Abstract
Based on oral history interviews, archival material, and paratextual analysis, this chapter chronicles the second life of the Japanese Sharp MZ-800 8-bit computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Czechoslovakia, investigating the practices and meanings that emerged around this machine in the local do-it-yourself community. Despite its incompatibility with major platforms at the time and its relative obscurity in the rest of the world, Czechoslovak users made it into a formidable gaming machine by producing around 200 ports of existing games and dozens of original titles. The chapter uses this case to argue that, despite deepening globalisation, 1980s Europe was a loosely interconnected patchwork of distinctly local markets and user communities that adopted (mostly) foreign technologies and adapted them to their own needs and ambitions.
Keywords: Game History, Home Computing, 8-bit Computers, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Bloc, Sharp MZ-800
In many parts of 1980s Europe, fans of 8-bit computers engaged in so-called ‘machine wars’. In these discursive battles, each faction claimed the superiority of their platform of choice: Atari fans praised their machine's colour palette, Commodore 64 users claimed theirs had the best sound chip, and the ZX Spectrum crowd boasted an enormous library of software. The ‘machine wars’ were often jocular but also ‘emotionally loaded, personal, and local’ (Saarikoski & Reunanen, 2014, p. 16). Before globalisation went into full throttle, 1980s Europe was a patchwork of national markets, each of which offered a somewhat different selection of hardware and software. The Commodore 64 was the major gaming platform in Scandinavia and Germany, but the UK and Spain were (at least temporarily) dominated by the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and France, for example, had a strong presence of Amstrad CPC, Apple II, and Oric Atmos machines.
As the Western European market grew increasingly crowded, several machines— such as the Sord M5, the Enterprise, or the Sharp MZ-800—failed to capture a significant market share in the West, but found their home in the Soviet bloc, where discounted stock of surplus products could easily be sold to citizens hungry for any computer at all. And so, in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, there was one more contender for the crown of the top 8-bit machine: the Sharp MZ-800.