The long-gone Days of Colour Clashes

Hey, Hey 16K is curious little British flash piece circulating the net.
It touches precisely on the weird excuses peoples were using for buying home computers in the 80’s – homework, doing the household accounts. Of course none of this came to be, but oh! the games.
(Saw this on the Digiplay mailing list.)

All the screenshots are from the ZX Spectrum (Timex Sinclair to Americans), but how do I know this? -From colour clashes! The Spectrum’s high-res graphics mode worked such that each 8×8 pixel area on the screen could contain a total of two different colors. Thus, it was easy enough to have a red ghost and a blue ghost on their own, but the moment they started to overlap, you’d have weird colour clashes where part of the blue ghost turned red and vice versa. Most of the screenshots in the piece exhibit loads of colour clashes (and I think you can tell the resolution is 256×200 rather than 320×200 of the C64).
Towards the end, Sir Clive Sinclair makes a cameo appearance and the familiy that sings the song is remade in glorious colour clash style.

Which of the games shown have stood the test of time? Gonzalo Frasca votes for Manic Miner. I must admit that I find big games like Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, and Elite to be basically unplayable today, but the earlier and much simpler Jet Pac is still worth a quick play.

2 thoughts on “The long-gone Days of Colour Clashes”

  1. Pingback: richtfilz

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *