This video clip from 1997 first popped its head up on the Weird Wide Web last year. Originally a brilliantly funny instructional video found by the curators of the Found Footage Festival Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, in a Minnesota thrift store, on an old VHS tape. With the bad fashion of the presenter, her sudden unexplained appearance topless, and hysterically delivered dead-pan lines like, "I’ll show you how to reach a cybersex climax. We’ll also visit others who have mastered the art of one-handed typing." It's a gem of a find.

The infamously controversial platform game, that was so much a blatant rip-off of Super Mario Bros. that the original Commodore 64 cover art declared "The brothers are history". The Great Giana Sisters was a German computer game from 1987 developed by Time Warp Productions and published by Rainbow Arts. It's similarities to the famous Nintendo platformer were so great that urban myths developed around lawsuits being filed by Nintendo, against the makers of the copy-cat game. Originally released on the Commodore 64, it was ported across to the Amiga and Atari ST, as well as the Amstrad CPC and the MSX2. However a planned Sinclair Spectrum version never saw the light of day, supposedly due to legal pressures. Due to the controversy around the game, it has gained a cult status among retro gaming fans, and it rated as one of the best ever C64 games.

The game has two playable characters, the "sisters" Giana and Maria.  The game background and general style looks very similar to Super Mario Bros.  However in the game play, instead of collecting mushrooms from blocks, the sisters gather brightly-coloured balls from blocks.  After collecting the power balls, the characters do not grow large (like in Mario), but instead their hairstyle changes into Mohawks.  Allowing the characters to break blocks, a feature of both games.

In 1981 On-Line Systems released the very first commercially available pornographic computer game, Softporn. A fantasy text adventure game for adults, where the player had to seduce three women, while avoiding hazards, like being killed by a nightclub bouncer. With text commands as odd and creepy as BUY WHISKEY, WEAR CONDOM and SCREW HOOKER, the game was about as erotic as being slapped in the face with a wet fish.

They went full steam ahead marketing the game, with the now infamous hot tub advertising photo, which was taken in the Williamses' own backyard. The photo even featured employees of On-Line Systems, with Roberta herself appearing in it, on the far right. The hot tub ad first ran in the September 1981 issue of Softalk, an Apple II enthusiast magazine, and instantly became controversial, among early computer hobbyists and readers of the magazine.

Back in the primitive days of video gaming, the best most homes could hope for was a TV console with a series of generic Pong style paddle and ball based games. The Magnavox Odyssey was the world's first commercial home video game console. It was first demonstrated in April 1972. 

The British "virtual" TV host that first appeared in the cyberpunk TV movie on Channel 4,  Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future. First broadcast in 1985, the character was so successful that he was developed into a VJ, with his own show, The Max Headroom Show, that same year. The show ran for 3 seasons, until 1987. In 1987 a further spin-off sci-fi drama series was made, which ran for 2 seasons.

Max became such a massive hit, especially among youth audiences that he began to appear everywhere. He was used to promote New Coke, he appeared on Sesame Street, he appeared at the 1988 Winter Olympics and released a song Paranoimia with the synthpop group The Art Of Noise. In 1986, Quicksilva released a Max Headroom game, which was sold in the UK for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Max has been parodied on many occasions. From David Letterman to Back To The Future and an Eminem music video. Infamously in 1987, Max's character was hijacked as part of a TV broadcast signal intrusion prank. When a hacker dressed in a suit and wearing a Max Headroom mask, hijacked the TV signal of a Chicago TV station and its affiliate, in an incident known as the "Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion". Most recently Max was revived as an old man to promote Channel 4's digital switch-over.

Developed and produced by the book publisher Hodder & Stoughton, and based on horror writer James Herbert's 1974 novel of the same name, The Rats came out in 1985. The game was a strange mix of governmental strategy simulation, text adventure and survival horror. How that one got past the initial development pitch is anyone's guess. Anyway the game was released on the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum, but not on the Amstrad CPC. Though a version was planned, but never released.

The apparent juxtaposition of different games was generally well received on release. For an 8-bit game, with limited sound and graphics, it was surprisingly creepy and atmospheric. The game starts like a novel, with a prologue is written out in bold white letters across a black screen to setting the scene. Then a pool of torchlight is seen wandering around in the blackness, sudeenly red eyes appear in the dark. A heartbeat sound quickens. Suddenly, a rat pounces into view! Then blood-spattered screen, with eerie accompanying theme music.

Another among the many movie tie-in games that appeared in the 1980s is RoboCop in 1989, produced for the home computer by the British company Ocean Software. Most of the versions that appeared were a reworking of the arcade game, published by Data East and Nihon Bussan, but licensed by Ocean. The Commodore 64 version was a uniquely different game, and notorious in the European version for being very "buggy". And so became an infamously bad game on that platform. 

The ZX Spectrum version however was a great success. Considered by many to be better than the arcade version. High praise indeed, for a platform that was well known for less than impressive graphics and sound. With The game became one of the highest selling of all time on the ZX Spectrum, and stayed at the number one spot in the sales charts for over a year and a half. It was voted the 9th greatest game of all time by Your Sinclair magazine.

