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My mother bought me this instead of Elite for my birthday back in 1985. I hadn't even heard of the Great space race until I opened my present.

I first stumbled across your channel via "the algorithm" offering me some of your video game history videos, but since then, you've proven yourself worthy of being followed no matter the topic. Bring on more Japanese wrestling or whatever you feel like talking about!

This is (sadly) my oldest video game shop memory - a computer shop in Beckenham, Kent in 1983 (I was either 6 or 7) - I can clearly remember seeing the large oversized box on display and held it in my hands. I asked my more learned programmer brother what it was like and he said it was shit. Apparently, the oversized box, which was totally unheard of for a retail Spectrum game at the time, was the big selling point. It was my first memory of massive unnecessary packaging hiding a pile of dross. Never realised they did Valhalla until now - which I do remember was a good game!

I remember getting this when I was a kid. I was so excited at the huge box it came in only to find when I opened it there was no cassette inside. Having to wait until the following weekend to get a replacement I loaded it up and wished I'd just kept the empty box instead.

i tell ya man, i could listen to ur voice for hours

I'd been impressed with Valhalla and had been looking forward to this game, when I saw it on the shelf in WH Smiths I was genuinely excited and it was an instant buy. That was the last time I EVER bought a game without reading reviews first, the game was probably worth the money for teaching me that lesson alone

Don't apologise for the wrestling stuff they were well made and fun...anyway now to actually watch this video

I'm certain that prior to going under the name Legend, the company previously traded as Microl, and produced educational software. I had one of their packages, something called Use & Learn, which consisted 25 BASIC programs, and a manual. Topics covered things like sorting algorithms, graphing utilities, a start atlas and some awful games. This was a very early package for the Spectrum, released around September 1982.

I got mine from a car boot sale many years ago when I was a kid. I must revisit it soon.

Another great Kim Justice video with a quote from Sir Richard Richard VC for good measure!

Always fantastic to see new stuff, Kim!

Just wanted to say I discovered your channel through the fabulous wrestling videos you made. Well done, I hope you have more planned! Was surprised you didn’t have enough wrestling videos, given the amount of detail & work you put into it. Keep up the awesome work mate.

Very nice video thanks for making. I bought this used for a couple of quid back in the day. The box attracted me to it as it was huge and had a very impressive cover. Oh the disappointment when I loaded it. Only gave it a couple of goes.

Awesome - thanks for this KJ, I love these in-depth features. Not thought about this game for a long time.. But I well remember all the hype about it, and the absolute panning it got in the magazines. I think only Street Hawk could have equaled such a major drubbing in the Speccy press! Having played Valhalla at my pal's & quite enjoyed it, it was hard to imagine how they went on to follow it with such a duffer. An early lesson in hype control!

I knew someone who worked for Legend, and wrote them some bitmap code for the C64 version of TGSR (I did get paid, but it took a lot of chasing). Their intention was to do animated faces and synthetic voices for the characters, but this was, of course, impractical on Spectrum 48K or C64, if you wanted a program to do anything else as well. You're perfectly right that what they released wasn't what they intended, but what they intended was not feasible.

I had this game as a kid and it was quite impressive when you were used to playing Manic Miner and the like. The box and manual made it something cool to have and gave more of a back story to the game. Much like Valhalla did with it's manual. True it was ground breaking as advertised, but it did impress on it's release. Easy to look at it now and say it looks terrible. But it wasn't that bad ;)

I got this for my birthday. Took it back next day and got Zub instead.

The Great Space Race..... The "No Man's Sky" of the 80's.

Well done on the recent monster success on the wresting video's not my bag really, not watched them, I would watch the big daddy and haystacks one though. Glad you haven't jumped ship and are doing these types of video's still.

I lived through that period but honestly cannot remember it.... what a pile of tripe! I remember buying Transylvanian Tower for the Spectrum and that was written in BASIC (at least I remember listing one of those early games!) but it felt great for the time.

The Great Space also had a huge, expensive box, it really stood out on the very busy Xmas Game shelves of that year.

So good you covered this game. I had forgotton all about it but recall being really underwhelmed after the bullshit promises from the developers and the great packaging... especially after how much I enjoyed Valhalla!

The Great Space Race really did have a BEAUTIFUL box. It was lovely. Vastly over-large, but it looked really gorgeous. The outside was a very deep blue colour and had a sort of leatherette finish, and the artwork was printed directly on it, mostly in shiny silver. The insides of the letters in the logo, though, were filled with matte black. It looked phenomenal. (And I remember all this from seeing it back in the 80s, just after launch.) Thankfully, I didn’t buy it myself. A friend of mine did, though, and the level of his crushing disappointment was something to behold. He must have spent the best part of a fortnight trying to convince himself (and others!) that it was really good, that he liked it and that he hadn’t just wasted a huge amount of money (for an 80s schoolboy) on a pile of utter dross in an admittedly beautiful box. Eventually, of course, he had to admit the truth. Buying The Great Space Race was akin to purchasing a top of the line, beautifully packaged box of artisan chocolates and finding the box full of turds. I do remember the hype very well. For months prior to release, the magazines were full of huge double page spread adverts for TGSR, and Valhalla had indeed been fantastic and groundbreaking, so it caused real excitement. No-one could quite imagine how it might turn out, but there seemed to be a dream team behind it. All those adverts must indeed have cost a fortune. TGSR really is the poster child for over promising and under delivering. It was the biggest disappointment in the history of games releases to date, and probably ever.

