Meet BASIC

What this is

Not a game — a bridge. You arrive knowing what a variable, a loop, and a decision are (from General Programming, or any language). Meet BASIC sits you at the Spectrum and teaches you to write and run Sinclair BASIC for real: its keywords, its quirks, and the parts a general primer leaves out — the screen, colour, sound, and the pixels you can set moving.

Fifteen short beats, each showing its result on screen the moment it runs: a line you typed, a variable that remembers, a rainbow title, a beep, a drawn frame, a shape that moves. By the end you can type, run, edit, save, and debug a Sinclair BASIC program — and you've met every feature the first games assume, so they can open on building a thing, not on "here is what PRINT does."

Who it's for

Anyone who has met variables, loops, and decisions somewhere — General Programming, or another language — and now wants to write them on a real Spectrum. New to programming entirely? Start with General Programming; it teaches the ideas this primer writes in Sinclair BASIC.

You don't need a Spectrum: any Spectrum emulator runs every example.

The shape

• The machine and the editor — the keyboard that types whole words, and editing a program by line number.
• Talking and listening — PRINT and its punctuation, LET and what the Spectrum lets you name, INPUT.
• Choosing and repeating — IF/THEN the Spectrum way, FOR/NEXT, and GO TO / GO SUB building the game loop (with RND to pick a secret number).
• The Spectrum's own surfaces — the screen grid, colour and multicolour text, sound, drawing, and the title card finally coming alive.
• Keeping it and fixing it — saving your work, and debugging from the report line.

By the end you'll have built a small, moving, multicolour splash screen — the kind of title every game opens with. And the moment it flickers, you'll see exactly why the Spectrum's legends reached for assembly. Next stop: your first BASIC game.