A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE # 1
For a time, in the mid-to-late 80:s, consoles like the NES or Atari 2600 were mostly unheard of in my home town. And in case they weren't, parents could sense some usefulness in a computer, whereas a gaming console was the work of the devil; a very expensive toy that sucked all the creativity out of their kids.
Our first computer belonged to the 8-bit era. It was a ZX Spectrum 48K from the British company Sinclair Research. We inherited it in 1986 from a beloved uncle who sadly passed away from ALS at the age of 46. It came with a small, black-and-white CRT screen, a tape recorder (because it used cassette tapes as a physical storage medium), and a Kempston interface (for plugging a joystick controller into). The computer itself was tiny, squeezed in its entirety into a small box of metal and plastic with a keyboard (with its infamous rubber keys) on top.
The act of playing was quite a different mental process back then. Today, I immerse myself fully into one game at a time, like I would a good book, exploring as much of it as possible before I reach the end. Then I review it and delete it from the hard drive, most likely forever.
On the Spectrum, however, I switched back and forth between games, playing whatever I fancied at the moment, and kept coming back to the good ones for the rest of the computer's lifespan. Many games didn't even have a proper ending, you just played indefinitely, aiming to get the highest score possible. Gaming was like playing with your toys. Higher aspirations were no part of the deal for the most part - at least not yet...
I think that attitude towards video games lingers in a lot of adults today, at least the ones around my age and in my part of the world, even among those who owned a gaming platform in their youth. It's not like I, as a man in my forties, can casually mention that I love video games without facing some prejudice or ridicule. To me, their attitude is just as dumb as condemning all movies on the basis that Marvel movies are for kids. But really, who cares? It's not like I'm the one missing out.
Another difference between now and then is that my life situation nowadays is totally different. Back then I had a very limited assortment of games and getting new ones was difficult, since you had to purchase them in stores with barely any money to speak of. As a schoolboy, you had all the time in the world, but a very limited selection of games.
Now, as a working man, the problem is quite the opposite. I have all the games I want to play readily available, and can easily afford to buy whatever I'm missing, but hardly any time to actually indulge in them. But the major differences between now and then are of course the existence of Internet and easily obtainable free-to-play games. If things would've been different back then, I could have lived without the free-to-play, but would have gladly accepted the Internet.
As an adult, it simply feels as if the excess of games - a.k.a. our backlogs - have moved away from the store shelves and into our hard drives, online accounts and subscription services. Instead of money, time has become a rare commodity. *Sigh* It never gets any easier, does it?
HOW WE ACQUIRED NEW GAMES PRE-INTERNET
Initially, we only had a few tapes, containing mostly homebrewed games and programs to mess around with. They were the products of a few coding books from which one could program some simple, disappointing arcade games through the Spectrum's built-in Basic programming language. Not knowing better, we still managed to get some fun out of games like Kraa-kraa, Labyrint and Krash-It, titled by the one who typed them in.
But this wouldn't satiate us for long, and a kind relative supplied us with some compilations of commercial games that quickly expanded our library quite a bit. And whenever possible, all of us local kids would come together around the warm glow of the TV screens to "pirate copy" each others' games, filling cassette tapes with as many titles they could hold. We'd then sit and rejoice, drinkning beer, smoking pot and laugh and compliment each other for the progress we made through the most difficult games.
Well, that tall tale could have been true, but the only problem was that in our small town, no-one else owned a ZX Spectrum. So we had to find other means of acquisition.
Every once in a while, our family would travel to the nearest city, where one popular supermarket had an electronics department, selling quite a number of games for a variety of systems. Me and my big brother would run to the shelves and drool over their selection of Spectrum games, safely locked away inside a display case, and mom would occasionally let us choose one game to purchase. I can't remember if mom or my brother paid up. It certainly wasn't me - I probably couldn't afford it, and was too shy to ask the store clerks for the game anyway. What if I mispronounced the title? It would have been too embarrasing.
It was on one of those trips that my brother came in contact with a fellow Speccy-owner from a neighbouring town. They hit it off and decided to become pen pals, and started sending each other tapes to copy, until the other guy eventually sold his Spectrum to buy an Amiga 500. But until that happened, that mail exchange was how we came into possession of many of our finest Spectrum games, like Beach-Head, Raid over Moscow, Wheelie, Jack the Nipper and Mikie.
