Across the channel, French gamers developed a very similar trend, adopting the Amstrad CPC as its weapon of choice. Unlike other countries, however, the French gamer refused to accept badly translated imports or shoddy licensing, and software houses began to appear all across the country. Some of the strongest CPC titles to be developed in the computer’s celebrated history never even left the French shores, though gamers enjoyed a rich and varied abundance of titles from RPG to shoot-em-up; so long as it wasn’t a quickly translated afterthought, French gamers were happy to experience as much variance as possible.

The ZX Spectrum, while enjoying massive popularity in the UK, struggled to find a foothold elsewhere in the world. Officially, that is. Russia, like the UK, had a cornucopia of technical experts, all looking to expand their horizons. Because of the strict regulations on import and export, however, it was difficult for foreign businesses, like Sinclair Research (developers of the ZX Spectrum) to make inroads, and even more difficult for the enchanted Russian gamers to get their hands on the few computers which did actually cross the border.

This small taste of game playing delights spawned a host of Sinclair compatible hardware – some licensed, most not – to be developed within Russia. Obtaining games was equally difficult, and since all software had to be officially licensed by a state department, most came in the form of home brewed games distributed for free, by hand and word of mouth. Due to the nature of development, puzzle software based around all manner of traditional games was a natural choice for Russia’s back bedroom programmers, ultimately, of course, leading up to the most popular and played game of all time, Tetris.

In the US, Nintendo was single-handedly resurrecting the videogame market with its new NES console, though this new found power also led to something of a tyrannical rule when Nintendo came to (quite rightly) protecting its valuable intellectual property. Law suits and injunctions were rife, tying the hands of many third party and independent developers. To the north, Canada took this advantage to introduce its population to the joys of not only playing, but developing games. Much stricter in its allowance of rampant litigation, many difficulties in the American market were automatically negated by entry into Canada, and the country became something of a haven for beleaguered developers (to this very day), and the local gamers took full advantage.

In the East, many other Asian countries were slow to take up videogames as a dedicated pastime, though Taiwan and Korea were both early adopters of Japanese trends. The Taiwanese showed considerable support for Sega’s first foray into console gaming, the SG-1000 (forerunner and basis for the Master System), enjoying, particularly, the first party arcade ports of Sega’s increasing list of coin-op titles (as did the otherwise geographically isolated – and therefore last on the list for import licenses – New Zealand and Australia; two countries of thrill-seeking gamers, hooked on arcade adventure and high quality shooters). Korea, however, shared a very similar taste to the Japanese, preferring a character based adventure of slightly more epic proportions.