I’d struggle to place the year, probably 1983 or early 1984, but the first game I ever played on our first ZX Spectrum was “Maze Death Race”.

It was a blatant Rally-X rip-off, from a time when intellectual property rights felt more like guidelines than actual rules. You move around a maze, collecting flags, avoiding other cars and oil patches. You can select the speed of the other cars, and that’s about it.

Most of all, I remember it being janky as anything. The graphics felt like they were falling apart, with UDGs flashing in and out of coherence, jerky movement, blurping sound effects…

But I had no frame of reference, no point of comparison. To my 8 year old self, the mere fact that a recognisable car was moving around on our TV under my control was mind-blowing. I honestly had no idea that the glitchy graphics were anything other than purposeful - that instability seemed to add to the allure somehow. It felt like a window into a weird world I’d only had hints of before then…

And that cassette inlay art… nowadays it looks amateurish; back then it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen!