Video games 1.0: How the UK pioneered gaming culture

16:04 25 October 2013

Looking at early video games may give you a bout of nostalgia for the UK of the 1980s. Computers were just making their way into people's homes, and they often inspired players to create new games themselves from the comfort of their bedrooms. Home-grown designs often reflect the quirkiness of British culture, as well as the politics of the time. British inventors also contributed to hardware development, with Clive Sinclair's series of home computers taking on the US's Commodore computers.

A new exhibition at The National Centre for Craft and Design in Sleaford, UK, celebrates the rise of the UK's video game industry between 1979 and 1989 with popular memorabilia, as well as offering fans a chance to play their favourites again. Many of the games on display were created by teenagers who enlisted the help of their mothers to distribute them by mail order, reminding us that the basic entrepreneurial teen spirit driving digital culture doesn't change much. You have until 5 January 2014 to find out if all your old favourites have stood the test of time. Sandrine Ceurstemont

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The design of the Sinclair ZX80, the UK's first affordable personal computer, was surprisingly compact and slick. Punters could buy a ready-built version for £99.95 (£320 in today's money) while kits cost £20 less. It had no colour or sound – and just 1 kilobyte of memory to store programs. If you wired the kit to a television, you could give the computer instructions using simple commands in BASIC to write a message that would loop endlessly down the screen. For example: 10 Print "Hello mum", 20 Goto 10

(Image: Sandrine Ceurstemont)