Who would have thought that this small, cheap and unassuming piece of hardware could have been the catalyst for a world record that has stood for 33 years? The feat in question was one achieved by Artic Computing’s ZX81 title – 1K ZX Chess, a game that amazed all by only taking up 672 bytes of memory when it was released and has held the record for being the smallest game of chess on any format for the last three decades.
That long standing record has now been finally broken by the demoscene group Red Sector Inc. who have programmed a fully-playable version of chess called BootChess using just 487 bytes.
Our congratulations go out to Red Sector but we are still in awe of David Horne for that amazing achievement way back in the early days of home computing.
EDIT: I originally posted this with the title of “32 year old ZX81… etc.”. My mistake. I took a look at the cassette and it is copyrighted 1982. 33 years old it is then!
Hehe, this is insane that people still do this kind of stuff! Loving it!
Yup, David Horne will still have the hat as it’s difficult to make such a game with such massive hardware during those years. Still, it’s good that someone challenged the record, and congrats to Red Sector Inc. I bet chess players around would love to get their hands on this for some serious portable fun.