ZX Spectrum Trivia
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59 free ZX Spectrum trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The ZX Spectrum was launched on 23 April 1982 with a rubber keyboard that felt like dead flesh, a rainbow stripe and a price under £200, and it sold five million units and kick-started the British games industry. This quiz covers the machine itself: the Z80 at 3.5 MHz, the ULA that Richard Altwasser designed, the 8x8 attribute grid that gave us colour clash, the beeper, the 1500-baud cassette loading, the Microdrive and the Kempston interface. It also covers the people and the games. Sir Clive and his earlier calculators and watches, Rick Dickinson's case, Timex in Dundee, the mail-order backlog, the Spanish-built 128, the Amstrad takeover for £5 million and the +2 and +3. Then Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, Ultimate Play the Game and Knight Lore, The Hobbit, Elite, Chuckie Egg, Skool Daze, Dizzy, Crash and Your Sinclair, right through to Micro Men, the Vega, the Next and Black Mirror's Bandersnatch. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Spectrum, Sinclair Research and the individual games and add-ons, so the dates, prices and kilobytes are correct.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The ZX Spectrum went on sale in 1982 in two versions that differed in what?
Memory size
Memory size was the only difference: 16 KB or 48 KB of RAM. Most games soon needed the larger machine, so many owners of the cheaper one paid to have theirs upgraded.
Q 02How many ZX Spectrums were sold across all the official models?
About 5 million
About 5 million is the usual total for the official machines, and it leaves out the unlicensed clones built across Eastern Europe, so the true number of Spectrums was higher still.
Q 03The Spectrum was manufactured in Dundee by which company, better known for watches?
Timex
Timex assembled the Spectrum under contract in Dundee, and when its factory shut for the summer holiday in 1982 Sinclair's queue of waiting buyers grew to 40,000.
Q 04Which industrial designer created the Spectrum's case, rainbow motif and rubber keyboard?
Rick Dickinson
Rick Dickinson replaced the hundreds of parts in a conventional keyboard with a design of four or five moving parts, because at Sinclair every design decision was driven by cost.
Q 05The name 'Spectrum' was chosen to emphasise what?
Its colour display
Its colour display set it apart from the black-and-white ZX81; during development the machine was called the ZX81 Colour or ZX82.
Q 06Which Olympic champion's 1984 Spectrum game became notorious as a 'joystick killer' for its frantic waggling?
Daley Thompson
Daley Thompson's Decathlon made players hammer two keys or waggle a joystick to make him run, a control borrowed from the arcade game Track & Field that wrecked many a joystick.
Q 07The cheaper of the two original ZX Spectrums went on sale in 1982 at what price?
£125
£125 bought the entry model when the rival BBC Model B cost over £300, and within three months 30,000 buyers were still waiting for theirs.
Q 08The Spectrum's rubber keys were famously said to feel like what?
Dead flesh
Dead flesh was the jibe that stuck to the rubber keys, and Sinclair answered it in 1984 with the hard plastic keyboard of the Spectrum+.
Q 09Which processor, running at 3.5 MHz, powered the ZX Spectrum?
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80A ran at 3.5 MHz; its 16-bit address bus could reach only 64 KB directly, which is why the Spectrum 128 needed bank switching.
Q 10Which single chip integrating the ZX Spectrum's essential hardware did Richard Altwasser design?
The ULA
The ULA, an uncommitted logic array made by Ferranti, packed the video, keyboard and sound circuitry into one custom chip, which kept the Spectrum small and cheap.
Q 11Because colour was stored per 8x8 cell, the Spectrum suffered from what graphical limitation?
Attribute clash
Attribute clash arose because each 8x8 cell could hold only two colours, ink and paper, so a moving sprite recoloured the background it crossed; the best games were drawn to hide it.
Q 12Besides its colours, each character cell on the ZX Spectrum could be set to extra brightness and what other effect?
Flashing
Flashing was one bit in each cell's colour byte: when it was set, the ink and paper colours swapped at regular intervals, so text blinked on its own.
Q 13Which Nine Tiles programmer wrote most of the Spectrum's ROM code and its BASIC programming manual?
Steve Vickers
Q 21The ZX Spectrum 128 launched in September 1985 in which country, financed by local distributor Investrónica?