Great video, thanks Kim :)

I got this game for Christmas. I have never been so disappointed.

Nice bottom reference I can't see you Kim but I bet you're wearing a smashing blouse

literally can't wait for the Mike Singleton vid, i also hope you'll one day cover the works of Anthony Crowther (if that's someone you'd be into covering!)

A year later, there came "Psi-5 Trading Company". I see some points in common.

I really like your wrestling videos!! The one on the worst wrestling preview was great as well as the two japanese oned.. Keep it up? Could you do the worst WWE or WCW ppv too?

ugh, I can't wait until you cover Deus Ex! SUCH an amazing game concept. The the age before CD-ROM games it was quite novel to have a radio play (via cassette tape) that went along with your game.

My parents wouldn't stump up another £15 for Valhalla's follow up, especially seeing as I'd cleaned them out completely after Gorf (£40! Although they made me save some pocket money every week for a month to contribute to it) on our previous Vic 20, then stung them for Valhalla - money well spent - when we got a Spec. Seeing this, I'm glad I didn't stick my neck out for it.

I have sooooo many questions about the zx spectrum, but I don't even know where to start, being a games enthusiast from the states, I know next to nothing about the 80s micros. All I know is I want to buy a spectrum sehow to display, cuz I've always thought it's one sexy looking machine. Think apple stole alot of it's product marketing from Sinclair's approach to how it made it's products look. Rant over.

That looked interesting.... to start with... then the disappointment sets in. Great vid though!

I could never work out what to do in Lords of Midnight, although a friend of mine had a whole wall covered in maps and really liked it. I recently completed Metro 2033 and it had three really bad aspects: too many "kill the player" sections, limited saves, too many long cut scenes which took you out of any immersion you may have felt. At the time the Great Space Race came out, very few people I knew were willing to pay above £10.00 for Spectrum games. We'd already been ripped off numerous times by shoddy programming and slick marketing. How about a close look at Blaby Computer games? They always had big adverts for their products on the Spectrum magazines, but their games were still panned by the reviewers.

Kim your a god send thank you for all your hard work putting such awesome vids out for us all.... your shits rated A+

When I think of the biggest hype ever for the ZX Spectrum, I always think back to "Knight Rider" - it was advertised in the Your Sinclair! and Sinclair User for years and years and years (I never subscribed to Crash). I don't know if it ever came out..

Would calling this the No Man’s Sky of the 1980’s be accurate?

Oh Elite, ALWAYS upstaging their super-hyped, super-expensive space-game counterparts. It's almost as if we've been here before.

Valhalla was great I thought (and a real achievement to finish) but was written in Basic too, and as slow as hell. It had so much character though, was such a big trek or odyssey all on foot, that even the slowness somehow worked. Did they really think they could do a space game in Basic though? Unlike Molly, I think Peel had no idea of the programming elements behind it all - he could easily have been the charismatic manager with the pre-existing team that either wasn't being square with him, or he just wasn't listening to at all. Interesting about the lack of delays back then, though - I tend to think of thing of these things as coming out after embarrassing delays. Those did happen of course with un-hyped or uncompleted games - though only a kid a the time, I did a loading screen for a football game that was so delayed that the backers eventually called it quits. The manager didn't understand that Basic just wasn't the language to write it in (and the programmer just wouldn't tell him) - apparently they kept showing my screenshot as part of the update! (It was Bobby Charlton's soccer on the speccy.)

Oh no. I ended up with two copies of this "game" from relatives who obviously just went for the biggest box on the shelf !!

Argh, what’s that intro music from? I cannot remember what it is. It’s an intro to something I think but my old brain can’t pull it up from the archives. Help!!!

Another great video Kim!

The "Space Battle" really feels like some slowed down simulation a Ship would show a humanoid passenger so they wouldn't feel left out on a fight that lasted a fraction of a microsecond.

Hi Kim, where's your Kim Justice ident at the beginning of your video's from? It's seems familiar, but I just can't place it.

Just got this out - of it's enormous plastic box and played for the first time - uurrrrghhhh - you over sell it's merits (lol). Came with a broken Speccy I got on e-bay (and got repaired) - wonder whether the frustration of this abomination caused it to self destruct ! Keep up the good work.

I rented TGSR from a video store back in the day. I couldn't find any gameplay in it. The whole project appears to have been pure hype.

Enjoyable video, thank you

A friend and I had decent paying, for 13 yo kids anyway, jobs (NOT a paper round). Anyway, we had money to burn and he bought this and I bought Elite. Needless to say neither of us were impressed with this utter bollocks. After spending a couple of hours "playing" The Great Space Race it was promptly return to WHSmiths for a refund. It was a dire game.

