Popular games for platform Sinclair ZX81

A Defender like (right only) side scrolling shooter. You are equiped with a laser to shoot enemies and a few super bombs destroying all enemies. While fighting of enemies you have to rescue prisoners on the ground by flying close to them (whatch for gravity pulling you down). This "high-resoluation" game runs on a standard ZX81 with a 16K memory expansion module.

You have to take the keys and go to the exit, avoiding enemies.

A reboot of the Game and Watch title Helmet, with Palo T as the protagonist.

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.

ZX Compendium is a collection of six games and programs that contains: Alien Intruder: During a long space voyage to Earth, you have been woken from cryogenic suspension to find, to your horror, the rest of the crew devoured by an alien lifeform. To prevent yourself being the next item on the menu you have decided to collect enough essential supplies before escaping in a shuttle. The game is a text adventure with some graphics where the screen is split into two. The top half shows a map of one of the three levels of the ship with your location and the aliens if on the same level as you, a map showing your immediate surrounding area and any exits, and finally the supplies you need to collect which are oxygen, cells, water and food. The bottom half of the screen has text describing your current location and you type in commands with the keyboard to interact with each location. If you enter a location with the alien then you die but if the alien enters your location then you need to deal with the situation. Wumpus Adventure: A text adventure that allows one to four players to move around an area hunting for creatures called a Wumpus to kill. Before you start the hunt you have a number of options and they are, choice of caverns (Novice, Random Cave Pattern and Professional Hunter), number of players, and if you hunt to the death or kill a certain amount of Wumpus. The actual game sees text on the screen describing each location of a player and the current player types in commands to interact with their surroundings. Each player gets one move before the next player has a turn. The players are armed with five arrows but more can be collected, and as well as Wumpus there are other creatures like Goblins and giant serpents that need to be dealt with. Numerology: A program that allows you to enter your name and birth date to receive a reading about your personality and find out your lucky number, colour and day of the week. Hangman: Based on the pen and paper game, you can compete against the computer or another person as you try to guess a word without being hanged. A word is generated and you have to select a letter at a time to try to make the word. If you guess a correct letter then it appears in the word but get one wrong and a man being hanged on a scaffold starts to appear. The computer has two levels (1-2) to choose from. Hieroglyphics: You have to decipher 39 Hieroglyphics by placing a letter or a vowel combination under the correct symbol and the computer will give you a word to help you decipher them. You must be careful in your guesses though because each wrong guess sees trapped explorer Wullie Makeit's tomb slowly fill with sand. Movie Mogul: A management game where with a limited budget you have to buy a script and attempt to make a movie and make a profit with it. After buying a script you decide which type of movie to make as well as hiring a director, actor and actress. You decide on each day of filming how much money to spend on various options watching your budget levels decrease. Once you have completed filming you are given a final score as a profit or loss for the finished movie.

Scram - 81 is a clone of the arcade game Scramble which is viewed from the side with the screen scrolling left to right constantly. You have to fly a spaceship above the surface of a planet bombing ground targets while shooting or bombing missiles with your laser. As you fly, your fuel level decreases but you can bomb fuel dumps to increase it. If you hit a missile or the surface then you lose one of three lives.

Pinball recreates a pinball table where the aim is to keep hitting a ball to score as many points as you can with two flippers. The table is equipped with bumpers and letters spelling TIMEX, as well as two lanes that when entered give bonus points. There are also two outside lanes that when entered lose the ball and if the ball also passes the flippers then you lose one of five lives.

The ZX Spectrum port of Boulder Dash.

During the American Gold Rush you are digging for gold. While excavating gold you must be aware of giant rats and a vicious Gremlin which comes to infest the mine. Snakes can be used to eat the rats. This a 16K program which uses "high-resolution"graphics.

3D Grand Prix (for the ZX81 with 16K memory expension module) is a racing simulator with a first person view. You race against others on random generated track. You have to accellerate, brake, steer and switch (6) gears.

Subespaço is a game for the Sinclair ZX81 where you are the commander of the subspace ship Pegasus and your mission is to dismantle the enemies' supply network, depriving them of their vital supplies.

You have five days to escape from the Oracle's Cave and gather as much treasure along the way as possible.

To clear the level, you must destroy all the UFOs while avoiding falling bombs and blocks. Blocks cannot be destroyed by your own bullets, but will disappear if hit by an enemy bomb.

Place the arrow, change the direction of the car, and pass all the flags to clear the game. If the car goes off-screen or hits a rock, it is a failure. If the car hits a wall, it will flip, but the wall will disappear.

The classic Defenders (Atari 2600 and other platforms) but then in a first person 3D perspective. This game is to be run with a 16K expansion module. You fly over a planet and have a proximity radar indicating where (left-right) an enemy is. Your radar can show false hits when meteorites fall down. The enemies go down and you get points (250) if you shoot them before they reach the ground. The enemies will shoot at you and you will have to try to prevent being hit. If an enemy reaches the ground and can fly up and away again you loose points (50). You have a shield which can take take 10 hits. With either one of the keys q-t moves you left-down. y-p right-down. a-g left-up, h-newline right up. z-m shoots the laser. Using two keys at once allows you to move non-diagonal.

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

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.

In this surreal platformer, released in 1985 for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, you have been transformed into a bird, and must fight to save the human race from the invading Kremins by exploring an expansive world and collecting useful items.

20 Years on from the Spectrum game Amusement Park 4000, the Zeddy gets a conversion of the 16K Spectrum follow-up Fun Park for Chroma-enabled ZX81s. So much has been crammed into this game; amazing colour and graphics courtesy of Jarrod Bentley, more visitors and options. There are more rides than Amusement Park 4000, and AI and strategy is more sophisticated than the 16K Spectrum version of Fun Park. You've never seen a ZX81 game that looks and plays like this.

Aeroporto 83 is an action shooter game developed by Renato Degiovani and published by the magazine Micro Sistemas, it is considered to be one of the first Brazilian computer games to be commercially released.

Tournament Tennis is an early tennis game featuring or even creating many conventions that would become standard features in later tennis simulations. Matches can be played at quarter-final, semi-final or final level - winning at one level automatically moves the player to the next one. They can last for 3 or 5 sets, with a player requiring a 2-game lead to win a set, though a tie-break comes in at 6–6 in all but the final set.

Bank Robber is a variant of Commodore's Money Wars. The player controls a man who has to move money from the bank to his home. The bank is located on the left side of the screen while the home is located on the right side. The buildings can however only be entered when their doors are opened. From the sky, meteorites are falling and the player has to avoid being hit by these while moving across the screen. Getting hit means a life is lost. Other things falling from the sky are pills that give an extra life when eaten and bricks that when caught builds or repairs one of three protection buildings (similar to the shields in Space Invaders). At the end of the game the player gets a ranking depending on the amount of cash that has been collected.

Croaka-Crawla is a clone of the arcade game Frogger where the player must control a frog and get him to the other side of a road and river. The game is viewed from above and the first thing to cross is a busy road full of traffic scrolling across the screen. You can move left, right or forward as you dodge the traffic to reach a river bank. Once the road has been survived then a river must be crossed by jumping on logs or the backs of turtles that scroll across the screen as well. Once you reach the other side of the river you must jump into a gap and occasionally a baby frog or flies appears for extra points. If you get hit by a vehicle, fall into the river, or touch the sides of the screen then you lose one of three lives. Before the game you can change the speed of the game (1-100) with 1 being the fastest.

The Tomb of Dracula is an arcade adventure where the aim is to explore vaults over various levels of Dracula's Tomb to find the Vampire's Treasure worth half a million pounds.