Pirat (Pirate) by Mihailo Despotovic, June 1985

A text adventure with still pictures for the ZX Spectrum, which I wrote over the summer school break in 1985. Like many Spectrum adventures of the day, it was written in ZX Spectrum BASIC, with routines in Z80 assembly to draw and load the pictures. Nothing of it was preserved.

What I do remember is its loading screen, which I drew in Art Studio: a big PIRAT in square letters, with rays from a dot in the middle of the screen, and my name under it, all in black on yellow. This is a recreation of it from memory, 256 by 192 pixels in the Spectrum's own colors and font, as it looked while the game went on loading from the cassette.

The loading screen

It loads as it did from tape, and sounds like it too when you untick Mute.

The picture

The Pirat loading screen: a big PIRAT in black square letters on yellow, rays from a dot below it, and © Mihailo Despotovic, June 1985, with blue and yellow loading stripes in the border
The recreated screen, with the border striped as the rest of the game loads.
It is also here as a Spectrum screen file, PIRAT.SCR, which an emulator can load with LOAD "" SCREEN$.