Spain
Spain got it first because Sinclair developed the 128 with Investrónica, its distributor there; Britain had to wait until January 1986 while shops cleared unsold Spectrum+ stock.
Q 22Which chip gave the Spectrum 128 three-channel sound and MIDI compatibility?
AY-3-8912
The AY-3-8912 was the chip already used in the rival Amstrad CPC, and it sent its three-part music out through the television instead of a speaker inside the case.
Q 23Which businessman's company bought the Sinclair computer range and brand name for £5 million in 1986?
Alan Sugar
Steve Vickers adapted the ZX81's BASIC for the new machine, then quit with hardware designer Richard Altwasser within weeks of the launch to build a computer of their own, the Jupiter Ace.
Q 14How was a BASIC keyword such as PRINT entered on the original Spectrum's keyboard?
With a single keystroke
With a single keystroke: each key carried whole keywords, so pressing P gave PRINT, a Sinclair habit since the ZX80 that saved memory by storing each command as one byte.
Q 15Which on-screen message told a Spectrum owner that several minutes of waiting for a game had been wasted?
R Tape loading error
R Tape loading error meant the Spectrum had found the game on tape but could not read it in, so the whole load had to be started again from the beginning.
Q 16The original Spectrum's sound came from what?
A single-channel beeper
A single-channel beeper could play only one note at a time, so, as Sinclair's own manual put it, anyone who wanted harmony would have to sing it themselves.
Q 17How was the ZX Spectrum sold at first?
By mail order
By mail order only at first: demand ran far past the planned 20,000 machines a month, and only after long backlogs did chains such as WHSmith and Boots stock it.
Q 18Which right-hand man of Clive Sinclair left in the late 1970s to co-found the rival Acorn Computers?
Chris Curry
Chris Curry had run Sinclair's side company Science of Cambridge; within a few years his new firm had beaten his old boss to the contract for the BBC's computer.
Q 19Clive Sinclair, the inventor behind the ZX Spectrum, was the long-serving chairman of which organisation?
British Mensa
British Mensa had Sinclair as its long-serving chairman, yet the home-computer pioneer said in later life that he did not use the internet himself.
Q 20Which Sinclair business computer, announced in January 1984, reached buyers months late and became a costly flop?
The QL
The QL, short for Quantum Leap, was announced before it was finished: working machines took until late summer 1984 to arrive, and the advertising watchdog upheld complaints about the delay.
Alan Sugar's Amstrad bought the computers and the Sinclair name in April 1986 but not the company itself, then launched three more Spectrum models of its own.
Q 24Amstrad's ZX Spectrum +2 came with what built in?
A cassette recorder
A cassette recorder, which Amstrad called the Datacorder, was built in just as on its own CPC 464, and the +2 was sold purely as a games machine with a joystick and games in the box.
Q 25Amstrad's 1987 ZX Spectrum +3 passed over the common 3.5-inch floppy disk for one of what size?
3-inch
3-inch disks were a non-standard format, but Amstrad already used them in its own CPC and PCW computers, so the same drive went into the +3.
Q 26Which 1983 release was the first title from the Spectrum software house Ultimate?
Jetpac
Jetpac, in which a spaceman rebuilds and refuels his rocket, arrived when many shop-bought games still contained reams of BASIC, and its smooth arcade action made Ultimate's name.
Q 27The ZX Microdrive, launched in July 1983, stored data on what?
A continuous loop of magnetic tape
A continuous loop of magnetic tape ran round each tiny cartridge in about eight seconds, but friction wore the tape so fast that Microdrives earned a name for unreliability.
Q 28Which company's joystick interface became the most widely supported add-on of its kind for the ZX Spectrum?
Kempston
Kempston's interface let Atari-style joysticks plug into the back of the Spectrum, sparing its rubber keyboard from the pounding that action games dished out.
Q 29Which American computer, launched in 1982, was the ZX Spectrum's biggest rival for British home gamers?
Commodore 64
The Commodore 64 cost far more than a Spectrum when it reached Britain, so Sinclair kept the budget end of the market while Commodore became its closest challenger.
Q 30The Stamper brothers, the team behind Knight Lore at Ultimate, went on to found which studio in 1985?
Rare
Rare grew out of Ultimate after the Stampers reverse-engineered Nintendo's console, a feat Nintendo had called impossible, and switched from Spectrum games to cartridges.