Welcome to Spectrum Arcade: Seven New ZX Spectrum Games

Spectrum Arcade is open. It's a place to play ZX Spectrum games, starting with seven that didn't exist a few weeks ago: all written from scratch for the 48K and 128K Spectrum in 2026, in Z80 assembly language, and all free to play in your browser.

Seven games, seven styles

We wanted the first cabinets in the arcade to cover the kinds of games the Spectrum did best.

• Apocalypso! is a 100-screen flip-screen platformer across ten ends of the world, with 250 golden tins to collect.
• Crypt Caper is a 60-room castle explorer with three heroes, three relics and three guardians.
• Gemquake is a bat-and-ball game with 25 caverns, TNT and eleven power-ups.
• Mothfall is a scrolling cave shooter where the rock is as dangerous as the moths.
• The Gullrock Light is an illustrated text adventure set on a lighthouse island in 1897.
• Jelly Storm is a fixed-screen shooter against waves of space jellies.
• Buzz Bee is a one-button game, and the friendliest way in for anyone new to the Spectrum.

Real Spectrum games, not imitations

These aren't modern games dressed up to look old. Each one is a genuine Spectrum program that runs on an original 48K or 128K, loads from a tape, and was tested through the real Sinclair ROM loaders. In the browser, they run in an emulator that recreates the Spectrum's processor, screen, keyboard and sound, including the timing quirks of the real hardware.

On the 128K, all seven play original music on the AY sound chip. On the 48K they fall back to the beeper, as Spectrum games always did. You can switch machines at any time.

Play your own tapes too

The same emulator will load your own Spectrum files: TAP and TZX tapes, Z80 and SNA snapshots, and archives containing them. They load through the real ROM, as if you'd typed LOAD "", and they never leave your device. Our guide explains how to load your own tapes.

Guides for old hands and newcomers

Alongside the games we've written guides to the Spectrum itself: its history, its models, attribute clash, joysticks and the modern machines you can buy today. We'll add more, along with developer diaries on how the games were made.

What's next

More games, more guides and improvements to the arcade. If you've written a Spectrum game you'd like to see here, or you've found a bug, get in touch. And sign up to the newsletter below to hear when the next cabinet arrives.

Now go and press Play.