In 1981, after winning a contract from the BBC, Acorn Computers released the 8-bit BBC Micro. It was used in most schools in the UK, and many of us who were in school at the time remember the computer fondly.
We have been lovingly restoring BBC Micro games from the 1980s onwards. We have put them here so you can play them in emulators, or on a real BBC Micro, or in your browser. If you would like to help us improve the site, please contact us.
Which game should you play? There are more than 3000 games on the website, but which are the very best? At the Stardot forum, members nominated their favourite games. Here are the top twenty:
What do you think? Have we missed your favourite game? Let us know: contact us here or at the forum!
The site is still under development. We believe we have most of the games written for the BBC Micro apart from a few very obscure ones which we are still trying to track down. If you know of a game we have missed, or, even better, if you own one, contact us and we will get it added to the database. We maintain a list of titles which we believe to be missing from the archive.
We strive for ease of use rather than the exact preservation of original releases. Games on tape have been transferred to disc-images so that they will load quickly. And changes have been made to enhance usability — see the Who we are section for more details. Any major changes have been noted on a per-game basis.
In addition to the people who worked on the archive and the website, we would like to say a big thank you to Matt Godbolt for developing JSBeeb and sharing it with the world on GitHub. It makes the website come alive — anyone can play BBC Micro games right in the browser!
Most of the games on this website were originally curated by Mick Brown, who announced the 30th Anniversary BBC & Electron Collection in 2014 and started releasing disc-images on the Stardot forum in May of that year.
The collection is made up of games that Mick had first copied to his own "unofficial" compilation discs thirty years before.
Mick has enhanced the games by fixing bugs, adding user-friendly instructions (taken from cassette inlays or other authentic sources), and ensuring that the games are compatible with a range of emulators as well as real Acorn hardware.
Our thanks go to Mick for the countless hours of work he has put into compiling, enhancing, testing, and re-testing the games in this collection.
Thanks also to Paul Houghton and Richard Toohey for developing the bbcmicro.co.uk website, and to Gary for hosting it.
Lee "Eagle Eye" Newsome proofread the game instructions, tested every game several times, and coordinated the work on the website project, aided and abetted by "lurkio" at Stardot.
Huge thanks to Dave Moore ("Arcadian" at Stardot) for his enduring commitment to preserving and promoting all things Acorn, online and off, including the creation of the invaluable Stairway To Hell archive and the ABug video series.
We're grateful to the incredibly knowledgeable members of the Stardot forum for their generous help and support.