In my 50 years I have had many collections of varying size and value, but my biggest was undoubtedly my retro gaming consoles, which actually turned into a career when I co-founded the Replay Expo and Play Expo video game events. But my main love has always been Uncle Clive’s rubber-keyed wonder, the ZX Spectrum.
When a friend of mine started reviewing game compilations for the C64 for his YouTube channel (search for Witchfinder1976) a few years ago it really piqued my interest and having finally caught up with his MANY videos I decided to do a search for a similar YouTube series for Spectrum compilations. But all I found was the odd video for well know titles like They Sold a Million, Cassette 50 or Ultimate: The Collected works. This saddened me and I decided to do something about it.
Despite not owning a single compilation, I felt ready for a challenge and started looking around for cheap compilations so that I could make a pilot review video. However, the bug hit me hard and I found I couldn’t stop buying compilations. Within a few days I had 14 compilations drop though my letterbox and there has been a steady stream coming ever since. I will get around to finishing the first of the video series soon, but collecting is about much more than playing the games and I have certainly been keeping myself busy!
I’ve spent quite some time researching the various compilations over the last week and whilst there are great sites that are archiving the entirity of the Spectrum’s history, I wanted something more focused on multi-game compilations and that is where CompilationZX comes in.
CompilationZX will document my collecting, with updates, reviews and articles as and when I have something interesting to share. But I hope that COMPZX-DB will overtime be more of a useful tool for other collectors or comilation fans.
I will be initially be adding the games from my collection to the database, but over time I aim to include ALL Spectrum video game compilations that have been available as a physical tape or disk. You won’t find any utilities or tools and there won’t be any digital only releases.
It is early days, but I really hope I can build something worth checking back!
Cheers
Gordon S.