Happy new year! You might have enjoyed my blog that spent all of 2021 going through the best 300 games on the Commodore Amiga, courtesy of 292 games chosen by Amiga Power for their six All-Time Top 100 lists, plus eight Honourable Mentions from myself. If not, just head on over to my Amiga Power Top 300 blog right here to check it out.
Of course, perhaps you're not interested in the Amiga at all, and came to this blog to find out about a slightly older, slightly less powerful machine. Well, 2022 just so happens to be the 40th anniversary of the release of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, so I decided that a nice sequel to my Amiga blog would be a similar one dedicated to the best games of all time on the ZX Spectrum. The selection is based on the most widely-known list of great Speccy games, compiled by Stuart Campbell (who just so happened to be in charge of Amiga Power's lists too), and published in Your Sinclair in 1991 and 1992. In addition, I've combined it with the Readers Top 100 from 1993, voted on by the readers of Your Sinclair, to get a grand total of 159 games, plus one Honourable Mention to reach a neat 160.
Unlike the previous blog - where my eight Honourable Mentions were spread throughout - this time, I'll kick the list off with my solitary choice on Monday, and given that there's almost half as many games this time, I'll only be updating on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with the exception being the last two weeks of the year, where the weekdays will be filled with the final top 10. Now, let me explain how this will work.
The YS Top 100 Speccy Games of All Time (Ever)
First, as before, some context. Your Sinclair began life as Your Spectrum in January 1984, becoming one of a range of popular magazines dedicated to the rapidly-booming micro. As the Sinclair range expanded beyond merely the Spectrum, the decision was made to rebrand as Your Sinclair in 1986, but as it turned out, none of Sinclair's other products would reach anything close to the success of the Spectrum, and the magazine kept its focus on the computer until its final issue in 1993.
Starting in October 1991, contributor Stuart Campbell created his list of the top 100 Spectrum games, seemingly based entirely on his opinion, unlike the Amiga Power lists which saw contributions from the whole team. Nevertheless, no other such list has been presented elsewhere, so this one has stuck. However, the Your Sinclair team decided to let their readers have the final say in the last issue in 1993, taking votes from readers of their personal top 10s and then putting it all in order.
I decided the best thing to do was to combine the two lists together to get the best selection: ones from an expert, and ones from the general public. Taking the 200 entries and removing duplicates - including the unfortunate double entry of RoboCop at number 9 and 52 in the Readers 100 (I have no way of knowing if another game was supposed to be there or it was just a mistake including the same game twice) - gave me a total of 159 games. How could I then arrange these games from two lists in a logical order?
My new ranking system
So, first of all, I did exactly the same as my Amiga list. Each game in each list gets points based on the inverse of its position - in other words, the number 1 game gets 100 points, number 100 gets 1 point, number 36 gets 65 and so on. Since this is a different situation to the six Amiga Power lists, I decided they should both get equal weight, so I simply added them together. So, if a game is 15th in Stuart Campbell's list and 62nd in the Readers list, it would get 86 + 39, or 125.
Of course, this gives a big advantage to games that were chosen by both Stuart and the public - but then, of course it should. In fact, after I combined the lists, I found that, coincidentally, the number of games on both lists was a nice round 40. So, due to the neatness of this, I decided that the top 40 should be exclusively games from both lists, followed by the highest-rated games from either list. In case of a draw, the one from the YS list gets priority over the Readers list. Thus, two different games ranked individually 24th in each list would have the YS game first, the Readers game second. In the top 40, if the combined scores of two games are equal, the priority goes to the game(s) which are higher in the YS list.
I won't be needing to include TOSEC information like on the Amiga blog, as the TZX files in the TOSEC set will generally be fine, but if there is some special case where it's not obvious where to find the game, I will mention it. I will also be comparing games that take advantage of the 128K Spectrums, and how they differ when played in 48K mode. Finally, there is one game that isn't a Spectrum game at all, technically, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let the list begin
Okay, I hope everything is clear. Join me on a journey though the extensive back catalogue of one of the UK's most beloved micros!
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