PRESSING THE DEAD FLESH


Retro Games Ltd has been putting out working replicas of classic home computers since before mini consoles were all the rage. Chris Smith and Darren Melbourne chat with MCV about their latest reproduction, The Spectrum, and the return of its infamous “dead flesh” rubber keyboard


Chris Smith (left) and Darren Melbourne (right), Retro Games Ltd’s CTO and licensing director respectively


36 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2025


Why The Spectrum? Why now? Darren Melbourne: I think the time was right. Although the ZX81 and the Spectrum were my paths into home computing, the Commodore 64 ran away with my heart back in the early days. And when we set the company up, I had already done a licensing deal with Cloanto and we were working towards a C64. But it was always our intention to work on a Spectrum. If it had been down to Chris - who probably knows more about the internal architecture of the [original] Spectrum than anybody else that’s still alive - we would have done it some time ago. But things had to take a certain order. I think that the fact that there’s been a lot more buzz around the Spectrum community, in the last year or so, it just felt the time was


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