This Old 8-Bit Video Game Had The Strangest And Most British Car Cameos

As you’re likely well aware by now, and perhaps even sick of hearing about it, I get especially delighted when two of my favorite geeky obsessions – weird cars and obsolete computing devices – intersect. And today I have a really fun intersection to show you. Well, I think it’s fun, at least. It’s also extremely British, so prepare yourself accordingly, which I suppose could involve decanting a can of beans on a convenient piece of toast.

The intersection I’m talking about appears in the Sinclair Spectrum conversion (well, I just also realized the Commodore 64 version and Apple II versions, too, and maybe some others?) of the 1985 Atari arcade game Paperboy, where you play, as you may have guessed, a paperboy. You deliver papers to houses and try not to break windows and avoid cars and angry dogs and errant rolling tires and that sort of thing. The game was ported to almost all major home computers and many consoles from the era, with a number of these ports made by British software houses, which may explain why this intersection exists at all.

And what is this intersection of weird car and computer? The Sinclair C5!

The Sinclair C5 was barely a car, really, more of an early electric scooter, and it is sometimes thought of as the biggest flop in British motoring history. It’s a vehicle that inherently lives in the common space of the Venn diagram of computing and vehicles, because the company that made it, Sinclair, also made one of the most popular home computers in the UK, the Sinclair Spectrum.

I got to drive a C5 once! Look!

Also our very own Adrian Clarke gave me his old Sinclair Spectrum the last time I was in the UK! I haven’t had a chance to get it running – or find a suitable PAL monitor – but I will!

But let’s get back to the point: I’ve seen references that in the Spectrum version of Paperboy, the tricycle the kid rides in the arcade game is replaced with, of all things, a Sinclair C5! The C5s were noted even in reviews from back in the day. Here’s what they mean:

See it? the little 3 wheeler with the flag. It doesn’t look exactly like a C5, but I do think that’s what the goal was, especially with that flag that most C5s had on them, in order to avoid getting pancaked by some, as they say, lorry. Rendering anything on a Spectrum wasn’t always easy because of the odd color restrictions (only 2 colors per 8×8 block of pixels) but the resolution wasn’t bad.

That said, I wonder if the developer intended it to be a C5 at all – the rear wheels are too small, the front too big, etc. – but reviews and people just took it to be a Sinclair C5, and then other versions, like the Commodore 64 and Apple II versions, made it definitely a C5.

Look how much more accurate the Sinclair C5 seemed to appear in the Commodore 64 and the Apple II versions, as you can see here:

The Commodore one I think looks particularly good, especially in the full context:

I’m pretty sure these conversions of Paperboy are the only times a Sinclair C5 has appeared in a video game. I’d imagine most people outside the UK playing this on their Commodores or Apples had no idea what the hell that thing was.

The arcade version had at least one identifiable car, that ketchup-and-mustard-colored Volkswagen Beetle you see up there, which is pretty fun. Most of the cars in the other conversions were fairly generic cars, like this one in the Spectrum version:

…but I think the Spectrum conversion had at least one other very British specific car cameo, and it’s a good one:

That’s an unusual car, right? Looks pretty specific. And I think i know what it’s supposed to be:

A Caterham 7! Or Lotus 7, if you’d like to believe that the car is a bit older. This is also a deeply idiosyncratically British car, and I love seeing it rendered in nice fat pixels in this game.

Man, this crap delights me. I need to get that Spectrum running!

(Top credit: Sinclair, Mobygames)