can result in something amazing.2

Owning a blog doesn’t need to take over your life. Nor does it need to be at the technical level that Ed Fries is working at. You can still contribute something worthwhile.

All you have to do is attempt to say something new. That’s all.

  1. To read some people’s writing, you’d think they were the only people who ever did anything. This kind of self-aggrandising gets my goat. No, I’m not going to give examples. But it’s truly pathetic. ↩

  2. Frankly, it’s how I’d prefer to write myself, but I come up with too many silly things I want to write about. ↩

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A Quiet Season

Published 5th June 2022

Meta / Videogames

For various reasons, I feel I need to take a bit of a break here on Dirty Feed. No, not a six month break. But I do want a bit of a rest from the endless posting. Partly because I’m a little burnt out with my job and need to clear my head, and partly because I want to spend some time researching and writing some more in-depth pieces than I’ve published on here of late.

So rather than leave you with an obnoxious and self-serving list of my own favourite articles on here as a holding pattern, instead I thought I’d link to a few other sites putting out some consistently good work. In particular: those writing about videogame history.

*   *   *

The Digital Antiquarian by Jimmy Maher
Some websites, like mine, simply post exactly what the writer feels like writing about at any given moment. Others are rather more ambitious. The Digital Antiquarian purports to be nothing less than “an historical chronicle of interactive entertainment”, in order. Of course, as I’m sure Jimmy Maher would be the first to admit, this historical chronicle is filtered through his own personal biases and interests. You won’t find much on consoles here, for instance, while every single game Infocom ever published gets its own article. This is very much not a problem.

The best place to start with the site isn’t on the front page: it’s the table of contents. You can either scroll down and pick the pieces which look interesting, or start right at the very beginning. One of my personal favourites is “What’s the Matter with Covert Action?”, about a game which I had never even heard of before I read the article, let alone played. You need precisely zero familiarity with the game in order to fully appreciate the argument the piece makes. And Jimmy’s writing really does go out of its way to avoid the boring, obvious arguments.

I love The Digital Antiquarian so much that I support Jimmy’s Patreon. If you have the means and enjoy the site, it might be worth doing the same.

All the Adventures by Jason Dyer
If the ambition of The Digital Antiquarian is startling, then the project All the Adventures is thoroughly ridiculous. Jason Dyer has promised nothing less than to “play and blog about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order”. There are hundreds of posts on the site already, and he’s only up to 1982. This might take a while.

Again, I highly suggest that you start on the chronological list of games rather than the front page, and see whether you want to skip around, or just start at the beginning. I especially loved his investigation into Time Zone – a famous, formidable, daunting game which I was never, ever, ever going to play… but sure loved reading someone else doing the hard work instead.

Revs on the BBC Micro by Mark Moxon
My last suggestion is a little different from the others. For a start, it’s far more technical – perhaps impenetrably so for many. But blame the old BBC Micro user in me, I find it utterly irresistible.1

The Beeb got a surprising amount of highly innovative games, considering its reputation among some people; Elite, Exile, and Aviator, to name but three. Some of those games are even covered elsewhere on the site I’m linking to here. But I was particularly taken by Mark Moxon’s articles about Revs, an extremely early racing sim. Mark’s work actually involves a complete documentation of the source code of the game, which I’m sure is fascinating for those people it’s aimed at, but for me it’s the articles which make the whole thing accessible to the lay person, albeit the technically-minded lay person.

My favourite piece on the whole site is this examination of the custom screen mode in Revs, which is the kind of thing I had a vague kind of idea about, but not how complex it actually was. It’s such a delight to find out brand new things about something decades old. While some people sit there pretending to write, it’s people like Mark who are calmly getting shit done.

*   *   *

I’ve only scratched the surface here of the fun stuff going on in retro gaming right now. There’s the Video Game History Foundation, who recently published this search for an important female pioneer in gaming. There’s The Genesis Temple, which takes a particular look at the oft-forgotten European side of gaming. There’s also the superlative 50 Years of Text Games, with the quite astonishing tale behind Silverwolf. I really do mean utterly astonishing. And so on and so on, across what must be hundreds of sites. And I’ve not even started on all the various podcasts or YouTube.

