do with the Spectrum architecture and hardware has been wonderful. I think if you’re a coder, if you have that technical ability, then the Spectrum Next is just a wonderful homage to the original. What we’ve done
is we’ve tried to bring the feeling of the Spectrum back to the masses. We’re
trying to go for the person that owned the original that didn’t end up in the video game industry, that just wants to recapture a bit of their youth. We are a faithful representation and replication of the original. We haven’t necessarily tried to push the Spectrum hardware in new and exciting ways, which the Next does. We recreate the original experience.
Chris Smith: The ZX Touch is not cheap and it’s a different kind of product, so we’re not worried about that. But The Spectrum, as Darren says, reproduces that experience down to the touch and feel, but also it’s got all the quality of life things which the Spectrum Next doesn’t have. Spectrum Next has got all the new features and graphics modes, but our Spectrum is plug and play. You’ve got save states. You’ve got rewind modes. You can launch your own games off a USB stick. I mean, our design mission for our products is to do 80 percent of what 80 percent of people want. [The Spectrum] is not all singing and all dancing. It doesn’t do the 20% of features that you might find in a modern emulator on your PC, because most people don’t want that and it would come at a cost of complexity. We choose to not do those things because it lowers the barrier of entry into the product, which is the one thing I would criticise the Next for. It’s got a very high barrier of entry.
Darren Melbourne: I see myself as a typical consumer of our products, and what I want is to open the box, pick up something that looks and feels like a Spectrum, plug it in and play Manic Miner. That really is what we’re aiming for.
38 | MCV/DEVELOP December/January 2025
Can you see that approach changing with future products, or with revisions of earlier products? Darren Melbourne: We have a five year roadmap. We’ve probably got about 15 or 16 products on our roadmap, and it’s a mix of both things you’ve just asked. Everybody knows we’re working on a full size Amiga and we’ve been intentionally ambiguous, because that way we don’t disappoint anybody. We follow a design, as anybody building a product does, but these things are often in flux. We’ll be working away and discover some of the things we thought we could do we can’t, and some of the things we thought were impossible we can do. The full size Amiga is coming next year. There is also another product coming from us next year, as well as peripherals. I really can’t be any more specific than that at this time.
Ok, back to The Spectrum then. The original machine was a very British success story. Is reproducing it a risk? Darren Melbourne: As with any business creating something new, we have a break even point. And if we can achieve a break even point in a single or dual territory, then it’s worth pursuing the product. We
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