Popular games for platform Sinclair ZX81

You are marooned on a strange planet and have to repair your space ship in order to get back home.

Released in 1982, Adventure B: Inca Curse is the second in a series of eight interactive fiction adventures made by Artic Computing. The aim is to explore an Incan temple in order to find golden treasures. There are eight treasures and only six items can be carried in the inventory, so the correct treasures must be collected in order to leave the temple with the maximum score.

A text adventure game where the player controls a spy shot down while investigating an enemy stronghold.

Drawn by a gravitational beam you have to find a way to the main control room in order to free your space ship.

A top down view space battle against the Klingons. You can rotate your ship and fire rockets to the Klingons but make sure not to hit them. After defeating all the Klingons you can use a wormhole to go the the next galaxy. You can configure the speed and whether the Klingons move or not and you have three ships at your disposal.

Text adventure with an overview of surrounding rooms for the ZX81 with a 16K memory expansion module. The game allows you to set some parameters (like amount of food and arrows, but also the dungeon layout) before starting.

If you ever felt sorry for the ghosts, the orphans they left behind, and wondered what would happen when Pac-Man became the ruling elite, then this is for you. Whilst researching to see if the ZX81 was capable of doing justice to an isometric game along the lines of Ant Attack! or KnightLore, Bob's Stuff coded a program to display a single height map of tiles, and it looked a bit like a maze. Along with the code examples, he'd also been experimenting with the graphics required for such a game, and produced a cute little ghost. An idea then began to germinate... a maze, and some ghosts? Why not try a scrolling isometric Pac-Man? He's still not sure if a full isometric game is possible (that's for another day) but a scrolling flat one certainly is, and he's really pleased with the results. It looks good, is fluid and responsive, and features most of the aspects of the original - including the (slightly bugged) A.I. and attack patterns. Having a ghost as the main character means that I've had to supplemented the concept of 'lives' for 'spirit' - I mean, a ghost doesn't have a life, does it? - which introduces a slight twist on how you play the game.

You have to defeat the Lords of Chaos in this action adventure.

It's the year 2081 and servant robots have become commonplace, though too expensive for most people. In that same year, a large abandoned Sinclair warehouse is discovered with thousands of mint, working ZX81s and some genius decides to build a line of cheap and affordable robots using them: The Zeddytrons. Based on ZX81s and huge rampacks (by 2081, rampack science has advanced significantly) the Zeddytrons become massively popular and the world fills with them ... until the unexpected happens! Wobblying rampacks cause the Zeddytrons to malfunction and declare mankind an obsolete species! Your mission is to move through 50 waves, blasting Zeddytrons, avoiding undestructible Zeddyhulks and rescuing human survivors! You can control your player using AWSD to move and JIKL to shoot simultaneously in 8 directions. Otherwise, you can use OPQAM / Cursor / ZXPand+ Joystick to move and shoot by pressing fire and the direction in which you want to shoot. Good Luck!

Never did like office parties... Christmas eve, and the staff at Macrobiology Industries Limited were having the usual office party, with all the usual hi-jinx and tears, but something very unusual was happening in the biohazard containment fridge. The predicted pandemic had never occurred, and so the fridge was full of unused swine-flu vaccines, but that night it jostled for space with the secretary's cucumber sandwiches and the boss's - sorry, not his, a friends - Viagra supply, all stored there for safe keeping until the party really got started. But the disco lights overloaded the generator, the fuses blew, the fridge shut off, and the staff all went their separate ways home to sleep off the excesses. January 2nd, happy new year! The security guard, first on site that morning, was slowly working his way around the offices and labs, tripping the fuse boxes back to life. He shook his head, bemused by the broken hinges on the doors, but the smashed containment fridge, and mucus-like stains on the walls and floor scared him enough to grab his SHARPS pistol, as strange things moved just out of sight...

Night Gunner is a shoot'em up set in World War II for the Sinclair ZX81.

Cassette 50 is a compilation of 50 games that was released for a variety of 8-bit home computers, albeit with different selections of games on different computers. The majority of games within the collection were programmed in BASIC and are widely considered to be of poor quality.

Sim of a catering business.

Community Chest is based on the game Monopoly and is a smaller version of the game. You play the computer and try to make money without going bankrupt. The game has 16 squares with 13 squares named after London streets, Community Chance, Jail and a Go square. The street squares are split into six sets. Each player takes it in turns to throw a dice to move their counter and if a street square is landed on then the player has a choice to buy it if the player has enough money. If the player has brought a street to make up a set then houses can be brought and placed on the square. As the players move buying streets and a player lands on a street square owned by the other player then that player has to pay rent and the cost depends on how expensive the street is and if there are any houses on it. Landing on a Community Chance square reveals an incident and this can either lose or gain the player money. The Jail square forces the player to pay a fee and if a player passes the Go square then they receive £2000. A player will lose the game if they go bankrupt.

The ZX Spectrum port of Boulder Dash.

A Pac-Man clone for the ZX81 with 16k memory expansion module and for the ZX Spectrum

Bob Smith's interpretation of Atari's 1979 arcade game 'Asteroids'.

3D space shooter

Casca a Cobra is a strategy game where you need to chase a snake and eat its body up to the head.

Traffic is a flick-screen game where you have to move across lanes full of various vehicles for as many points as you can. The vehicles move left or right across the screen and you have to move upwards through gaps while avoiding getting hit by the vehicles or it is game over. If you move downwards then your score decreases. There are 3 skill levels and you can choose the speed of the game (1-255) with 1 being the fastest.

An unofficial port of Atari's Centipede made by Jeff Minter in the early years of Llamasoft.

The game is cleared when all the stars are taken. The cracked floor disappears when you pass over it, so you can only pass through it once.

USS-Enterprise is an unofficial strategy game based on Star Trek, where you are James Kirk, and your mission is to destroy all Klingon ships in the galaxy.