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      Cluedo seemed to appear out of nowhere as some murdery-mystery rival to Monopoly. In fact, it was devised by a solicitor’s clerk from Birmingham (the home of many unsolved crimes, we’re saying–the Bullring and Spaghetti Junction to name but two). Posh kids had it first, probably because it featured a ‘study’ and a ‘drawing room’, but it wasn’t long before the whole street was testing their detective skills with miniature tools of death and cards that you had to keep in little wallets like After Eights.

      Essentially a glorified board version of 20 Questions (just keep asking until you guess whodunit, where-they-dunit and with what) but featuring murder, it stirred the nascent serial killer in many a small child. Show us a grown-up who claims they didn’t secretly want to see Mrs White bludgeoned to death with the lead pipe in the bedroom, and we’ll show you a suspiciously new-looking patio out in their back yard. (Of course, this almost-amusing observation conveniently ignores the fact that the actual murder victim–Dr Black–couldn’t simultaneously be one of the players. Neither could you record a verdict of suicide or accidental death. No wonder we grew up to be such a distrustful generation.)

      See also Monopoly, Electronic Detective, Escape from Colditz

Quite where the stereotype characters were drawn from remains unexplained, although we suspect some play on words implicit in Mrs Peacock and Col. Mustard. Popular opinion had it that one of the suspects in the French version was a Welshman called Jack Hughes (j’accuse, geddit?), but sadly that’s just a grand old urban myth. 1986’s Super Cluedo Challenge did introduce three new characters–Captain Brown (just nervous, we expect), Miss Peach and Mr Slate-Grey but, like new-formula Coke, it never caught on.¹.

      Although it must be said that both Rev. Green and Prof. Plum weren’t exactly marketed as teen heart-throbs, Miss Scarlet stirred more than just violent urges in the fellas, appearing as she did on the cards as a bright red pawn with a mane of flowing blonde hair and a saucy-yet-sophisticated smile. Thinking about it, any game that prompted a prepubescent sexual frisson from a chess piece, or educated young Crippens as to which household items could best be used to kill, should probably have come with some form of parental advisory warning. But this was in the good old pre-PC days, so we had free rein to don our imaginary balaclavas and go a-garrotting. With the length of rope. In the kitchen.²

1 Neither did the ratings haemorrhage of a TV show that broke through on ITV primetime in the ’90s. Although they managed to churn out four series, host Chris Tarrant (later replaced by Richard Madeley) claimed it was his ‘all time low…fucking bollocks…I just hated it’.

2 Another crime is the literal bludgeoning in the past decade of the Cluedo franchise, with the original game beaten to fit into travel, card, PC, junior and Simpsons-branded versions. Hasbro has also introduced a nostalgia edition (whatever that means), which comes in a wooden box. Which is where we’d have to be before you’d find us playing the animated Cluedo DVD Game.

       Commodore 64

      Breadbin-shaped family computer

Often, the first computer to grace the family home would not be bought as a present for the kids but would be borrowed as another toy for a tinkering dad. Commodore Business Machines had already dangled their PET, one of the top ‘take home from work for the weekend’ computers, in front of inquisitive parents across the globe, but it was with the introduction of the VIC-20 and Commodore 64 in the very early ’80s that they cornered the younger (i.e. games-obsessed) micro market.¹

More eccentrically named than their closest competitors, Commodore computers also pretty much outclassed any in their price range. As any owner wouldn’t tire of banging on about, the C64 had much better–that is to say, more arcade-like–graphics than the Spectrum, thanks to something called ‘sprites’.² Its sound chip was also more sophisticated, leading some very zingy music to accompany the on-screen action rather than the usual bleeps and boops.

On top of that, the C64 also had a purpose-built matching cream lozenge colour-scheme tape deck or floppy disk drive, a ‘proper’ keyboard and that extra wodge of actually-not-very-important-in-the-event DRAM memory (a full 16K more than the 48K Spectrum–still some 6000 times less powerful than the average 3G mobile phone). But it did mean that a few classic programs were unique to what modern technologists would deem ‘the platform’: Dig Dug, Gilligan’s Gold and the assault-on-Hoth-apeing Attack of the Mutant Camels to name but three.³

      The BBC Micro Computer programming

      More than any other micro, though, the C64 was positioned as a grown-up’s office tool with all kinds of spreadsheet, word-processing and accounts applications available. All that processing power! However, once computer and accompanying colour portable telly took up residence in the spare room, so did we. Come on, it was 1982! We could close the curtains, watch the first edition of The Tube on Channel 4 and then play Defender’til bedtime. You can catalogue your record collection later, Dad.

      See also ZX Spectrum, Binatone TV Master

      Worthy, wealthy households instead chose to purchase the distinctly public service remit BBC Model B, which at least had a couple of Sunday-morning computer-literacy TV shows to back it up–although precious little in the way of games at first. Price wars and a failure to keep up with the increased specifications in the industry did for most of these machines in the end. Time has been kind, however, and a thriving retro scene keeps

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