Acorn Electron - Popular Games

Popular Games

Although not as well supported by the biggest software publishers as rivals like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a good range of games were available for the Electron. The traditional BBC Micro publishers such as Acornsoft, Superior Software and Micro Power offered the widest support. Notable popular games particularly associated with the Electron include:

• Starship Command (Acornsoft, 1983)
• Chuckie Egg (A'n'F, 1984)
• Elite (Acornsoft, 1984)
• the Repton series (Superior Software, 1985–1989)
• Thrust (Superior Software, 1986)
• Exile (Superior Software, 1988)

There were also many popular games officially converted to the Electron from arcade machines (including Crystal Castles, Tempest, Commando, Paperboy and Yie Ar Kung-Fu) or other home computer systems (including Impossible Mission, Jet Set Willy, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Tetris, The Last Ninja, Barbarian and SimCity).

Despite Acorn themselves effectively shelving the Electron in 1985, games continued to be developed and released by professional software houses until 1991. There were around 1,400 games released for the Acorn Electron, several thousand extra public domain titles were released on disc through Public Domain libraries. Notable enterprises which produced discs of such software are BBC PD, Electron User Group and HeadFirst PD.

See also the list of Acorn Electron games for a fairly comprehensive list of games published for the machine and Category:BBC Micro and Acorn Electron games for a list of games with information on Wikipedia.