The side-scrolling, shoot'em-up, come beat 'em-up platformer, referred to in geek gaming circles as a run 'n' gun, had the eponymous hero advances through various stages that are taken from the 1987 movie. The bonus screen is a target shooting range that uses a first-person perspective. The arcade and home computer versions also featured examples of digitised speech,sampled from the soundtrack of the movie.

The C64 version had a cheat mode, where by you could skip levels. Which was great, for a notoriously difficult and bugged version of the game. Nothing unusual about a cheat mode in a game, except the cheats showed the makers love of the singer Morrissey from the 80s band The Smiths. As the cheats you typed in were from Morrissey songs, "Suedehead" and "Disappointed" . And "disappointed" was just about right for C64 owners of this particular game.

A computer game for the Commodore 64 from 1984, that despite its really low grade graphics (even for the time), it redeemed itself with relatively good game play and what was for the time rare and innovative sampled speech.

Space Taxi was released by MUSE Software, and was a twist on the popular lunar-lander style game of the period, which there seemed to be quite a few of as I recall. I remember typing in the whole code for Rox 64, for example, that appeared in a 1984 copy of C+VG. Only to discover afterwards that I could have saved the hours and hours of work, by just buying it for a couple of quid, as it had been originally written by early gaming genius Jeff Minter and released by his Llamasoft label in 1983.

Anyway, I digress, back to Space Taxi. Despite the dodgy graphics, the game featured some quirky scenes, such as a beach scene, candyland and a snow strewn winter scene. All utterly random, but adding to the fun of what was underneath a pretty standard game.

In 1981, MUSE had released the now absolute classic Castle Wolfenstein, in which was included some of the very earliest synthesised speech in home computer gaming. The games creator Silas Warner, had developed a piece of sound engine software called "The Voice" while working for MUSE. It would appear that the same technology was used for the speech elements of Space Taxi, with calls of "Hey taxi!" and "Pad one please!"

Space Taxi was originally written by John Kutcher, with Silas Warner as the games composer. The game was ported to the Amiga by Andreas Spreen. The ported version, however, had a different set of levels and minor modifications to the game rules. In 2004, Space Taxi 2, an authorised sequel was released by Twilight Games. As well as Space Taxi: Remake that same year, by Michael LeSauvage. Who knew, that it had such a cult following?

Now I've covered retro horror game movie tie-ins before, so coming round eventually to the abomination that was the Friday The 13th computer game cash-in, was inevitable at some point. The game came out for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC in 1985, so around the same time Friday The 13th franchise was hitting deplorable mid-period, with Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985). Not that we knew that at the time. Only if we could have seen into the future, and know that Jason X (2001) was coming, and that the series could actually get much, much worse.

The game was (and excuse my language here) fucking terrible!!! I mean not just the bad graphics, you half expected that as an 80s gamer. No, the whole premise, the whole game, everything about it was horrific. And not in a good way. The Spectrum version didn't even have any sound in it!

You start out the game with two tasks. One to find sanctuary, and one to find and kill Jason. Obvious?! Not so, as Jason doesn't appear in the game as "Jason", he's in disguise! Yep that's right, you have to wander around killing everyone, in order to find which one is Jason. Making you more of a mass-murdering psychopath than our eponymous zombie slasher. Oh and talking of "zombies", a glitch in the C64 version meant that if you attacked a freshly slain corpse, it would come back to life!

The C64 version did have one redeeming feature, that a kill gave you a "digitised" (using the term very loosely) image of a brutally slaughtered victim, and a pretty cool (for the time) digitised scream. So you went around trying to find Jason, and eventually came across him. Now if you managed to kill him with a whole load of crazy button tapping, then unfortunately it wasn't "game over". Oh no, the designers decided to make you suffer. Suffer by having to play the whole thing again. Not just once, you had to play the game through five times to complete it!

Newton the robot, which appeared in 1989, was manufactured by SynPet. Advertised as a "practical" personal robot, it's a bit of a mystery exactly what Newton was, part from a PC on wheels. A bad R2-D2 rip-off, or a Metal Mickey without arms or the sense of humour. Newton was also an answering machine and a smoke detector. As far as being a "robot", Newton had motion sensors and could move around "autonomously" on "plush carpet" and even on a "5 degree incline". The best part of Newton was the cheesy 80s promo video for him. Check it out below.

Kids TV: Metal Mickey (1980 - 1983) - Designed by Johnny Edwards, Metal Mickey was a robot that got his own prime-time UK TV show in the 1980s. Directed by Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees.

Best Of British: Comic Book Robots - A look at the comic book history of the UK through the eyes of robots. From Robot Archie and Brassneck, to the robots of 2000 AD and C+VG.

Randy Retro Robot Romeos - Redressing the romantic balance, with Weird Retro's romp through the Romeos of the robot world. For all the ladies who like a love-bot.