8-Bit Stories - Book Review

8-Bit Stories: Home Computing in 1980s Britain (second edition)

£35.99 hardback, £15.99 paperback (currently £11.52 from Amazon)

This month my nose has been well and truly buried in this rather fun and comprehensive compendium, celebrating the British 8-Bit computing scene during the 1980s.

I do need to declare a slight conflict of interest, as the author has previously written for Pixel Addict. Not only that, but amongst the book’s co-contributors is John McDermott, and regular readers might recognise the name, as John was a previous editor of the magazine. Nonetheless I shall endeavour to remain professionally neutral!

The first thing that strikes you is the level of detail offered. It is phenomenal. “Comprehensive” is not a sufficient adjective. A huge number of systems, programs and games are covered, along with associated back stories, tech detail and sales charts. There are even reproductions of the print adverts of the day for some of the machines in question. It is all helpfully sorted into chronological chapters by year. There are also quotes from leading figures in the industry at the time. This has been a labour of love, and it shows.

Then there is the writing style, which I found very agreeable. When there are so many facts and figures to digest, there can sometimes be a danger that books like this become very dry and can read purely like a reference book. Not so here, the author writes quite personally and there are plenty of memories and anecdotes to complement the data, making for a more engaging read.

All the machines from my youth are included (when I first picked up the book I went straight to the sections for the Commodore Vic-20, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 for example), but there are also plenty that I had never encountered, or even heard of!

In the last edition of Pixel Addict (in my piece about the Vic-20), I wrote about my memories of the heated disputes at college over which was the best 8-bit machine. So I particularly enjoyed the chapter entitled “The School Playground”, which went some way to settling these arguments once and for all with some fascinating comparisons of how some of the leading games of the time such as Elite, Spy Hunter and Chuckie Egg ran on different systems.

However, I do have to offer one criticism. While a huge amount of time and effort has clearly been spent in producing the book, I was left with a feeling that the proofing/editing stage may have been skimped upon a little. I found significantly more typos and grammatical errors than one would normally expect in a published book (even a self-published title).

There is also a double return used between all the paragraphs which is a little unconventional; I found that the resultant larger gaps between the paragraphs served only to disconnect them and interrupt the flow when reading. Thankfully these are easy fixes and perhaps will be corrected for the third edition.

However, don’t let that put you off. Ignore the occasional typos and this is a tremendous read; well over 300 pages covering the subject completely, with a passion and in great detail. If you are of a certain age this is a wonderful jaunt down memory lane and, for the younger reader, this paints an incredibly detailed picture of the time.

For content I’d rate this as a solid 90%, but I do have to dock some marks for those errors that evaded the proof reader, so 8-Bit Stories gets a more than respectable 85% from me. And before you claim that I am biased, I would point to the user reviews on Amazon, which are currently scoring the book 4.4 out of 5 - so this is definitely one to pop on your coffee table!

Score - 85%

AG August 2024

Featured in Pixel Addict magazine, issue 24.