If, like me, you have fond memories of screeching blue and yellow lines surrounding loading screens, leaping over penguins in Manic Miner, and finding ways to make Mary unamused in Valhalla, then you need to see this new kit on the Lego Ideas page. It’s a faithfully recreated Lego Sinclair ZX Spectrum, complete with pressable keys and an interface socket on the back. It even comes with a little Sir Clive minifig riding a C5.
Several retro gaming machines from the 1980s and 1990s have already been recreated in official Lego form, including the Nintendo GameBoy and NES, as well as Atari’s classic 2600 console. There’s a classic beige desktop PC kit that’s already gathered the necessary 10,000 supporters for Lego to consider making it a final product. However, the Spectrum was an iconic computer from the time, especially for us Brits, and I’d love to see this kit get made.
Submitted to Lego Ideas on 25 November, the project has already garnered support from 359 people, but it will need 10,000 before Lego will consider turning it into a production kit. Assuming it makes it that far, you’ll be able to make three main parts.
Firstly, there’s the Speccy itself, with the kit containing 100 specially printed tiles to recreate the classic black and grey fascia, including the four-colour rainbow stripe across the corner. Impressively, the keys also sink into the chassis when you press them, just like the real ones, but without the feeling of dead man’s skin under your fingers.
As a bit of a pedant, I’d say some of these tiles need a little refinement. The letter spacing isn’t quite right at the moment, for example, the writing on the Symbol Shift key should be red, and the Sinclair logo in the top also need to be a bit bigger. These are minor complaints that could easily be addressed by the Lego design team, though – I’d just be happy to have a Lego Spectrum.
You’ll also get the bricks needed to build a small Evil Edna-style CRT TV set, including three game scenes you can slide into place. These represent simplified screenshots from Jetpac, Jet Set Willy, and Knight Lore. Finally, there’s Sir Clive riding his C5, an electric car that would have been ahead of its time if it was actually any good. There’s one crucial part missing, though. Where’s the Lego cassette recorder to put next to it?
‘This project is deeply personal,’ says the project’s creator on the Lego Ideas site. ‘When I was growing up, a neighbour gave my older brother and me a ZX Spectrum. That gift changed everything—it was our first experience with computing.’
If you want to pledge your support, to visit the project’s page on Lego Ideas. I still have my ZX Spectrum, and I still plug it in and play with it now and then, but I’d still love a Lego one on the shelf. Let’s hope enough people support it.
