Year: 1985 |Publisher: Micromega|Developer: Stephen J. Redman |Original format: ZX Spectrum | Version played: ZX Spectrum
When Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX Spectrum and father of the British games industry, passed away on 16th September 2021, I felt I really should mark his passing in the only way I know how… By playing a game he’s associated with and recording my rambling thoughts on it. But which Spectrum game to play? Though his hardware paved the way for a generation of creators, Uncle Clive himself was no game developer. Although he is one of the few games industry figureheads to star in one…
There have been surprisingly few videogames to feature real games industry personalities on the screen. There are some, like Micro Cabin’s Tower Of Cabin or Sega’s Segagaga, which see the player explore and adventure within the actual developer’s offices. There are some that feature exaggerated caricatures of the developers, like the Ben There, Dan That adventure series or those games that feature hidden cameos of the development team in secret rooms, like the original Pokémon. But how many actually feature a well-known games industry figure in a playable role, and how many of those were developed by a third party, rather than the person represented?
A Day In The Life may well be unique in this respect, and a perfect example of how carefree the ZX Spectrum catalogue could be. In today’s games industry, I cannot imagine a publisher, not even an indie dev, taking the risk of trading on someone else’s likeness. But the Eighties were a very different time. Even Konami, one of the biggest publishers of the era, felt confident filling the Metal Gear MSX games with celebrity lookalikes. Over here in little old England, where a bedroom programmer could code their own game in a couple of weeks and sell it to a tiny publisher to release on a few duplicated tapes, videogame content was about as unregulated as it would ever get! So it’s easy to see how something like A Day In The Life might come into being.
So what would you be doing in a game that stars Sir Clive Sinclair in a playable role? There are so many possibilities that spring to mind, so many ways in which this legendary figure could have inspired a game designer. Maybe they would harness his inventive side, combining objects in a puzzle game to create weird machines? Perhaps they could make a business sim, putting you in control of Sinclair Research and managing his profit margins? Heck, you could even put Clive behind the wheel of his infamous Sinclair C5 for a 15mph racing game…
A Day In The Life is actually a much more down to earth affair than even those ideas, as seems fitting for the Spectrum. After all, this is the computer that gave us Trashman, a game about the mundane world of refuse collection. No one ever said that British games had to be exciting! Instead, the game simply offers a chance to spend a day as Sir Clive Sinclair, just as the title suggests. Not even a day spent running Sinclair Research… Just a day where nothing really happens. The kind of day anyone could have.
It’s all quite relatable. Sir Clive starts off the day in bed, has to get dressed and find his house key before he can leave and go about his business. Yes, the TV seems to have turned evil and is angrily roaming the house, a ZX Spectrum is also patrolling like a little rubber keyed prison guard and there’s some sort of monster in the loft. Like I said, all very normal. Oh and Clive seems to have misplaced his body!
I guess the Spectrum doesn’t quite offer the graphical resolution necessary to draw an entire Clive Sinclair complete with body and limbs in a way that his face would still be recognisable. So what you get instead is one giant head with beard, glasses and balding dome. Which is completely understandable, but when you see that head float out of bed, down the stairs and into the streets, it does look every so slightly surreal.
As you emerge into the streets, I’d like to say that a sense of internal logic starts to form. On the second screen you encounter your first fellow human, another giant floating head. Yet on subsequent screens, more floating heads are joined by little stickmen, blowing any sense of consistency clean out of the water. Elsewhere, Sir Clive takes casual trip to the pub and has to dodge giant dancing beer and wine glasses just to get to the bar. Perhaps the weirdest sight is when you travel between screens by catching the train, the giant Clive head docking flush into a whole freight carriage and beaming out from the doors as the train pulls out of the station. It has to be, without exaggeration, one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a game.
The paradoxical thing here, of course, is that all this weirdness was practically de rigueur on the Spectrum. This is the system of Manic Miner, in which a working class hero must avoid freaky enemies like walking toilets and bespectacled eggs. Or Head Over Heels, in which two dog-like creatures, armed only with an air horn, a handbag and some donuts, try to escape a castle patrolled by a robot that looks a lot like Prince Charles.
