When I was a kid, I had a computer.

More accurately, my family had an Amstrad CPC 464 for word processing and programming and Important Family Things, and which categorically wasn’t mine. (I beg to differ, based on the sheer number of hours I spent on it.)

This was the era of magnetic tapes, games created by a single programmer in a matter of weeks with wildly misleading box art, sold for £2.99 at the local model shop. It was the era of picking up a game because the blurb on the back sounded cool, then - in the absence of tutorials or any meaningful manual in the tight confines of a plastic cassette case - discovering that the actual gameplay was implacably obtuse and never making it past the first three screens.

And one of the wonders of reading code from magnetic tape is that the only file system you need is time.

The Amstrad had an integrated tape deck, hooked up to a three-digit analogue counter. When you hit Play or Record, and the tape slowly wound through the read heads, the counter ticked up so you knew where you were on the tape.

Describing this feels like alchemy, like wild ancient technology at the cusp of the digital age. At the time, it just made sense. My files were saved as audio at different points in time on a magnetic tape, so all I needed was to know when my files were.

When I played Elite, I had multiple save files, each one recorded at a different position on an ordinary audio cassette tape. I wrote the timestamps for the start of each save file in pen on the paper insert that came with the tape, so I could rewind or fast-forward to the relevant point.

But of course, it wasn’t limited to save files. You could put anything on those blank sections of tape.

My dad was a programmer, and so were his colleagues. Sometimes he’d come home with mix tapes of Amstrad code collated by someone he knew, mystery boxes with no instructions. No index, merely a number.

My favourite was Tape Nine.

In the modern era of internet malware and Steam libraries, it’s hard to imagine what it was like to press Play on a tape filled with software, knowing nothing about each file beyond a single cryptic filename, Now Loading with arcane chirps and whirrs. And then to be surprised - often disappointed, occasionally delighted - by what resulted.

Sometimes the result was a crude game, lacking any sort of explanation or title screen. The tape finished loading the data, and you had to be ready to play. Sometimes it loaded demos, optical illusions of wireframe 3D objects or kaleidoscopic patterns, thrumming colours that fascinated me with possibilities.

Amongst its wonders, Tape Nine contained a file called “canon”, which sounded exciting until the tape stopped and the computer froze while it played a tinny rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon through its pathetic speaker. And then the tape started again, loading the next item.

I could’ve written out an index, identified where on the tape my favourite experiences were, canonised it on the pre-printed lines of the cassette tape insert.

I never did.

This week I’ve been playing UFO 50, Mossmouth’s love letter to the 8-bit era. It’s a collection of fifty games, with the conceit that they were all made by a single fictional videogame company during the course of the 1980s.

I was expecting them to nail the aesthetic. I wasn’t expecting them to successfully recreate that same sense of wonder - of anticipation and occasional disappointment - that I remember from Tape Nine.

I’ve only played perhaps a third of the games on offer so far. Most of them have been universally excellent, others faithful recreations of '80s design sensibilities - with era-appropriate frustrations - and a few utterly obtuse.

I played one particular game for fifteen minutes and scored zero points, the lack of instructions or meaningful feedback leaving me baffled at what the game wanted me to do. And y’know what, I had fun; as someone who played a lot of games in the '80s, there’s a cosy familiarity to that confusion that I wasn’t expecting games in 2024 to be able to evoke.

I could always look up a tutorial, ask the community until someone explains the mechanic to me. But I won’t. After all, there are another forty-nine games to go through first.

All I have to do is press Play.