Unfortunately, we lost all those tapes to yet another guy - a hooligan on a motorbike - who we came in contact with through one of my brother's classmates. He said he wanted to copy the tapes in exchange for even more games. He claimed he'd be back soon, but he lied; he just plain took them and never returned.
We persevered with our small, very slowly increasing collection of games, until the next great acquisition happened. It was like something out of a dream; our kind relative arrived at our doorstep with a big box full of second-hand games and a ZX Spectrum 48+. It looked bigger and more impressive, but was technically identical to the machine we already owned. It had a few quality of life improvements, like a reset button and a much improved keyboard.
But the big deal was the amount of games, very few of which were games we already owned. Just going through them all took days, or weeks, probably, and I found some pretty rare gems among them. I think we got back a few of the titles that we lost to that hooligan. It was probably the happiest day of my life for a long time.
THE IMPORTANCE OF MAGAZINES
So, what was so special about the Spectrum? Well, the cassette tapes took forever to load, sometimes as long as five minutes for a single game, and the instability of the analog storage medium would often cause the process to crash midway through. It was agony, and nothing to feel nostalgic about today. The freak shows called "loading screens" were of little comfort.
I didn't care about technical specs at all back then - they were only a bunch of numbers. I knew that our ZX Spectrum had 48 kilobytes of "memory", but to me it only meant it was better than the ZX Spectrum 16. The higher the number, the better. Thanks to its expanded capacity, it could run better games. That also fuelled my jealousy of those lucky bastards who owned a Commodore 64, which was an even higher number...
But how did we learn all this, and how did we learn what games to search for, or even buy? Remember, this was long before Internet, and we didn't have swift access to press releases or rumors. Instead, we turned to monthly or bi-weekly computer magazines for inspiration. Written game reviews and previews were the YouTube and Twitch of our days. Whenever our parents went to the store, we'd tag along and run to the magazine shelf to grab the latest issue of Svenska Hemdator Hacking (Swedish Home computer Hacking).
SHH was an all-round computer magazine, covering all bases without being specialized in any particular system. It contained hardware-, software- and game reviews, programming tutorials, editorials, news of all kinds, and even had a comic mascot called Torsten. It covered the entire spectrum of home computer owners because the customer base for any particular brand wasn't yet big enough in Sweden. Or so they thought... But more on that in a future blog entry.
Gaming journalists were responsible for all the hype, along with exciting, carefully designed ads that always promised more than the game could deliver. In retrospect, game reviews weren't exactly stellar pieces of writing, but the simplistic games were not generally ones to inspire great thoughts, either. The importance of grades/ratings couldn't be overstated, as they determined what games were worth looking out for, and what reviews were worth reading. I remember mostly skimming through the gaming pages, glancing at the ratings and pictures, and then going back through the issue to read more carefully.
The ads for mail order companies and their huge selection of goods were another magazine highlight, as they seemed to have all the popular games in store. Once you placed an order, the long wait for the mail to drop was almost unbearable. And when it finally happened, you had to wait for dad to come home from work so that he could drive to get the package from the post office. That was the epitome of hype.
Those magazines were the source of a lot of excitement, but thinking back upon those days, they also burdened me with the awareness of other platforms. They essentially opened my eyes to the fact that the our Spectrum was, technically speaking, a cheap, second-rate solution for the masses. The man behind the machine, Sir Clive Sinclair, was responsible for bringing a lot of tech- and programming expertise into the homes of common British households, and around Europe for that matter, and he was appointed Knight Bachelor by her majesty the Queen in 1983.
THE SPECTRUM vs THE C64
When compared to its main competitor, the Commodore 64 (C64), the Spectrum was sold for less than half the price at their releases in 1982, which led to the Spectrum's success, primarily in Britain. But the low price tag came with a cost of a different kind, at least in the gaming sector.
As opposed to the C64, games on the Spectrum could not handle scrolling very well, because it had no specific hardware to support it. If they desired scrolling, programmers had to work their magic to make it as smooth as possible. That is why so many games tended to take place on one single screen instead, or switch between different fixed screens, rather than scroll with your character's movements
In fact, the discrepancies between different 8-bit architectures were so tangible, they each had a distinct, personal touch to the presentation. And, with no exception, the ZX Spectrum screenshots were always the ugliest, with a much maligned so-called "attribute clash" or "color clash", making me quickly long for a better system (like a spoiled brat).
