I was never much of a Sierra gamer, probably because unlike Lucasarts’ you would get to a Game Over screen if you did something wrong… days before. Which was pretty frustrating. But there’s something compelling about being able to play those games instantly in the browser. If only you could play Monkey Island…

No, I better not hear about it. I’ve got work to do.

A huge part of my childhood now fits in a website. To think of all the anxious Fridays, waiting for my dad to arrive from work with a bootleg copy of some new game (back the 80s, at least in Portugal, there was no such thing as ‘piracy’, in fact there were quite a few ‘game copy shops’). To think of all the time spent anxiously waiting for that first load attempt, only to see the game crash after 15 minutes of loading. To think of all the constant fiddling with the tape recorder, trying to ‘tune’ it for that particular tape — in a couple of years I’d be fixing radios (or destroying them in a puff of noxious electrical smoke, more likely).

And now, this website has 28 years (up to 2010!) of Spectrum games accessible and always-loadable at the click of a button, and all I can say is that for all the nostalgia, Kick Off looked like shit.