There seems to me right now to be some extraordinary work going in terms of retro gaming, both in terms of analysis, and pure software preservation. There has been for years, of course, but I feel it more than ever right now. In fact, I might almost be tempted to use that dreaded phrase “golden age”. If you want to know all about the games of your childhood – or even the games of somebody else’s childhood – there’s a quite astonishing amount of material out there.

So there you go. Plenty to be getting on with away from here. I hope at least one of the sites above is new to you. As for this place, the fact that this post has been a struggle to write, when it’s literally just a few links bunged together, probably tells you all you need to know about how well my brain is working at the moment.

See you on the other side. Toodle-oo.

  1. Old time BBC Micro users will get the headine of this article, for instance. Yes, Yellow River Kingdom… ↩

A Short Tale from Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Published 1st June 2020

Videogames

Last night, I was bumbling around on Animal Crossing, as usual. Just doing a little night-time fishing, you know the drill. The clock strikes midnight. Well, actually, the clock played the NBC chimes at midnight, because I am a twat.

Immediately, I see something glowing in the distance. Hang on, what’s going on? I grab my net, and swing.

Catching a firefly

Oh. That’s weird, I’ve never seen them before.1 And suddenly, they’re everywhere. From no fireflies, to being surrounded by them.

A light goes off in my head. Let’s check Critterpedia…

Firefly on Critterpedia

Sure enough, you can only catch them in June. And because we’re now past midnight, and technically it’s June 1st, that immediately means they spring up out of nowhere, ready to catch.

Which I think is… not a great way to go about things.

I mean, look. I’m not a complete imbecile. I get how computers work. But this is surely waaaaaay too artificial. For an insect which is only available in June to suddenly appear seconds after it’s technically June is just weird, and brings me out of the reality of the game entirely. If I can see the numbers crunching in your simulated world, the chances are you should have done a better job at hiding them.

So, let’s pop over to Blathers to donate this specimen. Hello Blathers, look what your programmers have given me. Programmers who I am unaccountably thinking about for some reason, despite the fact I shouldn’t be. What’s the point of giving Blathers amusing character dialogue to make him feel real, if I keep picturing date algorithms in my head?

My solution? An easy way to disguise it would simply be for the fireflies to appear in the evening on the 1st June, 19 hours later, rather than immediately past midnight. Just treat midnight to 5am as an extension of May. That way, the fireflies aren’t going to suddenly appear in the middle of the night while you’re playing; they’ll appear naturally during the evening instead. And surely Animal Crossing should be doing its best to appear natural, rather than just a bunch of numbers throwing insects at you.

Still, never mind. Let’s relax with some fishing. Hmmm, not seen that fish before…

Catching a hammerhead shark

Oh fuck off.

  1. In New Horizons. Yes, I remember them from previous Animal Crossing games. ↩

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Reasons Shaun Keaveny is Boring #2847342

Published 10th January 2019

Radio / Videogames

The aforementioned Shaun Keaveny, 6 Music, 9th January 2019, on a listener talking about their kid playing Minecraft:

“If he’s playing it, I don’t mind that. It’s watching my children sometimes watching a kid playing Minecraft on YouTube which beggars belief for an analogue person. The other day, I saw a kid watching a kid playing Minecraft on YouTube, and a kid watching over his shoulder. It’s like Russian dolls, isn’t it? Absolutely insane.”

Let’s take a little trip back to my childhood. I remember watching and loving my sister play games on our BBC Master. I remember watching and loving my friend Joel play games on his Archimedes. And I remember being at a Scout activity weekend, where by far the best thing that happened all weekend was gathering around our leader’s Amiga and watching each other play games.1

I totally get that Shaun Keaveny is not trying to be the voice of youth. But 6 Music hiring DJs which don’t even manage to keep up-to-date with what was happening in the early 90s – or, indeed, far earlier – is not a good look. People watching other people play videogames is not a new thing in any way whatsoever. It’s been going on for decades.

By the way, the fact I didn’t invent Twitch and make millions of pounds despite being well aware that people love watching other people playing games will haunt me to my deathbed.

  1. The other amazing thing which happened that weekend was the sex scene in Problem Child 2 making me feel a bit funny. ↩