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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Jeff, one of your very first titles is still at large. Have been trying to find a copy of your Graphics / Character Creator tape for the Atari for years and years. I suspect sales must have been very low. Do you happen to still have a cassette of this program somewhere or remember anything about the title? Would love to see this archived!
Thank you for everything!
I own it for the Vic20, and I’m not sure I’ve seen another copy of it physically along the way. I know a couple of other folks who own one. Can’t say I’ve seen an Atari version.
It was advertized from August 1982 to March 1983 so surely some people bought the program. Maybe it was mail order only? I know the Atari market was really small compared to the bigger computers but I’ve been archiving titles for ages and never even found it on pirate compilations, which is pretty telling.
Loading this file into a ZX81 emulator is just running Deflex, how to access the other programs?
Not tried this (as I just did “soft reset” and kept doing load”” for each game until I got to it, but I think it will be something like load “life” or load “fastlife” , followed by run.
Thank you for your response Frank.
I’ve now discovered the solution for those of us using Michael D Wynne’s excellent “EightyOne.exe” emulator (Available here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/eightyone-sinclair-emulator/)
A) load the full file.
B) Go to drop down menu “Tools” & click “Tape manager” (or press CTRL F9)
C) A list of filenames appears
D) Enter “J shift P[FilenameFromList]shift P” (ex. LOAD “DEFLEX II”)
E) RUN
F) Press CTRL F9 to turn Tape Manager off to resume normal usage.
I’m posting this in case someone else ever has the same query as me, so they can find a quick & easy solution. (I hope posting the link is OK?)
Thanks Bryan, that’s really useful! Much appreciated! :)
I’ve always wondered, how do you pronounce “dk’tronics”?
Dee Kay Tronics :)
DK stands for Dorling Kindersley
Ah, lol. I’m muddling companies up :D
Nothing to do with Dorling Kindersley, but their company name has the “DK” in capitals, (using a stylised lowercase for the printed logo), so I’ve always pronounced it as Dee Kay (and always assumed as a kid that it was related to Dorling!)
Jeff always said D K Tronics when doing his talks.
Not sure where the DK came from. The guy who founded the company was called David Heelas, I recall Jeff may have talked about him and his son, maybe his son’s name began with a K?
Haha I completely forgot I’d made that. If I’d’ve been any good I’d’ve used the ZX81’s quarter-cell graphics for double the resolution, but I was just a calf.
I guess they swapped it out when I’d finished doing the Centipede game, as that game was likely more interesting and fun for people than just noodling around with a low rez cellular automaton.
Do you happen to remember anything about an adventure called “Quest for the Golden Torq” that was advertised as “coming soon” for 48K ZX Spectrum just once in a Llamasoft ad on page 20 of the September, 1982 issue of Your Computer magazine?
That was never even really started. I had thought I’d have a go at doing a text adventure style game on the Speccy, but then a bunch of stuff happened with my Vic and C64 games getting distributed in the US and I got super busy with that, so the adventure game thing never got any further.