Those attribute problems affected color depiction. Over a tile of 8 x 8 pixels, the Spectrum could only display two different colors at a time. Add to that a very limited color palette - 8 base colors plus 8 more of the same ones with slight brightness variations - and you could get some off-putting visuals when lined up side-by-side with the more advanced systems. We didn't realize it at the time, but our monochrome CRT-TV might have been a blessing in disguise, because the Spectrum's attempts to display colorful graphics were often nauseating.
Another thing I failed to realize, however, was that games on the C64 didn't look all that great in real life, either. It could display more colors, sure, and it had no color clash, but it had a lower resolution, resulting in blockier graphics. I would some time later come into possession of a C64, and wasn't often that impressed with what I saw - through magazines I had already witnessed the potential of the 16-bit era Commodore Amiga.
In the sound department, however, the Spectrum 48K was severely outclassed. The one-channel speaker's beeps and boops were an affront to the ears. Although some coders were so skilled they could actually emulate some cool, distorted semblences of different instruments from it, the C64 was so much more impressive with its three channel SID-chip paving the way for the coolest chip tunes I'd ever heard. The ZX Spectrum 128K was a vast improvement over the 48K in terms of audio, but I have no hands-on experience with that system, so I'll just mention it and move on.
As a control method, I preferred the joystick whenever applicable, but luckily - since the joysticks would break easily - the keyboard was just about as viable. Today I might actually prefer keyboard controls, but I'd have to get a working eight-directional joystick to make that assessment. As far as I know, gamepads were console-exclusive, and the mouse had to wait until the next generational shift to become a household standard.
Presentation and peripherals are only part of the package, though, and in the end playability comes down to the skill of the programmers. With all the superficial stuff cast aside I can name a few games that, gameplay-wise, performed much better on the Speccy than its main competitors. Already back then, I realized Ocean's movie tie-in run'n'gunner Cobra was one such game. The disappointing, glitchy C64 version is almost a different game altogether. And over the years, I've come to learn that the arcade driving port Chase H.Q. was way more playable on the Speccy than even the horrible 16-bit Amiga version. Bomb Jack was stellar on the Spectrum, much better than the C64 version, and so on.
Looks can be deceiving, and tiny screenshots sadly can't successfully convey gameplay qualities. That's why I look back on the times of the Spectrum less fondly than they might deserve. I spent so much of it longing for a better system, never able to appreciate the quaint charm of what we had. There's always a bigger fish...
MY PERSONAL PREFERENCES NOW vs THEN
I'll list some of my own defining Spectrum games further down the page, but first a few words on my preferences back then. I was very young; I think the Spectrum-era lasted between ages 6-12. Consequently, I drifted towards simple games. All of the games we owned were in English, and my knowledge of the language was quite limited. But I picked up some words and phrases here and there by simply playing - in fact this gave me a head start in English when compared to my classmates, none of which would become gamers until much later.
Also, technical limitations, small-sized programming teams and the "Wild West"-mindset of the entire business didn't generate many super-advanced games. They were still testing the waters, the pond was small, and the chances of financial success miniscule. The range of genres were still taking shape, with quite a few still on the horizon. Point-and-click adventures, for instance, appeared late in 8-bit system life cycle, but I never heard of them until the 16-bit era.
I appreciated action games over tactical ones, no big surprise there, and stuck mostly to platformers, arcade games and shooters of different breeds. I really liked fighters and brawlers like IK+ and The Way of the Exploding Fist, a preference that prospered and died with this era. I also longed for a good sports game, particularly football/soccer games or arcade racers, but they were hard to find. A few attempts surfaced, but as far as I know, they were rubbish. Out Run, the big racing game of the era, was a horrendous multi-loader on the Spectrum.
Funnily enough, I despised adventure games, which would become my favorite genre in the 16-bit era. The reason was quite clear: they were all text adventures back then, or interactive fiction as it would later be called, and quite horribly incomprehensible ones at that. I loved the idea of Questprobe's Spider-Man, or The Hobbit, or Mindshadow, but their impossible puzzle logics and the language were two barriers too many.
