Bum George - Soft & Cuddly

I first discovered Soft & Cuddly after securing a huge haul of bootlegged ZX Spectrum games from my friend Thomas. He had refused for weeks to let me borrow anything from his treasure trove of Spectrum tapes, insisting that he was playing them all on a daily basis. Frustrated, I supplied him with several boxes of the classic C-15 Computape blank cassettes so he could make me copies of his copies. It took him some time but he eventually brought them to me on the playground. I looked at the tapes, scanning over the crudely written names on the featureless labels and trying to join them in my mind with the graphics Id seen in recent issues of Crash and Your Sinclair .

One of the tapes said soft & cuddly. The title instantly conjured up images in my mind of a game called Ah, Diddums , a borderline-moronic romp in which you controlled a teddy bear in a very abstract room, trying to do god-alone-knows what. Despite playing it for some time, my sister and I couldnt figure out what the point of it was. So because of Ah, Diddums , Soft & Cuddly got pushed aside in favor of better-known titles.

When I finally finished school that day and returned home with my bag of goodies, I set up the ZX Spectrum in the front room, tried to load the first game, and TAPE LOADING ERROR. It failed. When I think back on this fateful day, most of what I remember is recalled through a sizzling red mist. I went through tape after tape, listening to the broken warble on the header data and watching a pastiche of what should have been the solid blue and red bars blinking onscreen. There must have been around 25 tapes: None of them loaded.

Then I got to the bottom of the bag, and there it was. Shoved aside and passed over for everything that had just failed me. Resentment and resignation mingled with a faint glimmer of hope. I took a sip from my cold cup of teaI was banned from using the kettle as a result of a previous incidentand put Soft & Cuddly into the cassette player. I took the leads in and out: I told myself this made a difference and I still believe it did. I also put my hand on the tape player, as if to reassure it, to try to prepare it to interpret the data correctly rather than producing that familiar, awful warble of failure.

I pressed play.

The signal was strong. The tape sounded as good as an original. The bars onscreen were solid as rock (if the rock was blue and red and projected on a cathode ray tube). I held onto my jubilation, however, as the battle was far from won. Many times in this batch I had encountered tapes that sounded great yet produced the dreaded TAPE LOADING ERROR at the very last moment. I resisted the urge to push down on the lid of the tape caddy, which was sometimes required to load certain gamesbut to do so mid-load was madness. I was panicking slightly. Could this tape redeem the day? Even if I was to control a moronic teddy bear or some recalcitrant baby and have no clue what was going on, heavens, it would at least be something.

The loading screen appeared. Soft & Cuddly written in the top left. A large THE POWER HOUSE logo in the middle. It loaded. The fear of a TAPE LOADING ERROR shattered.

Then an image appeared onscreen, an image that will never leave me: a ghastly, blinking face, framed with what looked like grim pastiches of the Cookie Monster, that appeared to be eating babies? The face wore a spiked crownor was it half a mantrap, the other half buried in its scalp? Its lower left eyelid was severed and its frenzied attempts to blink only ever resulted in half of the eye being obscured. What torture had befallen this disembodied head? This was not Ah, Diddums . This was nothing like Ah, Diddums .

In the days when Mary Whitehouses idiotic conservatism was rampant and all of the films I wanted to see the most were placed on the VIDEO NASTIES list, could it be that I finally had some form of playable video nasty? Could it be that I could actually cast myself in these fantastically grim environments that my young mind so longed to explore? Would I have to hide this game from my parents?

The game that followed was a desecration of all that I expected of the computer games industry. This was beyond a game. This was a statement, a damning indictment of everything ringfenced and British. It was a pathway from the cosseting, predictable games of that period into something far more abstract and expressive. Something far more individual. Through the conduit of Soft & Cuddly, we gamers were offered a vision of one mans personal hell.

Many years later I revisited this game for my YouTube channel Funkyspectrum, where I offer reviews and playthroughs of old Spectrum games, and all of the old feelings I had when I first loaded it up came flooding back. As the many people who have reached out to me about the video would agree, Soft & Cuddly has lost none of its bite. Its still shocking. Its still singular. It still stands as a grim beacon, casting its lurid light out across the video gaming landscape. Soft & Cuddly remains one of the standout experiences for the ZX Spectrum. As time passes, it seems more at home in the modern world than it ever did in the past. A world that is now, by any stretch of the imagination, anything but soft & cuddly.

George Bum

bumfungames.com

Winter, 2016