While the Sinclair ZX Spectrum wasn’t my first “games playing system”, it was surely my first computer. While it was released in 1982, I got mine (well, my father’s) in 1983 – I was 9 then. Man, I feel old…
And this – Penetrator, from Melbourne House, was the first game I played on the Speccy. At the time, the name didn’t sound “suspicious”, like it would today. 
It’s basically a Scramble (an even older arcade game) clone – you fly a ship, which can shoot forwards, and drop bombs beneath you, in an apparently physics-reallistic sort of way. The first level is on open air, with just mountains to dodge, and missiles which try to hit you, but from the second level onwards, the game is inside increasingly complex caverns, so the ceiling is also a danger. And new enemies, of course.
Of course, the graphics seem laughable now, but reviews at the time said great things about them – they were impressive, for the time.
It would take years before I was able to beat the game without cheating, but I did so. My first Spectrum game…
If you want to try the game yourself, it’s perfectly emulated.
Of course, soon I would have a much harder challenge ahead of me: The Hobbit. My first text adventure game, at a time when I didn’t know any English. But that’s for another post…
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I remember this
Also, i’ve been looking for a way to convert .roms into audio files, to then be recorded to audio tapes and later played on an actual spectrum. Just for the heck of it. Do you know anything of the sort?
Good luck for your new blog.
Thanks for the “good luck”!
Maybe you can convert .TZX files, they’re the actual “tapes”. Check out if Spectaculator does it. If not, I don’t know, sorry.
http://www.emulatronia.com/emus/ordenadores/spectrum/taper206.zip
Tapper does exactly what you want:
From tape to .tap and from .tap to tape
Penetrator was the first game I saw and played on the Spectrum… wow, brings back some good memories…