You'd maybe not believe it, but flight simulators were a thing; a revolutionary game like Elite actually got ported to the Spectrum, and generated quite a buzz, but I never got my hands on it. We owned a copy of a decent helicopter sim titled Combat Lynx and another one titled Fighter Pilot, but none of them tickled my fancy. I played a lot of Top Gun, but that was a just an action game disguised as a simulator. It was not good, but supported two-player dogfighting.
Role-playing games, which has remained my favorite genre ever since the release of Baldur's Gate in 1998, was very niche. For a long time I didn't even know they existed, and they were near impossible to get a hold of. Eventually I saw ads for two of them in British magazines, namely Times of Lore and Bloodwych. Both got converted to the Spectrum but I never dared to buy them. I didn't know if they were worth my money, and now I don't know if they're worth my time.
Strategy games were also quite niche. Digitized versions of board games like Chess and Backgammon were the most prevalent, but the keyboard and joystick controls were unsuitable for the genre. You might find it hard to believe, but the Spectrum actually gave birth to the real-time strategy (RTS) genre without much fanfare. Stonkers was a game about moving troops in real-time, and we owned a copy. I played it a little, but cannot add much more than that. I probably didn't understand what I was doing.
But enough yapping. Listed below are 20 defining games that I have played quite a bit (and in most cases not beaten). Obvious omissions are hugely influential games like the aforementioned Elite, but also Lords of Midnight, Chaos, Laser Squad, 3D Deathchase and Dizzy. The reason is simple; I never played any of those. I couldn't get ahold of them or didn't even know about them until much later.
Hmm, what else was there... By the time I recalled some goodies like Trailblazer, Spindizzy and Impossaball I had already completed my list. What about Boulder Dash? Yeah, I played it, but it sucked on the Spectrum. Manic Miner? Yeah, I owned it but was never much of a fan. Monty on the Run? Played too little of it. Jet Set Willy II? Only played the C64 version - and so on...
20 GAMES THAT DEFINED MY SPECTRUM (in no particular order):
Our first commercial game, which came delivered with the computer, was also one of the Spectrum's finest. Technically super-advanced for its time, it featured a real 3D isometric viewpoint of the world, where you ran around in a city of blocky structures. The goal was to rescue your boyfriend or girlfriend (depending on your choice of sex) and bring them back to safety outside the city walls.
An endless horde of huge ants tried to stop you, and you had a limited supply of grenades to stop them from stopping you. They could not climb, so reaching higher ground was a way to get a brief respite. After saving your spouse 10 times, you won the game and received a medal.
A humorous school simulator, with great visuals for its time. You controlled Eric, a troublemaker at a boarding school, through a tiny sideways perspective resembling a dollhouse. Armed with a slingshot and a hard-hitting punch, Eric had a knack for getting into trouble.
I never quite understood the goal of the game at the time, but revisiting it since made it clear you had to touch all the emblems on the walls (I got that far back then), then receive a code somehow and open a safe before touching the emblems again to beat the game. If you got caught being naughty too often, you'd get expelled, which meant the game was over. To keep clear of trouble you had to attend classes and avoid mischief, which was hard. It got a sequel in the even more incomprehensible Back 2 School.
A legendary single-screen platformer, starring the eponymous Bomb Jack, who bounces around the screen collecting bombs. Every level has a setup of different platforms, set against one of a few backdrops inspired by real-life locations, like the Sphinx or Los Angeles.
The Spectrum version was great, with smooth controls and great, fluid animations all around. I found it rather easy, and could basically play it indefinitely, but that was probably because I got so much practice out of its stellar gameplay.
This was one of those labyrinthine, room-based platformers that were so prevalent on the Spectrum. Saboteur featured a modern-day ninja who infiltrated some enemy encampment with the mission to steal a floppy disk, set a timed bomb and and make a brave rooftop escape via a helicopter.
Enemy guards, gun turrets and dogs tried to stop you, but you could bring them down with a punch, a flying kick or different weapon pick-ups. I always played on the lowest difficulty setting, reached the ending with all objectives fulfilled and thought I was a gaming champ. A cool game back then.
Smooth-scrolling platformer, based on a movie flop starring Sylvester Stallone, with a surprising amount of freedom. You run back and forth a few levels, headbutting or shooting your way to a girl companion, who you must then lead to safety(?).
