We live in an age of hyperbole, where a couple of modest successes are enough to elevate someone to legendary status – at least in the eyes of a rapidly churning pop culture. This week we said goodbye to a genuine legend, Sir Clive Sinclair, whose vision virtually defined the British games industry – and by extension huge swathes of the modern gaming landscape. Ironic, given that gaming was perhaps the furthest thing from Sinclair’s mind when he was creating his first home computers in the early 1980s.
Sinclair was an inventor first, a businessman second. Born in 1940, he was a precociously gifted child, particularly good at mathematics, and both his father and grandfather were accomplished engineers. A voracious reader and tinkerer, he spent his school holidays teaching himself the things that his secondary school could not, and by the age of 14 had reportedly already come up with a design for a submarine. History, sadly, does not recall if he ever attempted to build and sail it.
Fascinated by the new technology of electronics, the young Sinclair took holiday jobs at relevant companies and tried to pitch his managers with ideas for electric vehicles – an obsession that would run throughout his career, and one of many examples of how far ahead of his time he was.
Before he had even finished his A Levels – physics, pure maths, and applied maths – he was selling DIY miniature radio kits by mail order, working out his material costs and profit margins in an old school exercise book. This grew into an actual business, selling calculators and other gadgets, as well as producing early kit computers for schools and colleges.
It’s here that Sinclair’s story branches off into our world of gaming. Envisioning a future where every household would have its own computer, Sinclair began putting together what would become the ZX80, which had a whopping 1k of memory in its basic form. Sinclair’s stroke of genius was producing a computer that was affordable by most ordinary consumers. At a time when computers cost at least £700 (over £3000 adjusted for inflation), the ZX80 retailed for less than £100. You could even save more money by buying it in kit form, like the radio sets Sinclair had sold as a teenager and putting it together yourself.