I’m not quite sure how the Spectrum became home to these celebrations of surreal. Perhaps its library, created almost entirely by British developers, is a product of a generation brought up on Monty Python or contemporary punk comedies like The Young Ones. Or maybe it’s because Sinclair’s little computer that could was so affordably priced that its games could easily be developed by teens and bedroom programmers, independently published without a thought for whether its content might be palatable to wide, global audiences. Multinational publishers on NES or even C64 would purposefully sand away the rough edges in order to appeal to the mainstream but in the freewheeling Spectrum market it felt like a game could be anything at all!
When it comes to the actual gameplay of A Day In The Life, there’s very little to write home about. It’s just a simple collect-‘em-up where you have to avoid baddies to survive and is actually quite dull and repetitive to play. Sure, there are some admirable attempts to make the maze gameplay challenging, particularly in the patrol routines of the baddies. Some will actively pursue you and need to be goaded out of key areas so that there’s room for giant head Clive to reach his objective, though most seem to ramble around aimlessly and oblivious to your presence. On screens that are particularly crowded with enemies, things can get complicated as two or more of them might bump into one another and change direction, making their patrol routine somewhat unpredictable. Even then, A Day In The Life quickly becomes tedious to play.
But it’s that unmistakable Spectrum vibe that keeps A Day In The Life interesting. There’s a delicate knife-edge balance between drab, 1980s British reality and a bizarre, colour-clash dreamscape that is precariously held on every screen. A day in the life of this fictional Clive Sinclair is an 8-bit acid trip, almost certainly nothing like the life of the real man himself but an affectionate tribute nonetheless.
A few days before writing this, I re-watched the BBC’s 2009 comedy drama, Micro Men, which depicts the rivalry between Sir Clive and BBC Micro creator Chris Curry. The film is well made, thoroughly entertaining and appropriately nostalgic, but it’s unfortunate that it seems to pick a side in the battle, painting Curry as the likeable underdog and Sinclair as a temperamental egotist. Hopefully it’s just coincidence that a BBC drama falls in favour of the creator of the BBC Micro…
It’s impossible for me to say how accurate the drama is in its depiction of Sir Clive but I do suspect any unsavoury qualities were exaggerated for narrative convenience, while certain archive clips, like this 1990 interview with Clive Anderson, show a different personality altogether; one of a quiet inventor who isn’t without a self deprecating sense of humour. The Clive I’ve seen in interviews certainly doesn’t match the one shown on film.
If Micro Men is a well told historical account that gets the broad strokes of it events correct but misfires on the character, then perhaps A Day In The Life can be considered its natural counterpoint, if not its opposite. A complete work of fiction that has absolutely no connection to the man behind the machine but is somehow a more loving tribute that perfectly captures the unique charms of the regional games industry for which this great British inventor unwittingly paved the way.
You’ll learn practically nothing about Clive Sinclair, the man, from playing this game, but you will sample a perfect cross section of the odd gaming culture of a very specific time and place, which could not have blossomed without the work of that same man. It might not be the sort of legacy he hoped for as a renowned and respected inventor, but I hope the idea of being remembered in this unique and surreal way would have brought a wry smile to his giant disembodied face.
FIVE LITTLE THINGS ABOUT A DAY IN THE LIFE THAT I RATHER LIKED
1. Getting a high score after each stage in this game is a bit like getting a score for life… Hey, you put your trousers on? That’s 2000 points!
2. It feels only right that Clive has a Spectrum in his house, and quite fitting that it suffers from colour clash, the effect that happens when two sprites overlap.
3. If you grew up in Britain in the Eighties, when this game was made, you’ll probably notice a resemblance between this angry telly and Evil Edna, the TV shaped witch in the 1981 cartoon Willo The Wisp. I refuse to believe this is a coincidence.
4. Seeing Clive’s fixed, stoic expression as he boards the train and pulls out of the station will never not crack me up!
5. This stage effectively has a time limit. Take too long and the train will slowly start to leave. If you do miss your chance to hop on the carriage there is a fun way to recover by going and parking Clive’s goliath head in the waiting room until another train arrives.
A Day In The Life has awful music, so let’s watch a speedrun instead…
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