I never got the hang of the victory conditions, but as long as you kept her safe for awhile, you would eventually beat the level. Famous for being miles better than the lousy C64 version - I even realized it back in the day.
A top-down, vertically scrolling shoot 'em up with slick and responsive controls. Commando was an arcade port that turned out super-fun and challenging on the Spectrum, albeit a bit tedious in the long run. You're an anonymous soldier trying to stay alive against an onslaught of enemy troops.
Different enemy types try to cut your life short. Without weapon pick-ups or upgrades, losing a life means only losing a life - there are no additional power-ups or boosts to risk losing, and the game is all the better for it. Pure skill is the name of this game.
I'm including this one simply because of its sheer technical brilliance. I never got that hooked on the gameplay itself. You control a spaceship in a sidescrolling environment as you fly back and forth against a large structure/ship in the background.
A number of enemy waves try to take you down, and you need to clear them before you attempt to land on the structure. Never quite understood what was so great about it, nor exactly what triggered the winning condition for each stage, but it sure as hell looked good with its neat animations.
Another one included purely on technical merits, and also a little bit because of atmosphere and visual storytelling, or what little of it the Speccy could muster. The idea is neat; you control a dragon in a sidescrolling environment, trying to reach a woman, presumably accused of witchcraft. She is trapped in a city about to get burned at the stake.
You have a limited supply of "fuel" for your dragon breath to torch enemies with, but since you need to save it for the city gates, you cannot do much but try to stay alive on your long flight there. Very boring gameplay, but neat visuals, particularly the dragon animation and the multi-layered backgrounds. How'd they pull that off? Beware, though, that the game runs extremely poorly, with framerates often down to one digit, if memory serves me right.
Early classic, single-screen platformer, where you control a small farmer trying to collect all the eggs on a level. Never looked that great, but the gameplay is frantic and addictive like hell, and the corpulent farmer is smoothly animated, bouncing around the platforms like he's some kind of superhero. Small chickens and, on later stages, a big homing hen/rooster/bird try to gobble you up. This is one of the all-time Spectrum greats.
One of the games we lost to the motorbike hooligan, Ping-Pong was a cool, fast table tennis simulator from Konami. I only played it for a very brief time frame before it got stolen, but I remember it fondly for its great pace, that essentially was a rhythm game before the genre was even invented. Maybe I overestimated it? Well, until I replay it I won't know, and so it'll have to make the cut - for now.
Another landmark technical achievement on the Spectrum, Turbo Esprit was a fun third-person driving game, where you chased crooks across one of four open-world cities (you chose which one at the start of the game).
Armed with a frontloaded gun, you tried to amass points by locating and chasing down differently colored cars, which indicated they were your target. You got penalty points by running over people or shooting down innocent drivers. A sort of predecessor to the Grand Theft Auto series, without the pedestrian parts.
This represents all those simplistic but addictive single-screen arcade games, like Jet-Pac, Pssst, Jumpin' Jack and Hungry Horace. Cookie, which was my favorite, had you controlling a chef. You tried to make some sort of cake by throwing bags of flour at the right kind of ingredients floating around on the screen, so that they would fly into a bowl at the bottom. The wrong ingredients you had to get into one of the surrounding trashcans.
I can't explain why it belongs on this list, but it appeared quite quickly and vividly in my mind so I'll just add it, and hope it deserves its spot.
One of the games I'd actually played (on a relative's MSX) before we bought it. We already knew it was good, and the Spectrum version didn't disappoint. From developer Ultimate Play the Game, they used their own, often utilized isometric 3D engine (if you could call it that), to create a small western town.
In the role of the sheriff, you ran around town, sometimes on a horse, and tried to locate a most wanted criminal. Then you had to outdraw him in a first-person duel scene. Then another criminal would appear, and so forth. If memory serves me right, the crooks were all more or less infamous people from history, like Billy the Kid or Buffalo Bill. Gunfright was quite a gem, brilliant in concept, and rather advanced for its age.
A so-called Breakout-clone, with the unusual twist of being played horizontally instead of vertically. You control a metal block up and down along the side of the screen. With the help of this block, you need to keep a ball bouncing inside the confines of the screen, trying to remove a set of bricks spread out across the stage.
