Thanks to the brilliant preservation work of Steve Brown of the TZX Vault, we are proud to present for the very first time, an extremely early Jeff Minter title from 1981. This was for the ZX81 and has been missing for 44 years – yet to be preserved, until today! Here is a version of Conway’s Life simulator from Jeff called Fastlife and another piece of history saved.
What is intriguing, is that the game was advertised just once for the ZX81 as part of a compilation from DK’Tronics, including Deflex and 3D3D, which Jeff also created. However, after that – “Life” was oddly removed and replaced very quickly on the compilation by Centipede. This compilation became the commonly known version, but no-one seemed to have a copy with the originally intended “Life” on it.
We now know that the first edition of the compilation DID just about manage to sneak out before the change, as Steve was able to finally source a copy that you can now see here. It’s assumed that just a mere handful of copies made it out.
Why was it changed? Perhaps DK’Tronics thought that a compilation with Centipede would sell better and swapped it round. We hope to learn more from Jeff and will update this page with more details about what happened. But for now, check out a piece of history with some of Jeff’s very first commercially released work and predating his work on the Commodore VIC-20.
Steve has also created a Patreon for his preservation work at the TZX Vault, where he will be releasing materials early to backers and take suggestions for getting rare inlays scanned. For more details please check out:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/TZXVault
With a huge thank you to Steve Brown for his preservation work and for giving to Games That Weren’t to release for the first time.
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