SpriteFountain is about old computers, old consoles and the slightly ridiculous amount of fun they can still provide. From the ZX81, VIC-20 and ZX Spectrum through to the Amiga 1200, Mega Drive, SNES and beyond, this is a site for machines that shaped gaming and for the people still finding new reasons to switch them on.
It is not going to be a museum. There will be plenty of looking back at games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, but SpriteFountain is every bit as interested in what is happening now: remakes, reimaginings, modern recreations of classic hardware and entirely new games being released for machines that supposedly had their day decades ago.
Retro gaming never actually stopped
That is probably the main reason SpriteFountain exists. Retro gaming is often treated as nostalgia, but there is far more going on than replaying the same handful of famous titles. Developers are still writing for old systems, hardware is being rebuilt and expanded, and communities around machines once considered obsolete remain stubbornly active.
The ZX Spectrum Next will be a big part of that. It takes the character of the Spectrum and pushes it into territory that would have seemed absurd when the original machines were sitting under televisions in the 1980s, giving developers new possibilities without losing the identity that made the platform special in the first place.
The same idea extends well beyond the Spectrum. FPGA systems, recreated consoles, upgraded versions of classic computers and new accessories are giving players fresh ways to use familiar machines, while programmers continue finding things to do with hardware whose limitations once looked absolute.
SpriteFountain will cover all of it. There will be reviews of games from the past, but not simply because they are old. Some classics deserve another look, some have aged better than expected, some are fascinating because of what they attempted, and some are probably best remembered through rose-tinted loading screens.
New retro games will get the same attention. If somebody releases a new Spectrum game, an Amiga adventure, a Mega Drive cartridge or something built specifically for the ZX Spectrum Next, it belongs here. So do modern remakes that understand what made their originals work rather than treating pixel art as a shortcut to nostalgia.
There will be features on hardware, developers, forgotten games, famous games, strange peripherals and the bits of computing history that are far more interesting than a list of specifications. Expect plenty of ZX Spectrum, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Nintendo and Sega, but the boundaries are deliberately broad. If it sits somewhere in the world of 8-bit, 16-bit or modern retro gaming, SpriteFountain is interested.
The machines themselves are part of the appeal too. The clunk of a keyboard, the wait for a tape to load, the satisfying brutality of a cartridge slot or the strange joy of getting a thirty-year-old computer talking to a modern display are all part of the experience. Retro gaming has never been only about software.
Most of all, SpriteFountain is here because this stuff is still fun. A great game does not stop being a great game because its pixels are bigger, and an old machine does not become irrelevant because something faster came along. Sometimes the restrictions are exactly what make developers come up with something clever.
So welcome to SpriteFountain. There are a lot of games to revisit, plenty of machines to get unnecessarily enthusiastic about and, perhaps best of all, an increasing number of completely new things being made for hardware that refuses to disappear.
