Thanks for the honest response.
Sadly I have no course of action but to write you off as 'not knowledgeable' in all things (retro) gaming-related, up to and including you making this thread in the first place. A pity.
You seem to fall into the familiar trap of gaming enthusiasts of 'If I don't know it = It doesn't exist'.
Let me give you a piece of history to give you an idea of your fail: The creation of
Manic Miner (1983) and why Matthew Smith was a code god in his prime.
The ZX Spectrum (1982) was the third-generation Sinclair computer, superceding the ZX80 (1980) and the ZX81 (1981). Despite the ZX machines being tiny little things with dozens of quirks and anomalies (rubber buttons, ugh) they were a huge hit... at least in Britain.
The ZX Spectrum was Britain's equivalent to America's Commodore 64 in many ways... but not in every way. One thing the C-64 had over the Spectrum was the SiD chip, a dedicated music processor that helped make the C-64 the legendary 'retro' computer that it is today. The ZX could make noises, but no one in their right mind thought that it was capable of playing music. Fortunately for us, some people didn't get the memo and tried anyway.
Enter Matthew Smith. 17 years old and having an affinity for computers, he started on his Magnum Opus.
He used a TRS-80 to write the game, then ported it back to the ZX. This was a painstaking process requiring perfection down to the byte, but he did it anyway. One thing he did discover along the way was to make the ZX Spectrum play music.
Manic Miner was the first ZX game to feature music, it plays the
Blue Danube on the title screen, and
In the Hall of the Mountain King during gameplay. The thing is, the ZX Spectrum doesn't have a dedicated sound chip, but Smith solved that by having the Spectrum's CPU alternating between playing music and running the game. It sounds stuttery as a result, but the reaction was undeniable. He brought audio to a computer thought incapable of doing it.
That's before you factor in that while Manic Miner is a tough game, it's one of the cornerstones of the Spectrum game catalog, which numbers over 27000 games last time I checked.
And then he went on and made
Jet Set Willy (1984), the sequel to Manic Miner. Bigger and better in almost every way compared to its prequel, it sealed Matthew Smith's reputation as the code god of his era, an icon among Spectrum fans, and a repeat offender of Britain's Vice Squad.
This is a 'then vs now' image of Matthew Smith:
He's lost most of his teeth due to substance abuse, he became such a supergod persona in the early 1980s that he burned out in record time. It's amazing that he's actually alive today.
But he made Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy all by himself. Period.
