were always relatively confident that the UK, Spain and Portugal would hit our break-even point from a units perspective, and I think we’re going to comfortably attain that worldwide. Obviously the Spectrum wasn’t incredibly well known in the US. That said, we’ve had an incredible amount of interest from consumers in North America and South America, so we do have distribution there. Sales there are just a massive bonus to us, really, but it would appear that demand has been more than we originally anticipated, which is great.
“We’ve tried to bring the feeling of the Spectrum back to the masses. We’re trying to go for the person that just wants to recapture a bit of
their youth” Darren Melbourne
Sinclair family it’d be a different conversation. But it’s been part of another organisation for 35-odd years now. It’s now Comcast and they’re quite a big company. I mean, the more acquisition that goes on, the harder it becomes to license these things. What we discovered, is, over the six years that our own branding has become synonymous with what we do with retro computers, [licensing the Sinclair name] probably wasn’t necessary.
The Spectrum comes with 48 games, but The C64 had 64. No fair! Darren Melbourne: It can be an immense trial licensing these products, because we won’t have anything on them] that hasn’t been officially licensed from either the original creator or the IP owner, and we are relatively certain of the lineage of the title. If there’s no form of provenance, we tend not to work with it.
The original ZX Spectrum was branded as a Sinclair machine, as was the more recent Spectrum Next. Why isn’t The Spectrum? Darren Melbourne: [Spectrum Next] did that a long time ago. They did that under a different stewardship of the rights. Whether they would be as successful at gaining it now, I don’t know. If it was owned by the
Is it harder to track the lineage of a game now compared to when RGL started? Darren Melbourne: Every day it gets more difficult. You know, we’re all getting on in years now. I mean, my first job in the video games industry was in 1984 and I’m still doing it 40 years later. A lot of my contemporaries have either left the industry and retired or passed away. Digging out the rights is a big task. Probably 80 per cent of my working week is detective work, trying to track down licenses and rights, not just to video games, but to operating systems, BIOSes, design rights. All of these things are held by various organisations and individuals, and it’s just a lot of detective work and negotiating and talking to people. So, yeah!
December/January 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 39
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