[Computer / Gaming WI] - A British Atari?

Not quite "Atari starts up in the UK for some reason", if that's what you're thinking as you click on the thread. Rather, is there the possibility of an IRL / OTL company that was based in the UK, that was involved in the computing and gaming industries like Atari was, of reaching the incredible heights that Atari did IRL?

I know that one of the United Kingdom's greatest contributions to the worldwide gaming industry was the 1982 release of the ZX Spectrum home computer, but the Spectrum is very poorly remembered today. Could Sinclair Research (makers of Spectrum), have entered the market a little earlier and accomplished much more in regards to both industries?

Of course, Sinclair sold most of it's properties to Amstrad, which was founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar, who cornered a large part of the tech market in the UK through his partnership with Sky. Could Sugar somehow have been involved in the computer and gaming market?

Any ideas, all? Kind thanks in advance.
 
Some additional candidates I found after research are Acorn Computers, which apparently was often referred to as the "British Apple" and Jupiter Cantab, formed by Sinclair Research employees and flopping big time. Acorn apparently dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s, so would it be too big a stretch to have them stick around even longer, take that crown of being a mega tech company based in the UK?
 
It would have helped if the Spectrum had had a normal qwerty keyboard instead of that "rubber" monstrosity. I think that Sir Clive thought that built in functions would increase usability. It did the opposite, I switched to a BBC B as soon as possible. Sinclair could have become the British Atari but he seemed to be an ideas person rather than a pragmatic businessman (which for all his faults Sir Alan Sugar was).
 
I think that you need Chris Curry and to stay at Sinclair Research and for Clive Sinclair to let him run Sinclair Research while Sinclair himself concentrated on other projects like the C5. Unfortunately, I think that would require such a significant change in Sinclair's personality that it might butterfly the entire Sinclair line of computers.
 
The thing is, both the Sinclair computers and the Acorn machines were based around what someone here in America would call the "Spirit of Woz:" All the chips were off the shelf, and everything was handled by driver software in ROM. A game console by one of those guys would have (at best) resembled Coleco, Early Sega,or something like Epoch or the VTech SuperVision than the "Way of Jay."

The closest thing to a British Atari would have been if Amstrad had been founded four years early, and marketed a version of the GX-4000 nine years early with hardware sprites and a custom sound chip.
 
...but the Spectrum is very poorly remembered today.

Say what?!? The Spectrum is positively legendary as a pivotal piece of 80s era computing. Clearly, you are coming at this with a non-British eye. However, in the UK the Spectrum was number one in its time and instrumental in creating a generation of British coders and games developers - indeed, it is no stretch to say that Britain's prominence today in IT and software engineering is due in no small way to those kids with Spectrums in their bedrooms who grew up on Sinclair BASIC and Jet Set Willy. The Speccy is still remembered fondly by virtually every person I know of my generation (40-somethings) and most of my colleagues who are in IT of a similar age to me had one as a child. Saying that it's "poorly remembered" is ludicrous. I'm sure there'll be people from the ex-Soviet countries and elsewhere in Europe who will similarly wax lyrical about the Spectrum clones they grew up with. There is still an active demo scene, there are successor machines (the Spectrum Next is imminent - although the less said about the Vega+ the better) - the Speccy lives on. "Poorly remembered" indeed - harrumph.

More on topic, I think the only way to see Sinclair ascendant is to get rid of Sir "Uncle" Clive himself at a point early in the Spectrum's lifetime. The Spectrum was the Sinclair success story, but Uncle Clive's fascination with idiocies like the C5 drove the company into the ground. If Clive departs the scene earlier, eg during the ZX81 days, I don't think the brand would have captured enough of the British imagination by then.

I think to be the British Atari one doesn't necessarily need to think in terms of games consoles - and maybe the British Nintendo or Sega might be a better comparison.

I think we start with a POD in 1981 where Acorn do not get the BBC Micro gig. Maybe they fail to get their demo machine up and running at the 11th hour to showcase to BBC representatives as OTL. Without this, Acorn struggle and eventually fold in early 1983. (As an aside, we have just butterflied away ARM, which has some interesting implications for future mobile devices - but that's another story).

A second POD has Uncle Clive himself meet with an unfortunate accident also in early 83. This leaves the keys to the kingdom with Nigel Searle who was a savvy business operator, but no visionary. But perhaps a visionary wasn't what was needed given the momentum the Spectrum and Sinclair brand had. Sinclair as a company failed because of Uncle Clive's preoccupation with things like the C5 and breaking into the business computing market.

Seale brings Chris Curry back into the fold to oversee tech. Under this duo Sinclair as a company doubles down on the Spectrum and the burgeoning games market. Instead of resenting the fact that the Spectrum was perceived as an inexpensive games machine, Searle's Sinclair Research owns it. The QL never sees the light of day.

