For years the front page of World of Spectrum carried a line most emulation sites could only dream of: “Officially endorsed by Amstrad plc”, and underneath, signed by Cliff Lawson, “Yup, I think the site’s great”. Amstrad owned the ZX Spectrum by then, and allowed its ROMs to be copied freely. World of Spectrum, or WoS, went further. Its founder, Martijn van der Heide, spent years writing to the companies and programmers who had made Spectrum software to ask whether their games could be given away, and he took down the games whose owners said no. On that footing WoS grew into what Colin Woodcock called “the biggest archive of Spectrum files on the planet”, with nearly 25,000 titles by 2012.
From a database program to an archive
Van der Heide started WoS in November 1995, as a web page for his Spectrum Games Database (SGD), a DOS program for cataloguing a collection of Spectrum games and starting them in an emulator. In January 1997 the site began offering the games themselves, opening with about three and a half thousand titles, and from then on, Woodcock wrote in The ZX Spectrum on Your PC, it was “updated pretty much on a weekly basis”. Van der Heide also wrote Taper, a DOS program for working with tape files, which could copy files between tapes, play them out to a real Spectrum and turn the sound from a cassette recorder into a TZX tape image.
The site worked with a group of co-maintainers, among them Andy Barker, Steve Brown, Tony Barnett, Juan Pablo López-Grao, Philip Kendall, Gerard Sweeney and Lee Fogarty. Much of their work was converting original cassettes into tape images. Titles nobody had yet found were listed as “missing in action”, and readers were asked to check car boot sales and charity shops for them; in 2012 more than 2,500 known cassette titles were still missing.
Asking permission
In the 1990s most sites offering old games simply put them up. According to van der Heide’s own account on WoS, the FTP site NVG had begun by distributing only software whose owners had agreed, then switched to distributing everything unless it received “a believable ‘no’”. At the end of 1998 the US Interactive Digital Software Association had a couple of the major retro-gaming sites shut down, and van der Heide argued against the idea that age put software in the public domain: “Ageing of software does not make it Public Domain.”
WoS, he wrote, “picked up the project to contact copyright holders in 1997”. Other fans had asked before him: the Alchemist Research group had won permission for the Gremlin and Lerm titles, and Damien Burke, Brian Gaff and Lee Tonks had kept a list of companies that allowed free distribution from 1994 to 1997. Van der Heide found the response encouraging: “most of the houses I contacted are more than happy to allow their property being distributed freely.” The site listed each publisher and each individual author who had given permission. Where an owner refused, the games were marked “distribution denied” and withdrawn; Woodcock named Ultimate and Codemasters as examples, and added that authors “hardly ever say no”. Retro Gamer reported in 2005 that van der Heide “actively seeks permission from publishers to offer the games freely on the site, and will remove games if requested by an IP owner”. In 2021 Craig Grannell wrote in Wireframe that World of Spectrum “has long attempted to secure legal permission for hosted game files”.
The site at its height
By 2005 WoS held information on more than 12,500 games, with screenshots, links to magazine reviews and, for most of them, a file to download. When it turned ten at the end of November that year, Retro Gamer asked van der Heide how he would celebrate. “Well I’ve added a smallish new section to the site, covering the Timex versions of the Spectrum,” he said, and he had plans: “It will take several more years to update the databases so I hope to provide a more complete history over time.” The magazine called WoS “arguably the best retro resource full stop”.
Alongside the games the archive gathered instructions, tape inlays, scanned magazines and books, emulators and utilities. Van der Heide also wrote the site’s search engine, the Sinclair Infoseek. The forums became a meeting place for people still writing Spectrum software: the publisher Cronosoft began, Retro Gamer reported, when Simon Ullyatt posted on the WoS forums early in 2003 looking for programmers of new 8-bit games.
Handover and split
In the mid-2010s the site stopped growing. According to Alessandro Grussu’s Spectrumpedia, van der Heide’s commitment to the site “began to wear off for personal reasons” towards 2015, and in November 2017 he left both World of Spectrum and the retro scene. The archive went a long time without updates, “just at a time when interest in the Spectrum was experiencing a considerable increase”. Spectrum Computing’s site notes that 2013 was “the last time new titles were added to WoS”. The site passed to a new custodian, Lee Fogarty: World of Spectrum Classic’s copyright line credits van der Heide for 1995 to 2014 and Fogarty for 2014 to 2019, and the ZXDB project credits Fogarty with rebuilding the site.
In June 2020 a rebuilt World of Spectrum was launched. Grussu wrote that its new interface “seemed cumbersome to many users”, that many pages of information had disappeared and that links to outside resources stopped working. A group of users who disagreed with the change, and with the site’s new management, built World of Spectrum Classic at worldofspectrum.net, a copy of the old site as faithful as they could make it. In its own FAQ, the Classic team says that after the handover “all updates (both in technical and content) stopped”, and that the 2020 relaunch came “to almost universal lament”, with “over 90% of the links to WoS from search engines” broken overnight. The team says it has “received no blessing or authorisation” from WoS.
Spectrum Computing and ZXDB
Meanwhile the information WoS had gathered moved into an open database. ZXDB was created by Einar Saukas, starting from the full contents of van der Heide’s WoS archive and several other Spectrum archives, all “imported with consent, directly from their internal files”. Van der Heide helped with the import, and Fogarty gave full access to the WoS internal files and declared them “open source”, according to the ZXDB project. The Internet Archive holds a mirror of the WoS files taken in June 2017.
Spectrum Computing, which Spectrumpedia dates to April 2016, is built on ZXDB and is maintained by Peter Jones and Ricardo Nunes. It records new releases that WoS never listed, links each title to its reviews in period magazines, and its forum became, in Grussu’s words, “the most active” of those devoted to Sinclair computers. The rebuilt WoS and World of Spectrum Classic both draw on ZXDB too.
Sources
- Colin Woodcock, The ZX Spectrum on Your PC, second edition (2012), pp. 24–25 (the start of WoS, the downloads from January 1997, nearly 25,000 titles, “missing in action” titles, permission requests, Ultimate and Codemasters, the Amstrad endorsement on the front page), pp. 60–64 (SGD, Taper, the tape-preservation volunteers and the 2,500 missing titles), and the acknowledgements.
- Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005: Spectrum feature, “The wonderful World of Spectrum” (12,500 games, permission policy, the tenth birthday and van der Heide’s comments); profile of Jonathan Cauldwell (Cronosoft and the WoS forums).
- Craig Grannell, column, Wireframe issue 58, December 2021.
- Alessandro Grussu, Spectrumpedia, volume 2 (English edition, CC BY-NC-ND), chapter 4, pp. 352–353: Spectrum Computing and World of Spectrum.
- Martijn van der Heide, “Archive – Copyright And Distribution Permissions”, from the original World of Spectrum, as preserved by World of Spectrum Classic (web, secondary): NVG, the IDSA, permissions since 1997, Amstrad’s ROM permission and endorsement. https://worldofspectrum.net/permits/
- World of Spectrum Classic, “World of Spectrum Classic FAQ” and home page (web, secondary): the original maintainers, the WoS Classic team’s account of the handover and the 2020 relaunch, and the copyright line. https://worldofspectrum.net/wosc-faq/
- ZXDB, project README (web, secondary): the creation of ZXDB, the credits to van der Heide and Fogarty, the June 2017 WoS mirror on the Internet Archive, the relaunched WoS of June 2020, and Spectrum Computing’s maintainers. https://github.com/zxdb/ZXDB
- Spectrum Computing, home page (web, secondary): “post 2013 (which was the last time new titles were added to WoS)”. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/