ZX Spectrum Vega+

» see zxvega.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There was a first one that worked. The ZX Spectrum Vega, released in 2015, was a plastic wedge that plugged into a television with a thousand licensed Spectrum games inside it, and people who bought it got it. The Vega+ was meant to be the same idea with a screen on the front, a handheld with the industrial design done by Rick Dickinson, the man who drew the original Spectrum's rubber keys in 1982.

The Indiegogo campaign was live by the middle of February 2016, when a retro news blog noted it had £15,000 from 155 backers and a month still to run. It closed around £513,000 from roughly 4,500 people. The pitch was the Sinclair name on a Dickinson shape, with a thousand games in your pocket for about a hundred pounds.

The company behind it came apart before the money even landed. Retro Computers Ltd was a four-way arrangement with Sinclair Research Limited itself holding a stake, and two of the founders, Paul Andrews and Chris Smith, resigned over what the paperwork called irreconcilable differences while the campaign funds were still in escrow. Everything after that happened inside a company whose shareholders were fighting each other.

Backers would wait three years. Most of them are still waiting.

~ the case file ~

~ every date it set ~

The first promised ship date was September 2016. By the end of that month it had become 20 October. In November the company was still saying Christmas. December moved it to February 2017, and the next date anybody heard was April 2018, followed by a window between the 8th and the 12th of May. Each move came with an explanation, and a surprising number of the explanations were about a button. In November 2016 a tech site reviewed a "production model" that turned out to be from a small test run, and three weeks later the company announced that testing had found a problem with one of the buttons.

The reporting got dangerous to do. In December 2016 Retro Computers' lawyers threatened the BBC with legal action over coverage of the delays and demanded editorial control of any report before publication. Indiegogo halted the campaign in March 2017. A backer took the company to small claims court and won in January 2018, with the judge finding an implied contract of sale, which is a quietly important ruling for everybody who has ever been told that a crowdfunding pledge is a donation. By June 2018 Indiegogo had appointed a collections agency to try to get the money back.

~ four hundred consoles ~

Units started reaching backers in late July 2018. What arrived was a handheld running Fuse, the open-source Spectrum emulator, in a case The Register described as plasticky and inconsequential, and the first backer to get one told Eurogamer that the sample games did not work. The company had already announced it would ship 400 "Blankety Blank" units with no games preloaded at all, because it no longer had rights to most of the thousand titles in the pitch.

Then the name went too. On 1 August 2018 the BBC reported that Sky, which holds the Sinclair and ZX Spectrum trademarks, had told Retro Computers its license would be revoked on the 7th. Six days later the company lost the right to call the thing a ZX Spectrum at all.

~ creditors ~

Private Planet Ltd presented a winding-up petition on 30 November 2018, and on 1 February 2019 Retro Computers Ltd was wound up. Nobody turned up to represent it.

Private Planet's sole director, Janko Mrsic-Flogel, had himself been a director of Retro Computers from April 2016 to August 2018 and had run his own Indiegogo campaign, raising over 2.5 million dollars for the Gemini PDA. Three weeks later The Register was explaining to backers how to register themselves as creditors in the liquidation.

The Spectrum was a British childhood and I did not have one. I came online in 1998 on a 14.4k modem in Turkey, a full machine generation past all of this, so the nostalgia the Vega+ was selling was never aimed at me. What travels fine in any language is the shape of the schedule: six announced ship dates in two years, each one explained, each one missed. Any engineer who has watched a hardware date slip can read that list from across the planet. zxvega.co.uk now serves a page recommending online casinos to British players.

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