Exile on the BBC Computer

My computer of the late 1980s was the BBC Micro produced by the British company Acorn Computers.

It is hard to appreciate thirty years later that the BBC Micro was an 8-bit computer with 32kb of memory. To give some idea of the constraints of computing at that time, one 640x480 JPEG photo is around 100kb; around three times the entire memory of this machine.

A game that really captivated me on this computer was Exile — released in 1988. I recently stumbled onto some videos 1, 2, 3 etc… that reminded me of my time playing this game as a child and what fun it was.

The premise, complexity, physics, game-play, puzzles, animations and even the sound were breath-taking at the time. Creating that game on that hardware remains one of the most remarkable pieces of engineering + art that I have ever seen.