A real pity about this game. The space trading genre is about as old as computer games get - popularized by Star Trader in 1974. Adding cool looking animated character profile pictures can work really well, as seen in Psi-5 Trading Company (1985), but that was a floppy disc based game with a TON more space for animated pixel art (original C64 version). I wonder if the (Canadian) developers of Psi-5 Trading Company took any inspiration from The Great Space Race. Maybe not ... they may not have even heard of it. And like I said, the space trading genre was already a time tested genre at the time.

For your next Pro Wrestling video, how about something closer to home, like the mystical and mysterious cult of personality of Pro Wrestling that was Kendo Nagasaki or how Big Daddy became the UK's wrestling superhero during the World of Sports era?

Me and my dad bought this.. well, my dad bought it! Even then we couldn’t believe you could escape into the code😅

I wanna like it twice, bonus for the Bottom quote.

I've just gone to watch the Brock /NJPW video and it's gone! In gutted, I was busy getting married and didn't have time to watch. Will it make a comeback?

I still enjoyed the game. Got it for a quid from a video rental shop. Th3 manual was fab

I wonder if a single ZX Spectrum could be used as a flight computer. I guess that someone jiggling it a little would make it crash, and then it would take 15 minutes to load the space-code back from space-tape. And then you'd be dead.

Did you play phantasmagoria 2 a puzzle of flesh ? Way ahead of its time and awesome story

I was kinda hoping for the boys and girls at Legend being reduced to some sort of digital banishment and an Ashens style declaration of, "A FITTING PUNISHMENT."

I actually enjoyed this game back in the day!

Strange, I remember seeing Valhalla in ashens' terrible old games you've never heard of

Yet to watch this, but this was my greatest disappointment on the Spectrum. Big package, big manual, crap game... not even sure it stayed on long enough to find out.

It’s the spectrum rise of the robots

I remember getting this ..,

"Deus Ex..." (So far so good) "...Machine - ah" (Oh dear...) It's Mah-kin-ah, for future reference.

This was great, but I would love it if you gave some obscure SEGA titles the Kim Justice treatment. Being an Australian kid with Nintendo and Sony consoles growing up, SEGA games always seemed like this distant thing only a few others had but I hardly saw anything of, and before I knew it when I entered high school in 2000 they were practically gone from the console market.

I worked in a computer shop back in the day. Valhalla was groundbreaking and great. Especially when you swore at it and 'Mary is not amused'. Mary might not have been amused, but we were. It was very amusing to a group of 14 year old boys. We'd heard the hype, waited in anticipation and finally it arrived. The impressive big box was opened, we eagerly sifted through the books and posters to find the tape and loaded it. Being young and that, we initially thought we were playing it wrong or maybe missing something. Nope, it was just rubbish. I don't think i even bothered to copy it......

It would be nice to think that they genuinely thought they had some kickass product that they just couldn't get together on time but it was obviously a load of Star Citiz- sorry, I mean a soulless cash grab.

Looks like trader on the ZX-81 was better than this.

I rented this from a video store back in the day. It didn't seem to have any gameplay. It's utter dross.

I expected more from the furry honeypot adventure

Where did your Brock video go?

So, Telltale before Telltale? That's my first thought.

The hype machine comes back to byte you no matter what era of gaming you talk about it seems.

Ha ha ha I must have dodged this one :-P

hmmmmm the inspiration behind No Mans Sky perhaps ........

I guess the devs drank too much Natof.

Not sure what was the biggest disappointment: this or Terrahawks. The latter game had nothing to do with the show.

It never made it to the C64.

Ah, an early example of a (non) interactive "visual novel" touted as an actual game!

I don't even like wrestling and those videos were great

I commented just so I could be commenter number 100. That is all. Have a nice day.

I dont think this game had crunch...more like splat!

Haberdaber

I bought this I will always remember that big box. It still is and always will be the ultimate disappointment. Trust me No Man's Sky is like the Original Star Wars trilogy compared to this game

I remember this! At the time, there was tremendous uproar over the fact that much of it was written in BASIC.

This looks like it was made in basic.

I liked corpse killer but thats ok, didn't hurt my feelings I'm a big boy I DON'T CARE IT DOESN'T BOTHER MEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Psi 5 Trading Company anyone?

Elite was the best and most memorable game that I played on the Spectrum. It was ground breaking, and although the reviews were all positive I didn't buy it immediately on release, it just looked too complicated to be fun. I did buy The Great Space Race immediately on release though. I like to think that my judgement has improved with age.

Lol @ your voice

"No Man's Sky - ZX Spectrum Edition"

Too be honest Kim, Im not sure you should be calling a peadophile who married a 14 year old girl "an almighty radio 1 DJ"

glad i never bought it - total crap game lol

It's always once to be diverse every now and then. So I have no issue with you talking about games every now and then.

They really should have called it the crap space race

I've noticed you always say "sado-masochistic" when you mean "masochistic" (you're not inflicting suffering on anybody else)...a Freudian slip that probably tells us quite a lot about what you really are.