This was yet another one of the games we lost to the hooligan, but I remember it fondly. I got very far due to a glitch that got the ball stuck in between two unbreakable blocks. Every hit scored me a few points, and the extra lives kept racking up for minutes on end. Eventually, the ball broke free, and I could keep on playing for a long time before I ran out of lives.
One of but a few sports games I played and enjoyed, Frank Bruno's Boxing was essentially a poor man's Punch-Out. Included here only because it was so advanced, it became an infamous "multi-loader" on the Spectrum. I thought it was fun and challenging back then, with an imaginative roster of opponents, but because of the Spectrum's limited RAM, the game could only load one opponent at a time.
This meant you had to wait a few minutes between each match for the next one to load. Once you died, you had to quit the game altogether, rewind the tape and restart from scratch. A horrible fate to befall a promising game.
As far as I can remember, Beach Head was a collection of minigames that attempted to depict D-Day, or maybe a scenario quite like it. You had to shoot down planes, steer boats, control tanks and just blast your way to the enemy headquarters over a few levels. The more troops you got safely across the screen for each minigame, the more chances you had to prevail in the end.
Yet another one we lost to the hooligan, and in my memory I get it mixed up with the similar Beach Head II and Raid over Moscow. I cannot exactly recall which game held what minigames, or which one was the best overall, but Beach-Head represents them all.
This was one of the rare instances where we got a cover tape that actually was great. I think it was included with one of our few issues of Your Sinclair, and it would probably become the most advanced game I beat on the Spectrum. It was essentially a fine attempt at a more complex ZX Spectrum Star Wars game in spirit.
I don't remember too much of it, but since I beat it, I must have had a swell time flying through hyperspace back and forth across the galaxies, blasting invading alien scum to oblivion and saving planets - or destroying enemy ground bases in the process. The closest I'll get to a flight simulator on this list.
Fighting games were so much more approachable with a simple controller, like a joystick, that had just one single fire button. With eight different kicks, three different punches and a very intuitive way to perform them all, Exploding Fist might still be my favorite fighting game, with hardly any competition at all. The one-hit knockout made the game a bit more tactical than what we're used to in our day and age.
In fact, I've come to despise the genre for its elitist ideas that super-complex control schemes are the way to improve upon the experience. Exploding Fist was tight and fun, but frankly, quite short-lasting and the C64 version was slightly better. I was sorely tempted to withhold it for a future blog entry about a different gaming platform, but no dice.
In this weird mix between sidescrolling platformer and driving game, you controlled a motorcycle from left to right on your way towards a phantom rider at the right edge of a long maze. Once you reached him, you had to race him back to the starting line. I never beat him.
On your way you had to clear different obstacles like bumps, ice and jumps, as well as enemies of different kinds. You had to manage your speed, because going too fast on an icy surface or across a jump meant you'd fall. And I believe you had to keep an eye out for fuel as well. This was a gem, but unfortunately we lost it to the hooligan. He already had a motorbike, why did he have to steal this one from us?
By God, I hated this game, but consider it now a worthy game to represent the most reviled genre of my youth; the text adventure. I certainly don't hate the concept, especially not now, but back then adventure games had the most idiotic puzzle designs. I mean, hear me out:
In this game, you start outside a castle surrounded by a moat. In order to lower the drawbridge and enter the castle you need to cast the SEED spell from your inventory, because they turn out to be SESAME SEEDS, representing the phrase "open sesame". You get no hints of this, not even in the manual as far as I know; I couldn't read a lot of English back then, remember? The spell is then lost forever.
Well, it turns out you're not supposed to open the drawbridge this way - you need the SEED spell later. If you cast it to enter the castle you cannot beat the game, but the game doesn't tell you. The only other way to enter the castle is to approach the monster-infested moat and dive all the way to the bottom, where you'll find a hatch leading into the castle.
Every attempt to swim across the moat ends with you getting eaten and a GAME OVER-screen, but for some reason, the "dive" command does not aggravate the monsters. You get no hints this is safe. And entering the castle is the first puzzle of the game.
***
And so, we've reached the end of my first arduous trip down memory lane on this blog. In the next one, whenever that'll be, I'll write about my experiences with the Commodore 64, which I remember with a little more fondness. My gaming preferences started to mature a bit, as I began exploring the budding genre of simulators and got my first taste of a tactical role-playing game...
[All screenshots from www.mobygames.com]
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