In 1984 Sinclair releases the Spectrum Ascendant - a low cost games machine with a membrane keyboard, joystick ports and integrated Microdrives. In hardware terms, this is OTL's Spectrum 128 - except the expense that otherwise would have gone on the keyboard diverted to the storage medium. With the focus now firmly on gaming, the machine is pitched as a console with the heart of a computer.

The Ascendant is able to draw upon a huge range of existing 48K games that can simply be transferred to Microdrives. In short order, software companies start to draw upon the "fast" (compared to cassette tape) storage and improved sound to create more advanced games.

In early 1985 Sinclair release the Loki and Loki Plus. Both models build on the Ascendant but increase the RAM to 256K and introduced a new screen mode that maintained the Spectrum's 256x192 resolution but added 8x1 colour attribute blocks, hardware scrolling and sprites. This greatly minimised the Spectrum's traditional graphical achilles heel of colour clash and made for much richer visuals in games. The feel is of 16 bit visuals at 8 bit prices. While this year sees the release of the Atari ST and Amiga, which sell well in niche contexts e.g. music and SFX, the gaming market finds it hard to move past the price point of the Loki and in Europe Sinclair reign supreme.

The Loki was the first machine to truly break into the American market. The original ZX81 and Spectrum had had limited penetration in the States through a deal with Timex, but following the Video Game Crash the time was right stateside for an inexpensive machine that could straddle console and computer. The vast library of games developed throughout the Spectrum's lifetime also helped make for a compelling offering.

(OK - so this is less "British Atari" more "British Nintendo or Sega"!)

Not sure where to go from here though and I'm out of time.. I'll just leave this here for now :)
 
Say what?!?
I'm a twenty something who studied in the UK for several years. When I was looking at console histories and found out about the Spectrum, I asked around about it. None of my local mates had ever heard of the Spectrum, I never found any systems around offline and I've consistently seen more talk online for something like Atari than Spectrum. I may well be the first person on the forum to make a thread regarding the Spectrum. So generationally speaking, I think it's faded from memory.

Like the rest of the details you've provided though. More in depth thought on Spectrum and Acorn than I could have hoped for.
 
I think it's faded from memory.
It didi, if i wasn't by Rareware i would never knew of those microcomputers, again the rule is if you're serious in your software, you must make your own hardware and the opposite is true, people serious their hardware need good programmers, so any potential british atari need a nice first party studio(rareware/ultimate? someone else?) as a must, and they could get the flare technologies(makers of the cancelled panther and jaguar and co creator the Handy/Lynx)
 
Regarding the Sinclair Spectrum I happen to know the man that made the first one from the spec given to him by Sinclair. He found it rather amusing to see something he built in the Science Museum!

As an aside he still enjoys tinkering having built his own 3D printer, repaired my old commercial Rijo 42 coffee machine (now in the shed and replaced by a Coffee Boss Vienna machine) amongst other things.
 
This is a bit of a tangent, but for those of you with a foot in the Atari and Sinclair worlds, who had the better early products? Years apart surely, but was there a similar level of quality?
 
This is a bit of a tangent, but for those of you with a foot in the Atari and Sinclair worlds, who had the better early products? Years apart surely, but was there a similar level of quality?

Sinclair were never about quality - they were all about price. The Atari 400 and 800 were superior in every way to the Spectrum. Indeed, the Commodore 64 (the Spectrum's main rival in the UK) was superior (something my 11 year old self would never have admitted in the school playground!). The earlier Sinclair computers like the ZX80 and ZX81 were little more than toys which served to introduce computing and programming - they sold well on that basis. The Spectrum was an iteration of the ZX81 that coincidentally just brought enough additional functionality to the party to make it a viable platform for gaming. But this was never the main use for the machine as envisioned by Sinclair. Clive Sinclair hated the games market and was desperate for his products to be taken seriously and to break into the business market. Sinclair's last computer before the Amstrad takeover - the QL - was business computing done on a shoestring. It was unsuccessful (there's a computer that's been lost to history!)

Ironically, Acorn were desperate to break into the games arena and capture some of what had become Sinclair's playground.

I recommend the film Micro Men if you want to find out more about the Sinclair/Acorn early days. It's actually on YouTube -
. Not only is it chock full of detail about how the Spectrum saw the light of day, it's actually a really entertaining film in its own right.
 
I recommend the film Micro Men if you want to find out more about the Sinclair/Acorn early days. It's actually on YouTube. Not only is it chock full of detail about how the Spectrum saw the light of day, it's actually a really entertaining film in its own right.
This thread inspired me to rewatch it yesterday, Alexander Armstrong's portrayal of Sinclair is brilliant fun.
 
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